Targeted gratitude journaling
When you remind yourself of the good things in life, focus on the ones that balance out your emotional trouble spots.
If you’ve ever asked Google how you can be a happier person, you may have heard of gratitude journaling — reminding yourself about the good things in your life you normally take for granted. It’s one of the more well-supported behavioral interventions for mood, and that makes sense. Our moods are influenced by our thoughts, so if we mix in more positive thoughts it should boost our mood.
My practice of gratitude journaling ranges from actual written daily journaling to randomly thinking of good things when I’m feeling down. I think it really has been helpful for my mood and mindset. When I’m inclined to see life as meaningless, remembering my loving family is good for getting back in touch with meaning. When I’m inclined to see life as a dreary grind, remembering fun experiences and happy times is good for getting back in touch with joy and anticipation.
A limitation of gratitude journaling is that it sometimes feels like a pointless chore that doesn’t respond to our real needs. Forcing reminders of the good things in life can feel inauthentic, avoidant, maybe a bit like being pushed towards toxic positivity. And I think sometimes that feeling is pointing to something true. Gratitude journaling is not the answer when we need to confront what’s dragging us down. Sometimes what we need is to face our problems or distorted thought patterns until we either solve them or accept they’re not solvable for now.
I recently noticed a way to do gratitude journaling that seems to get past the limitation, that feels relevant to my problems without full-on engaging with them. This is helpful because full-on engagement with the hardest problems can be overwhelming and exhausting — like mud-wrestling with a pig, or the Chinese finger trap of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy lore.
The idea came to me a few days ago, when I noticed something happening in my brain: a new thought pattern that kept returning unbidden, a positive one. For many years I have had recurring skin irritation and rashes, which have been getting both more frequent and more resistant to my usual solutions. A few weeks ago it got bad enough that I went into research mode and found a new clothing-based solution, and since then it’s completely gone away. Since then, I’ve noticed that when I feel bad about myself, my brain likes to remind me of this little achievement. It’s like, “I think you’re making progress! That skin thing was the sort of problem you normally have a lot of trouble with, but you figured it out!”
Reminding myself that I solved this tough problem is especially helpful because it directly responds to a strong negative streak in my internal discourse. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a strong inner critic. My brain is constantly observing how I fall short in life, finding patterns and demanding that I do something about them. Recently, I tend to notice myself being indecisive and overthinking. Every time I see it happening, I feel worse about it, because it feels like a pattern that I don’t know how to manage. Before long, the inner critic is compulsively reaching back into my entire life history and picking at every example of analysis paralysis and how it contributed to my personal disappointments.
Now, my self-criticism here is classic CBT discounting the positive, because I do sometimes come up with awesome solutions to problems by thinking hard. Fixing the rash is a recent example, but there’s lots more too. I’ve solved family medical issues that doctors didn’t have the bandwidth for. I’ve figured out tricky legal and tax issues when professionals couldn’t give me good answers. At work over the years, I’ve repeatedly found niches solving problems, resolving bureaucratic messes, and developing products to a level of quality that nobody thought possible.
Is my problem therefore simple? Do I just need to use CBT against my cognitive distortions? Yes and no. Countering negative thinking merely by labeling it something from a list of distortions is a bit glib, a kind of Fallacy Man behavior,1 and my inner critic is unimpressed. What makes the difference is the specific life details, the examples I’m able to summon. My theory is that a targeted form of gratitude journaling can help with this. If we know our negative internal narratives, we can counter them by regularly attempting to notice and document the specific ways our past and present lives undermine them.
In targeted gratitude journaling, instead of reminding yourself of random good things in your life, you ask yourself: what are the themes in your thoughts and self-talk and memories that drag you down? Then focus your journaling on the facts that cut against those negative internal perceptions. Once a day, once a week, or any time you need it, ask yourself: when have you managed to do things that you fear are too hard for you? When did a personal trait you find frustrating turn out to be your greatest virtue? When did something you predicted would go bad, actually go well?
As you build up answers to your questions, I predict that several good things will happen. Your counters to your cognitive distortions will become grounded and meaningful, rather than glib and abstract. You will be more engaged with the details of your life, and make more progress on your problems. And maybe, just maybe, your brain will start to retrain itself, and the jaundiced inner eye will give way to a clearer one.
Shutting down informal arguments by citing their logical fallacies is often unhelpful because very little can be proven infallibly in this messy and complex world, so if we want to apply reason in practical life, we have to use informal arguments and heuristics. We have to evaluate whether things are probably true even if they’re not certainly true. Similarly, CBT’s “cognitive distortions” are not so much mental potholes that you should always avoid, as potential failure modes of extremely valuable mental/emotional heuristics. I mean, discounting the positive sounds bad, but sometimes the positive is irrelevant when a big, urgent problem is staring you down. Overgeneralizing sounds bad, but how are we supposed to know when generalizing becomes “over”?
I like the idea of reminding myself specifically of how I have made even the smallest improvements to my personal failings, because they are very easy to ignore or forget about. In my experience, change typically happens very slowly and imperceptibly, with bursts of insight and more visible change that occasionally break through. In fact, I realize that I need to remind my kids of this too— focus on pointing out what they are doing right, out loud and often.
Another thought: a fellow therapist recommends another form of gratitude journaling that he calls “beautiful moments.” I’ve found that reflecting on moments of beauty from my week helps balance out the doom and gloom that we hear about and read about with the 24/7 news cycle. For example, we have a bird’s nest on the Christmas wreath still hanging on our door, with gorgeous blue eggs that have just hatched into fuzzy little baby birds. This small miracle happens countless times the world over but is never reported on. Can we really say that there are more ugly moments than beautiful moments occurring every single day? And the more beautiful moments I recall, the more balanced my perspective becomes. The little things, whether in personal development, or parenting, or day-to-day living, really do matter, much more than we give them credit for.
Interesting idea. I might try it for alleviating negative thought patterns, e.g. catastrophism.
Besides the 'toxic positivity' thing, gratitude journaling sometimes augments my baseline anxiety. It's an unintended effect, but my mind can follow the path of 'yes, see how good you have it -- and you're about to lose it all' haha. But I have to admit that I never really stuck with the practice to really evaluate it.