Most people already know gratitude is good for them. Ask around and you’ll hear the same advice: keep a journal, count your blessings, be thankful for the little things. Fair enough. The trouble is that “be more grateful” is a feeling, and you can’t schedule a feeling.
What you can schedule is a behavior. A two-line note. A text to a friend. Thirty seconds at the dinner table. And the research on gratitude has moved a long way in the last couple of years. We now have a megastudy covering 34 countries, a meta-analysis of 145 studies, and some surprising findings about which practices work best. Spoiler: the most popular one isn’t the winner.
Below are 16 ways to build gratitude into ordinary days, each one tied to evidence and ending with something small you can actually do. Pick two or three. You don’t need all of them.
1. Send one thank-you message today
If you only try one thing from this list, make it this one.
In May 2026, a team of 36 researchers led by Nicholas Coles at the University of Florida published a multinational megastudy of gratitude practices in PNAS. They tested six short gratitude exercises against three neutral control tasks with 10,696 people in 34 countries. All six practices beat the controls. Positive mood showed the clearest lift, with smaller gains in optimism and life satisfaction and drops in negative feelings and envy. According to the summary from Brazil’s FAPESP research agency, the strongest practice was writing a message to someone you’re grateful to and actually sending it. The weakest? Listing five things you’re grateful for, which happens to be the most popular method out there.
Two caveats matter. The study measured effects straight after the exercise, so it says little about long-term change. And results varied more by country than by practice: strong in Mexico, almost absent in Norway.
Paulo Boggio, one of the Brazilian co-authors from Mackenzie Presbyterian University, put the takeaway simply: gratitude “must be more than just thinking about something good.” The social part seems to be doing much of the work. If you’ve been putting it off, the advice in how to stop hesitating and start acting applies here too.
Your move: pick one person who helped you this month. Write three sentences: what they did, what it changed for you, and thanks. Hit send before you can edit it to death.
2. Notice the kindness you’re not expecting
We tend to underestimate other people. Badly.
The World Happiness Report 2025, published in March 2025 by Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, pulled together several “lost wallet” experiments. The gap between what people expect and what actually happens is striking:
| Wallet experiment | Expected return rate | Actual return rate |
|---|---|---|
| Toronto drop (Helliwell and Wang) | 23% | Over 80% |
| 20 North American cities (Rober) | 34% (US), 39% (Canada) | About two-thirds of 200 wallets |
| 40-country study (Cohn and colleagues) | 28% (non-Nordic countries), 47% (Nordic) | 47% (non-Nordic), 81% (Nordic); about 1.8 times the expected rate overall |
Source: World Happiness Report 2025, Chapter 2.
Why does this matter for gratitude? Because you can’t be thankful for something you never notice. If your default assumption is that people are indifferent, the stranger who held a door or the neighbor who brought in your bins just slides past.
Picture this, as a hypothetical: you’re running late, juggling bags, and someone at the café quietly moves their chair so you can get through. Most days that moment vanishes. On a day you’re looking for it, it becomes a small, real reason to feel good about people. Being on the lookout like this also makes you more likely to return the favour, which is the heart of how to be friendly and kind.
Test it this week: each evening, recall one small kindness from someone you don’t know well. Just one.
3. Keep a gratitude journal, but keep it short
Journaling still has a place. It just doesn’t need to be a ritual of three perfect paragraphs.
A 2025 randomised study by Noriko Yamagishi of Ritsumeikan University and colleagues, published in BMC Psychology, gave 100 Japanese employees aged 30 to 49 a 12-day online journal. Half wrote about things they were grateful for; the other half simply logged daily events. As reported in the BMC Psychology paper on a 12-day gratitude journal, the gratitude group’s work engagement rose, especially “absorption”, the sense of being focused and involved in your tasks. The control group showed no such change. Gratitude writers also started noticing workplace resources more, such as a supportive supervisor or a helpful colleague.
