A gratitude journal survives grief, illness or crisis when each entry is allowed to hold the hard thing first. The form that does this is the "and also" entry: one line that states what the day was, and one line that names something specific that was also true. "The scan results came back bad, and also the nurse remembered my name." Nothing is cancelled. Nothing is argued away. Five to ten minutes, and the entry is done.

Sometimes the right answer is to wait. In the first weeks after a death or a violation, being asked to find things to appreciate can feel like erasure, and in a severe depression the practice can feel inauthentic. This page puts the waiting rule first, then the entry form with three example entries, a table of formats that hold on a bad day, a section for people who feel nothing when told to be grateful, and a dosage rule for a practice the research has not yet dosed.

Quick Answer: Write "and also" entries: state the hard thing, then one specific thing that was also true, in sensory detail. Five to ten minutes. Start with one week of daily entries, then one entry a week. Wait if a death or violation is weeks old, if entries start reading as arguments against your own pain, or if a clinician has asked you to do processing work first.

Definition: Gratitude journaling in hard times is a short written record of what remained supportive on a given day, kept alongside the difficulty and never in place of it.

Key Evidence: Fekete and Deichert (Journal of Happiness Studies, 2022) randomised adults during the pandemic to five to ten minutes of daily gratitude writing for one week, expressive writing, or no writing; at one month the gratitude group reported lower stress and negative affect, and the expressive writing group showed no change. Diniz and colleagues' 2023 meta-analysis of 64 randomised trials (Einstein, São Paulo) found gratitude interventions lowered anxiety and depression scores by about 7 percent and raised life satisfaction by about 7 percent.

Context: Those are modest effects in mostly non-clinical samples. No trial has settled how often to write or for how long, and none has studied people in acute grief.

Key Takeaways

When gratitude journaling is the wrong tool (for now)

Three conditions mean wait. First, the first weeks after a death, a diagnosis that changes everything, or a violation. The mind is still finding out what happened, and a prompt to appreciate something lands as a demand. Second, when your entries start to read as arguments against your own pain: "I should be grateful that it was not worse." That is the practice turning on you, and the fix is to stop until an entry arrives that does not argue. Third, when a clinician has asked you to do processing work first. Gratitude writing shifts attention away from the stressor; processing work goes toward it, and the order matters.

In 100 Mental Health Journaling Prompts, Appendix IV, I set a six-month rule for writing about trauma without professional support, and I note in the same book that gratitude prompts can feel inauthentic or counterproductive during severe depression. Both cautions apply here. The evidence base has a gap in the same place: Diniz and colleagues' review describes gratitude interventions as a therapeutic complement for anxiety and depression, and the trials behind it were mostly short and mostly in people who were not in crisis. Nobody has measured the right dose for a person in early grief, so the dosage rule below is a working rule and says so.

Write the "and also" entry

The entry has two lines. The first states the day as it was, without softening. The second begins "and also" and names one thing that was true at the same time. The second line states a plain fact. It carries no counterweight and no lesson. Three example entries, all invented, on three kinds of hard day:

A caregiving day. Dad did not know who I was for most of the afternoon and I shouted at him about the pills. And also: at four o'clock he hummed the song he used to sing in the car, all the way through.

The day after a diagnosis. I read the letter four times and still could not hold the word in my head. And also: my sister drove over without being asked and sat in the kitchen and did not say anything useful, which was the right thing.

A numb day. I felt nothing today, and also the kettle worked.

Use the senses

The second line works when it is specific enough to be seen or heard again. "My family" is a category. "The way my daughter laughed at breakfast, the sound cutting through the fog" is a moment, and a moment can be reread. Write the smell, the sound, the temperature, the time of day. On the days when nothing large was good, small and exact still qualifies: the weight of the cat, hot water, the bus arriving as you reached the stop.

Reread the last ten entries

The record earns its keep on the bad days, and the rule for rereading is narrow. Read the last ten entries only. The whole notebook is too much and it invites comparison with a better month. Then write one line about what the ten have in common: a person who keeps turning up, a time of day that is bearable, a place. That line is the evidence you could not produce from memory on a bad day, which is the reason the notebook exists.

Pick a format that holds on a hard day

FormatTimeWhen it fitsExample line
The "and also" entry5 to 10 minutesA bad week; the default"Slept three hours, and also the neighbour cleared my path."
One line a day1 minuteA hospital stay, when attention is short"The night nurse warmed the blanket."
One entry a week10 minutes on SundayEarly grief, once writing feels possible"This week: the casserole from Maria; the dog leaning on me."
A letter you may never send20 minutes, onceWhen one person carried you"You sat with me in the waiting room for six hours."

The one-line and weekly formats come from the retired companion page on low-pressure gratitude, and they are the ones to reach for when a daily list feels like homework. Any of them can be skipped for days at a time. Skipping is allowed by design.

Gratitude journaling without pressure: when your mood is flat and you feel nothing

Being told to be grateful when you feel nothing produces one of two things: a forced entry or a closed notebook. Both are information. Resistance means the practice is asking for an emotion you do not have, and the way through is to stop asking for the emotion. The numb-day entry above is the whole method: state the nothing, then one plain fact. "The kettle worked" is a true sentence on a day when true sentences are scarce, and mood is the thing that moves when enough of them accumulate.

The dosage rule, given that the research has not set one: one week of daily entries, then one entry a week. Stop if the entries feel like a chore for two weeks running. Restart when an entry arrives unforced, on a walk or in a waiting room, and write it down wherever you are. If you want ready-made prompts for flat days, the depression section of 100 Mental Health Journaling Prompts includes one built around a tiny spark of light, written for exactly that state, and the mood journaling troubleshooting page covers the case where tracking mood makes it worse.

Why Gratitude Journaling in Hard Times Matters

The case for spending five minutes on this during a crisis rests on one trial that tested it under crisis conditions. Fekete and Deichert ran their study during the pandemic, with adults writing five to ten minutes a day for one week. A month later the gratitude group reported lower stress and negative affect, while the expressive writing group, who had written about their situation, showed no change on either. The authors' conclusion is worth quoting exactly: gratitude writing "may be a better resource for dealing with stress and negative affect than traditional expressive writing methods under extremely stressful situations with uncertain trajectories."

That is the situation this page is for: a stressor you cannot end and whose course you cannot see. Writing about it directly did not help in that trial. Writing down what was also true did, for a month, after one week of entries. The effect is modest, the sample was not in acute grief, and the waiting rules above still apply. Within those limits, it is one of the few things a person in the middle of a hard stretch can do in ten minutes that has been tested.

Related reading

Sources