Things to be grateful for

A gratitude list is a short list of things you are glad about, written down. A list can turn into the same three lines every night, because “my family, my health, my home” is always true. Four things stop that from happening.

1. Write about today only. “My family” is true every day. “Mom saved me a plate” happened today, and it will not be on tomorrow’s list.
2. Start from a different group each night. People one night, small comforts the next. A new group makes you think of different things.
3. Write the small thing, with its detail. “Coffee” could be any morning. “Coffee on the steps before anyone else was up” was this morning.
4. Add one sentence to one line. Pick the line that matters most tonight and write why. When every line has a why, your list has become a gratitude journal, which has its own page.

The same person or thing can come back, as long as the detail is new. If you would rather answer questions than pick from groups, use the gratitude journal prompts.

People put other people on a gratitude list more often than anything else. Here is what two studies found about gratitude lists.

Other people come up most often.

Researchers looked at the gratitude lists of thousands of people from around the world. What they wrote about most was the people in their lives (Park, Epel and Simon-Thomas, 2026).

People who could list anything gained more than people given a rule.

In another study, adults in Australia wrote a gratitude list every day for a week. Some were told to list only people. Some were told to list only things. Some could list anything. Only the ones who could list anything felt more grateful afterward than a group who simply wrote down what they did each day (Regan, Walsh and Lyubomirsky, 2023). So use a group to get started, and then write whatever comes to mind.

Do not expect a list to change your life. Across many studies, people who did a gratitude exercise ended up a little happier, and the difference was small (Choi and colleagues, 2025). The page on keeping a gratitude journal says more about what those studies found.

The three studies below are what we read for this page. We read the full text of two. The newest one is not free to read, so we read its summary. The list itself is our own.

1. Park, Y., Epel, E. S. and Simon-Thomas, E. (2026). Grateful for what and whom? How gratitude list content varies and is associated with affective responses. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, published online ahead of print.
2. Regan, A., Walsh, L. C. and Lyubomirsky, S. (2023). Are some ways of expressing gratitude more beneficial than others? Results from a randomized controlled experiment. Affective Science, 4(1), 72 to 81.
3. Choi, H., Cha, Y., McCullough, M. E., Coles, N. A. and Oishi, S. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(28), e2425193122.