The interesting detail is how little they wrote. The gratitude group averaged about one and a half entries a day. That’s it.
The limits are real: one country, self-reported outcomes, and a control group that wasn’t asked to write about feelings at all. Still, it’s a randomised design, which is more than much of the older work in this area can claim.
Start small: one line a day for 12 days. Write what happened and who made it possible.
4. Anchor the habit to your morning
Good intentions fade fast without a trigger.
Ben Singh, a researcher at the University of South Australia, led a 2024 systematic review in the journal Healthcare on how long health habits take to form. His advice from the January 2025 university release is blunt: put a new practice into your morning routine and the data say you’re more likely to make it stick. The review, covering more than 2,600 participants, found median habit formation times of around 59 to 66 days, with a huge spread from 4 days to 335.
That last number is worth sitting with. If gratitude doesn’t feel automatic after three weeks, nothing is wrong with you. Two months is closer to typical, and some people need much longer.
Morning works partly because it’s predictable. Coffee, teeth, commute: these happen anyway, so they make reliable hooks. Our guide to good habits to have leans on the same principle.
Here’s a simple way in: while the kettle boils, name one thing you’re looking forward to and one person you’re glad exists. Out loud if you can.
5. Thank colleagues in the moment, not at the annual review
Workplaces are often where gratitude goes missing. Everyone is busy, and thanks get saved up for a performance review that comes once a year.
Gallup and the HR software firm Workhuman tracked more than 3,400 workers from 2022 to 2024. As NPR reported in September 2024, employees who received high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to leave their jobs during that period, and people who felt recognized reported less stress and burnout. Keep in mind that Workhuman sells recognition software, so it has an interest in the result.
Meisha-ann Martin, senior director of people analytics and research at Workhuman, described good recognition as “catching good behavior as it happens.” Specific beats generic. “Great job” is fine. “The way you calmed that client down saved the deal” is better. If you manage people, this is one of the cheapest tools in how to be a good boss.
Next time, do this: when a colleague helps you, thank them within the hour and name exactly what they did.
6. Write a gratitude letter before something stressful
This one comes with a physiological angle.
Andreas Schwerdtfeger and colleagues at the University of Graz ran two studies, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2025. In the first, 76 people spent 15 minutes either writing a letter to someone they appreciated or describing changes to their apartment furniture. Then came the stress test: singing a song on camera while wired to monitors. The gratitude group’s heart rate variability dipped during singing and bounced back strongly afterward, a sharper recovery than the control group showed. In a second, two-week home study with 133 people, those doing a daily “three good things” exercise kept a lower resting pulse, while the control group’s crept up slightly.
The odd part: neither group felt happier on questionnaires. The body seemed to respond even when mood didn’t. The authors also note limits, including that singing changes breathing and home pulse readings are less precise than lab data.
So treat gratitude as a pre-game routine, not just a feel-good extra. If the stress spills into your nights, try the techniques in how to stop overthinking at night when trying to sleep.
A quick experiment: before your next big meeting, exam or difficult call, spend ten minutes writing to someone who helped you get there. You don’t have to send it.
7. End the day with what went right
Here’s the chain of reasoning, step by step.
Heather Altier, Jameson Hirsch and colleagues surveyed 869 primary care patients in Germany for a study published in Frontiers in Sleep in April 2025. People higher in gratitude reported less sleep disturbance. But the link wasn’t direct. It ran through other things: more grateful patients felt more confident about managing their health, and that confidence was tied to lower anxiety and depression, which in turn were tied to better sleep. Healthier everyday behaviors played a part as well.
So the proposed sequence looks like this. Gratitude, then a stronger sense that you can handle things, then less worry, then easier sleep.
Now the honest bit. This was a one-off survey, so it shows associations, not cause. Sleep was measured with a single question. It’s possible that people who sleep well simply find it easier to feel grateful. The mechanism is plausible; it isn’t proven.
Even so, a short look back at the day costs nothing and fits neatly into an evening wind-down routine.
