How do gratitude journals work? (Part 1)

Let's think about what those bookshop journal prompts do for you, and why it's great that the old way of gratitude-ing is becoming a fossil.

Some Housekeeping—Welcome!

Thanks for reading Badwater! I’m Dom, and I focus on keeping a critical eye on self-help techniques that have popped up over the years. I write about what has worked for me, what hasn’t, and what trends there are in the in the self-improvement space. As a mindset and transformation coach, I’ve seen the effects of good methods, and the worthlessness of bad ones.

This week’s theme is Dishonor/Graciousness/Grace. I thought that the best way to approach such grand themes would be to consider the very practical Gratitude Journal, which has never been a favorite of mine until my partner bought me one that was truly formatted in a useful, productive, and humane way.

It wasn’t perfect—maybe it was a bit TOO overbuilt on the daily, but the weekly and monthly check-ups were phenomenal.

But this short series isn’t about that. It’s about what makes gratitude journals tick. Part One is an introduction, with my thoughts on gratitude journals over the years and a first thought about what they can do for us, and how they failed a lot of us for so many years (and still counting for the lower-end ones).

My (non-)history with gratitude journals.

A younger, more cynical version of me walked around the journal section of Barnes & Noble, judging the self-help notebooks that were filled with flower graphics and flowery affirmations. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about, all this positive self-talk, and questions like “What are you grateful for in your life?”

I guess these kinds of questions were an affront to my sensibilities, because I would be more than frustrated at these questions. It was like a middle finger printed on bleached paper, pointed at me any page I flipped to.

Nowadays, I use a digital journal that asks me a question of gratitude each day, with a contemporary quote to put a bow on it. Sometimes I answer with detail, sometimes with shortly. But I’ve found use for it after all.

Why did I have such negative reactions to it before? I believe the answer provide more of an answer about how gratitude journals work, and how someone may benefit from these kinds of reflections.

I was a reactionary against emptiness, and mistook gratitude as a sign of emptiness.

My parents were decreasingly religious with each passing year after their divorce, so my connections with religion were always a distant one. I occasionally went to a Catholic with my grandfather, and had gone to a synagogue or two with my stepdad’s family.

That’s all to say that religion and its dogmas were always ambient in my life, but never explicitly. I internalized some of the opinions of the religions I grew up with, simply through cultural osmosis.

But I was also a young nonconformist and silently rejected behaviors like saying Grace at dinner or understanding the Good News from todays followers of Christianity.

As I grew up, the idea of Gratitude or Gratefulness was a religious concept, in which we all lent this thankful energy to at least one of the Holy Trinity. I disliked this, because I didn’t understand who I was thanking, as it was never apparent that any of the Holy Trinity existed in a divine way that I should thank them for food.

Thus the divine triangle was empty in my eyes, and I didn’t like to be dishonest with who I spoke with. So during the infrequent times I was told to say Grace, I would find a way to mess it up. In jest of course, though I don’t think older generations at the table were any happier that I messed up Grace with a good or bad attitude.

I didn’t want to thank this cultural emptiness. It felt like a distraction, and it felt like I was giving my energy to the wrong things in life.

This perspective carried on through the years, and I found myself at bookshops, journal design nerd that I am, checking out the intentions and instructions of dozens of gratitude journals, because I inevitably wanted to understand, even when I don’t like something.

I believe my emotions deceived me; all I could see were secular envisionings of Christ and God in these journals. Even if it was the innocent question of “Who are you grateful to have in your life?” I only heard a religious answer.

It’s only been the past year of studying self-improvement techniques like Neuro-Linguistic Programming that I finally got a grasp on the uses of gratitude journals.

When I understood that the perception we hold of ourselves is based on internalized notions of abundance and scarcity, I could finally map this theory on the gratitude journal system, whose primary goal is to promote a feeling of abundance for its user.

Gratitude: Toward a Sense of Abundance

I always maintained a negative connotation to affirmations as well; why would repeating something that’s not true make it true in the future? But I ran into a beautiful one that truly works for me by Gay Hendricks in his book The Great Leap:

I am expanding in abundance, success, and love every day, and I inspire others to do the same.

This phrase leapt out at me because it was structured so differently from old variations of affirmations:

• It is in a current tense of expansion, rather than already have done something.

• It calls for the user to create examples in their life of abundance, success, and life every day.

• It calls the user to be in service to others. through their successes.

This is not just an affirmation, but a code of ethics: That I remain committed to my expansion, and committed to by duty to serve others.'

