All grateful feelings aren’t created equal—it matters when, how, and toward whom you practice gratitude.
Gratitude makes us happier, healthier, and more empathic; it may even help us live longer, says the research to date.
There are specific ways to cultivate gratefulness—and journaling is one of the best documented. The Greater Good Science Center built a free, online platform to make gratitude journaling easy for anyone in the world with an internet connection. Our early observations showed that using Thnx4 predicted more gratitude and less stress and loneliness, among other benefits to health and well-being.
On Thnx4, people rate each gratitude experience on a scale from “Made me momentarily smile” to “Made my whole day glorious.” For this new analysis of 4,000 gratitude expressions posted between January and July of 2017, we asked: Which forms of gratitude and which styles of gratitude journaling had more impact on the quality of a person’s day?
Our findings confirmed some existing observations about the benefits of gratitude journaling—suggesting that Thnx4 works as well as writing in your spiral-bound notebook—but we also noticed some interesting and new patterns that we can use to leverage the most from our gratitude practice. To read more from ALEX SPRINGER, click here.