What I Learned From Writing a Gratitude List Every Day

Yes, it’s annoying to hear about. Yes, it’s cliché. And yes, it works.

At least, it worked for me.

Gratitude can be easily intellectualised. You can write five things you're grateful for every morning and still not actually feel particularly grateful, because gratitude, I've come to learn, isn't something you can simply think up.

It's a feeling. A way of experiencing what is already there.

The closest example I can think of to describe deep gratitude is being in the arms of someone you love and experiencing that strange combination of peace, contentment and I don't need anything else right now.

For a long time, I didn't believe you could experience anything resembling that feeling simply from being alive.

Turns out you can.

But like most worthwhile things, it took time.

After writing daily gratitudes consistently, digging deeper and forcing myself to notice the detail and beauty hidden inside the apparent simplicities of life, something changed in the way I experienced my days.

This doesn't mean I stopped getting angry, disappointed, frustrated or sad. What surprised me was discovering that those emotions could exist alongside gratitude.

You can be disappointed about one part of your life while deeply appreciative of another. You can be going through something painful and still notice something beautiful. The existence of one doesn't invalidate the other.

That was a significant realization for me.

You Start by Looking for Gratitude

So do we fake it till we make it?

Honestly, maybe.

When I started, gratitude was a deliberate exercise. I sat down and actively searched for things to write. Some days they came easily. Other days it felt like I was doing emotional admin.

But eventually something interesting happened.

I started noticing things throughout the day that I probably wouldn't have noticed before.

A particular conversation.

A light breeze.

A good cup of coffee.

A moment where I felt unexpectedly peaceful.

Someone showing me kindness.

Something difficult that taught me something I needed to learn.

The practice gradually moved beyond the page.

And that, I think, is where the real value of gratitude lies. The list itself isn't particularly important. What matters is what repeatedly looking for things to appreciate trains you to notice.

Our experience of life is shaped enormously by what receives our attention. If you're continually looking for evidence that life is unfair, disappointing or not moving quickly enough, you'll find plenty of it.

I know because I've done that too.

But there is also an extraordinary amount happening every day that barely registers because we've become accustomed to it.

Gratitude taught me to notice more of that.

The Obvious Stuff Runs Out

After a few weeks, you'll probably run out of obvious things to write.

Good.

You can only write “my family”, “my health”, “my house” and “food” so many times before the exercise becomes completely meaningless.

That's when the practice becomes more interesting.

You have to get specific.

Instead of simply writing that you're grateful for a friend, maybe you're grateful because you had a conversation with that person about something difficult and they genuinely tried to understand you.

Instead of being grateful for your home, perhaps you're grateful for having a space where you feel safe enough to completely switch off.

You can be grateful for something internal too: a moment of inner peace, an insight that arrived after a difficult experience, the fact that you handled something differently than you would have a year ago.

You can even be grateful for things that didn't happen.

The more specific I became, the more the practice forced me to actually examine my life rather than mechanically produce a list.

Gratitude Changed My Relationship With “More”

This is probably the part that has become more important to me with time.

I've spent a large part of my life wanting more.

More experiences. More success. More adventure. More money. More stimulation. More ideas. More intensity.

I still want a lot out of life, and I don't think gratitude requires pretending otherwise.

But there is an enormous difference between wanting more from a place of fullness and needing more because what you already have never feels sufficient.

For much of my life, I wasn't particularly good at that distinction.

There was always something else to chase, experience, achieve or consume. The next thing carried the promise that perhaps this would finally create the feeling I was looking for.

Gratitude works in almost the opposite direction.

Instead of continually asking, What else can I get?, you're deliberately asking, What is already here that I'm failing to see?

That doesn't kill ambition.

It changes your relationship with it.

You can want to build a bigger life while appreciating the life you currently have. You can pursue more without making your happiness entirely conditional upon getting it.

I've come to think that distinction is incredibly important, particularly for ambitious people.

Otherwise there is no finish line.

Every achievement simply moves the goalposts.

Gratitude and Presence

There's another connection I didn't fully understand when I originally started this practice.

Gratitude requires presence.

You cannot appreciate something you're not actually noticing.

And modern life gives us endless opportunities to be somewhere other than where we are. We can compare our lives to someone else's while sitting inside our own. We can scroll through other people's experiences instead of experiencing the one happening directly in front of us. We can spend an entire day mentally living in a future where things are supposedly going to be better.

Gratitude repeatedly brings attention back to what is here.

This has become particularly meaningful to me spiritually.

Prayer and gratitude have increasingly become intertwined in my life because gratitude eventually raises another question:

Grateful to whom?

For me, the answer is God.

I don't experience gratitude simply as positive thinking anymore. Increasingly, I experience it as recognition. Recognition that much of what I love about being alive wasn't created or earned by me in the first place.

A beautiful morning.

Someone I love.

My capacity to laugh.

Music.

Nature.

A moment of peace.

The ability to start again after fucking something up.

There is a humility in recognizing how much of life is received rather than achieved.

My Gratitude Practice

My practice itself is remarkably simple.

I write a short gratitude list every day and try not to repeat the same things constantly. I get specific about why I'm grateful rather than simply naming something, and I include experiences, emotions, lessons and small moments rather than only physical things.

Most importantly, I don't force myself to pretend everything is wonderful.

Gratitude isn't denial.

If something hurts, it hurts. If I'm angry, I'm angry. If life is difficult, I'm allowed to acknowledge that it's difficult.

The practice is simply a refusal to allow whatever is painful or missing to become the entirety of what I can see.

That distinction has stayed with me.

The Cheesy Ending

If you knew me well years ago, you probably wouldn't have expected me to write an article about gratitude.

And yet after years of meditation, prayer, personal work and daily gratitude, it has become one of the practices I value most.

Not because it magically makes everything good.

It doesn't.

But because it has changed what I'm capable of noticing.

And your life, I've come to believe, isn't only shaped by what happens to you. It's also shaped by what you're able to see while it's happening.

So yes, I'm grateful that someone introduced me to the annoyingly cliché practice of writing down what I'm grateful for.

Turns out the clichés occasionally know what they're talking about.