Gratitude Journaling: A Recommended Process

When I tell people about my 30-day gratitude journaling challenge, one of the first questions that pop-up is: “But how do you do it?”

I wrote a bit about my experience here, but now I’d like to share exactly how I used to practice it.

Template Questions

Journaling is not a complicated activity — it is basically writing about your thoughts, feelings and experiences. There are many different ways to do it, and one of them is by using template questions.

People often struggle with journaling, especially when starting out, because they don’t know where to start: “What should I write about?”, or “I have no idea of what to put on paper”. That is exactly where template questions come into scene.

These questions will serve as tools to turn your thinking engine on, and force you to reflect or focus on a specific idea. What are the best template questions to journal to? It is obviously a matter of personal preferences, but, most important, it depends on WHY you want to journal.

• If you want to be more positive, you want questions that make you remember happy and pleasant moments, good friends and relationships, and difficult situations you’ve managed to turn into wins;
• If you want to be more creative, you want questions that promote brainstorming, make you combine different ideas into something new, or push you to learn things unrelated to your domain of knowledge;
• If you want to be more healthy, you want questions that make you reflect on ways to improve your sleep, diet and exercise, and promote the change of negative habits.

In my case, what I wanted to improve was my mindset and mood (I used to be a chronic pessimist). After some research, I saw that journaling gratitude could maybe help me with that, so I used template questions that were related to it.

The Process

Now I’ll list some of the questions I use to journal gratitude, and some tips to get make the most out of them.

1) What are 3 things that you can be grateful for today?

No matter where you are and what your situation is, your focus can be shifted to something positive.

The idea is the more you write down what you are feeling grateful for, the more you start to notice and appreciate the things that make you happy — and you can then include these things more into your everyday life.

These tips will help you get started:

1. Be specific. Instead of just writing about being grateful for your family, write about specific reasons you’re grateful for a particular family member — do they make an amazing pasta? Are they funny?
   
   It forces your brain to do more “searching”, and it is this mental “searching” that trains your brain to automatically seek out for good things, making you more naturally positive. It is a great exercise for people with anxiety who will often think the worst; gratitude counteracts that.
2. Include the small things. It’s important to try and remember the little things you are grateful for — after all, not every day is filled with big events or gestures. That amazing new coffee you tried out or your super comfortable shoes qualify to the list.
3. You can even be grateful for the bad stuff. Sick with a cold? I could be grateful for my health when I am not sick. Lost a business? I could be grateful for the opportunity to start over and learn from my mistakes. Someone is rude to me? I could be grateful that they were showing me a good example of who I don’t want to be.
4. The funny thing about these examples and this line of thinking, in general, is that we don’t necessarily see these gifts as they are happening. But we can choose to look back and imagine that they were all happening for a reason.
5. Pass on the positivity. You don’t have to save your gratitude for your journal. Tell the people in your life how much you appreciate them and say thanks to people you encounter — pass on the positivity and everyone feels better!

Here is how it looks in practice:

I am grateful for:

• Having my two parents alive (and the opportunity to improve our relationship)
• Catching up with my friends, and giving or receiving good news
• The amazing ice cream from the shop next door

2) What would make today great?

Research suggests that our RAS (Reticular Activating System, a bundle of nerves in our brainstem that basically filters information) can be trained by taking our subconscious thoughts and marrying them to our conscious thoughts.

This is called “setting your intent”. It basically means that if you focus hard on your goals, your RAS will be stimulated to come up with people, information or opportunities that might help you achieve them.

One important note:

This is not a recycled version of the “Law of Attraction”. If you get lost in the woods without a map (or GPS) to help guide you back, it doesn’t matter how positive you think.

Because unless you get a map, you are STILL going to be lost. And if you only focus on thinking positive, you will just feel happy about being lost.

To get back home, you need to map out a detailed picture of what you want and combine that with action.

That is why I recommend you to not only journal, but also focus and improve your goal-setting and decision-making skills, and don’t forget that it all starts with execution.

It is not enough to think positive.

Here is how it looks in practice:

What would make today great:

• Write a message to my sister to see how she’s doing
• Start a conversation with a stranger to work on my self-confidence
• Go to bed at 22:30 to get enough sleep before the interview

Notice I make sure to write down only what I have control over. I could write “a sunny day”, but I have no control over the weather. You should focus on the specific actions YOU can take in the day to make it great.

3) Daily affirmation: I am…

When people think of affirmations, they usually write an aspirational or motivational statement like “I am a great entrepreneur”.

But research shows that affirmations work best when you elaborate on what is important to you, what your values are, and why.

Ideally, you would want to write something like “I am working on becoming a great entrepreneur because it allows me to deliver my message in a scalable way”. Keep it simple, but not too simple.

Every time you write it, you prime your brain to start building this belief in your mind. With consistency, you will start to notice its power.

Here is how it looks in practice:

Daily affirmations. I am …

• I am confident and able to handle any obstacle I encounter.
• I am a player. I base my self-esteem on doing my best. When things go wrong, I seek to understand what I can do to correct it.
• I am someone who prioritizes communication with my partner — I know how to express my feelings, but also when to listen.

4) What are 3 amazing things that happened today?

For your first days of journaling, you can start with something simple such as:

What are 3 amazing things that happened today?

• Had a pleasant talk at the local coffee shop with Sally and Lucas
• Productive day at work: finally started the X project I was avoiding for weeks
• Turned off the notifications on my phone — less distraction

Important note: research shows that people who write about pleasant experiences in an “analytic fashion” report fewer positive feelings and health benefits to those who did describe them and then rehearsed and replayed it in their thoughts. What does that mean?

It means that, by processing a joy or an achievement step by step, we may lead to question our luck (“Maybe I don’t deserve this”), consider the possible alternatives (“What if I had not been at the right place at the right time?”), or even imagine negative consequences (“My friends will be jealous now and might snub me”).

It can reduce the pleasure associated with our positive thoughts, and even evoke negative emotions, such as guilt or worry.

Don’t try to analyze the good, leave that for the problems.

Remember always to recall the good stuff — a triumph, a creative breakthrough, a first declaration of love — by reliving it through rehearsal and replaying it in your imagination. That will allow you to savor and capitalize on the experience.

5) How could you have made today even better?

This question promotes reflection on what did not go as well as expected, and also make us think of ways to improve in the future. What will you do if you encounter the same obstacle again tomorrow?

Some people might think: “It’s just me. I’m not organized / focused / smart / (whatever quality you might wish you had)”.

But, as Dr. Carol Dweck shows, the key to a “growth mindset” is to create a passion for learning, rather than a hunger for approval. Failure does not become an evidence of unintelligence, but an encouraging for improvement.

If you journal regularly, you will begin to naturally see the opportunities for improvement during your day. The question will automatically pop up during the day, and it will reinforce a proactive behavior in you.

It will help shift your focus from problems to solutions, and concentrate on the factors under your control rather than blaming luck or the circumstances.

It Takes Time

I hope this post was helpful and gave you some powerful questions to journal to. The main idea here is that we are not slaves to our thoughts and feelings — we can actively influence and reinforce them by changing our focus. And journaling is just another way to do it.

Remember that changing your mindset is not an event, it’s a process. It takes time, so be patient with yourself and enjoy the experience!

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