And I say, it’s a current tense, “-ing”, which means that I am giving myself the space to slowly chip away at expansion—I’m not suddenly abundant, successful, or full of love, no! I am expanding, I am consistently working at this, and I am, in the long-term, being more abundant and successful.

Affirmations are usually in this form:

“I am successful. I am abundant. I am full of love.”

But it’s suffocating. There’s no room for success, no room for abundance. Because I am forcing it into the world that it' has already happened, I can’t picture what got me there. How? Why?

This is why I avoided the affirmation game. I am a process driven person, and I want to know the how and why of everything that I adopt in my life.

So in a course on limiting beliefs, I was given the concept of Askfirmations: Turning affirmations into questions so that the user can fill in the how and why of my goals.

“How is it so easy to feel abundance?”

“How am I finding more and more success everyday?”

These phrases introduce a creativity for the mind, so it can explore these questions and come back with effective answers that add to our growing library of examples that support self-confidence. Our qualities of “abundance” and “success” become more concrete each time we may ask ourselves these questions.

Understanding the Gratitude Journal through its Rejection

I can give myself a pat on the back that my rejection of Gratitude Journals wasn’t “all wrong”. It’s not like I was completely out of left field here. There’s a trend the past couple decades of smoothing over feelings with “gratitude”—like a mother telling their kid that they should be grateful for even having a meal each night, even though their kid is going through the pains of adolescence and depression.

Decontextualized gratitude—that is to say, this dogmatic, all-light-no-negativity gratitude—ends with the same results as screaming at a wall.

No matter how many lists of people and things we are grateful for (cue the image of Harry Potter being forced to write apologies over and over again for the headmistress in the fifth book), our subconscious will still have reasons to maintain its self-concept that we are pieces of shit or whatnot.

You’ve likely tried this with yourself or your friends or your romantic partner, who continues to feel like a victim of their own fate even when you tell them “it’s not that bad”, and if you look at it another way “it’s actually going to be a great story/lesson in the future.”

They’ll accept what you say just to shut you up and wallow in their true feelings of the situation.

The old method of the Gratitude Journal was like putting a happy face sticker on someone’s tears. There was no room for the user’s actual feelings, only the forceful gaze of a journal whose only goal was to eek out positivity.

And I rejected it because I saw there was no room for true humanity.

These journals were for people on the up-and-up, not bottoming out in a ditch. The people at the bottom need to be partly understood, they need to be given some space before they can get out of their shell.

So the Gratitude Journal in its beginning was this flowery, happy guide for happy people. It wasn’t for those with mental health issues or those who feel like they have a problem. The journals of the past were almost designed for repressed happy people trying to keep themselves in balance, or forever fall into the seven rings of hell.

The old way of Gratitude-ing was best for the religious. Full circle! I didn’t like that, but I held this belief about Gratitude Journals for 20 years, even after the modern trend of a new generation not only accepting mental health issues, but wearing it like a badge of honor.

There was a gratitude journal for ADHD, for depression, for autism. There’s now a market for any kind health problem except maybe gonorrhea.

I missed the boat. That’s alright, but now that I’ve seen the evolution of pre-made journaling, I should have guessed that this would happen.

A summary before moving onto Part 2...

I wrote a bit, so I’ll try to re-summarize the more important bits from this article:

• The Gratitude Journal’s objective is to promote a feeling and knowledge of abundance in the user.

• Gratitude Journals of old parallel the use of Affirmations in the past half century. They both attempt to force the embodiment of abundance by repetition of what someone wants out of life—similar to a prayer.

  • This is an issue because it attracts people who are seeking to repress negativity by smothering it with gratitude or some other positive thing.

  • These Journals never held sway for people like me, because my depression and rejection of flowery-happiness made me feel excluded by the dogmatic way that Gratitude Prompts worked.

• For people like me, abundance can’t be brute forced. Gratitude needs to meet me in the middle, that things are shit, and not everything is a win, but I’m trying. To feel grateful of the almost, which is a nuance I didn’t see in the decontextualized Gratitude Journals of the past.

• The self-help journaling industry must have found profit in better targeting customers with mental health issues. Now customers can feel more “seen” and buy a $40 journal.

  • Along with better marketing came more nuanced Gratitude-ing that actually fits people like me.

What’s in Part Two?

In Part Two, I’ll get into more of the mechanics of modern Gratitude Journals and how they for its users on a daily basis. In Part Two or Three, I’ll get into what I think a better Gratitude Journal can look like, and the principles that can make it more effective.

Thanks for reading! —Dom

P.S. Spring came early to Reno. We’ll have a couple more snow showers, sure, but boy the dead of winter is already over, and it never even began.