Aerobic Action with the Gratitude Journal

Any Happiness Trainer worth her salt keeps an eye on performance.

I am indebted to a New York Times article for information which supports two points which I recognise as valid from my own experience of keeping a Gratitude Journal.

How frequently are you recording in your Journal? While Three Good Things needs to be a daily exercise to boost positive emotion, it appears that recording entries in a Gratitude Journal doesn't.

The NYT article quotes Sonja Lyubomirsky on research into the beneficial effects of daily as opposed to less frequent recording. It seems that those who do this exercise once a week are happier than those who do it three times a week. This is borne out by how this exercise has evolved, in practice for me.

I started out by intending to record something every day but I found this was interfering with Three Good Things. Before long, I was down to once a week or even once a fortnight.

I noticed that I had stopped feeling coy and uncomfortable about the touchy feely element of this exercise, and neither was I struggling to build up a 'credible list'. Better still, in spite of myself, I started to savour appreciative feelings during the day. I noticed, also, that my notes were becoming more detailed and focused.

I'd like to leave you with two Training Tips for increasing your success.

To avoid feeling a total prat, and being reduced to recording stuff like "I didn't need to reboot my router today", let expressing gratitude be a response to your spontaneous please at how something has worked out. Let the feelings come to you, if you like, rather than your having to dig and sift to find them.

Savour the experience before you write. Then savour it again while you write about it. The same NYT article quotes Tal Ben Shahar as saying, "The key is not just to write it down, but to write it down mindfully -- to focus, to imagine, to re-experience." Since many good things go in threes, there's the additional opportunity to savour the experience when you re-read that page of your journal in days, weeks or years to come.