Before bed, write down three things that went right and the part you played in at least one of them.
8. If faith matters to you, use prayer or grace
For many people, gratitude already has a home: prayer.
Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, fielded in 2023 and 2024 and published in February 2025, found that 44% of US adults pray at least once a day, down from 58% in 2007. A third (33%) say grace or pray before meals often or always, and another 18% do so sometimes. That’s a lot of existing moments that could carry thanks.
The research backs it up as a valid route. One of the six practices in the 2026 Coles megastudy was writing a letter to God, a higher power or a spiritual entity, and like the others it outperformed the neutral control tasks.
Not religious? Skip this one, or borrow the structure: a pause before eating, a moment of acknowledgement for the people and work behind the food.
Give it a go: at your next meal, before the first bite, name one thing from today you’re thankful for, in whatever words feel natural.
9. Imagine life without it
You stop noticing what you always have. The heating works, your knees don’t hurt, your friend picks up the phone. Because these things are constant, your attention moves on to whatever is new or wrong.
Mental subtraction flips this. Here’s how it works. You pick something good, then deliberately picture your life without it: no friend to call, no job, no working body. That imagined absence creates contrast. Contrast makes the familiar visible again, and once it’s visible, you can actually feel thankful for it.
This exercise has empirical company. In the Coles megastudy, one of the six tested practices was exactly this: listing five things from the previous day and imagining life without them. It beat the control tasks along with the rest. The Stoics had their own version, often called negative visualization, which we cover in Stoic exercises for daily calm.
One warning. Keep it brief. The aim is appreciation, not a spiral into worst-case thinking.
Your move: pick one person or thing you take for granted. Spend 60 seconds picturing how a normal Tuesday would go without it. Then go back to having it.
10. Mix up your methods
Doing the same gratitude exercise every day can go stale. Your brain learns the script, and the words stop meaning much.
A 2025 meta-analysis in PNAS by H. Choi, Michael McCullough, Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues pooled 145 studies with more than 24,000 participants from 28 countries. Gratitude practices improved well-being overall, mostly by raising positive emotion rather than reducing negative emotion. One finding stands out for daily life: combining several gratitude interventions strengthened the effect.
There’s a cultural wrinkle, too. The benefits showed up in the United States, China, Germany, Canada and Australia, but not in France, India, Japan, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom. The researchers couldn’t fully explain why, and suggested that how studies measured outcomes may play a role. If a standard journal feels flat to you, that may not be a personal failing. It may simply be the wrong format.
Test it this week: rotate. Monday a journal line, Wednesday a thank-you text, Friday a mental subtraction, Sunday a shared gratitude moment at dinner.
11. Keep practicing when life is hard
You might assume gratitude only comes easily when things are going well. Recent survey data suggests otherwise.
The Grateful Study, run by Eastern Washington University and Gracianna Winery with psychologist Philip Watkins as principal investigator, released its fourth wave in October 2026. Gratitude rose nearly 10% compared with 2024, reaching its highest level since the study began in 2020. At the same time, Americans reported more worry, stress and irritability than two years earlier, and calmness and optimism fell. Gratitude and stress climbed together.
Read this with care. It’s a press release from a study co-sponsored by a winery, and the sample size and method weren’t published alongside it. Still, the pattern is a useful reminder: gratitude doesn’t require a good mood or an easy year. It can sit next to stress.
That also means you don’t have to pretend problems away. Acknowledge the hard thing, then look for what’s still holding you up: a friend, a routine, your own resilience. Our guide to radical acceptance explains how to stop fighting what is so you can focus on what you can do.
On a rough day, write one sentence about what’s hard and one about what’s still helping. Both are true.
12. Thank your partner for small, specific help
Think of gratitude in a relationship as a delivery receipt. Your partner sent support; your thanks confirm it arrived and mattered.
That analogy has backing. In a 2024 study in Frontiers in Psychology, M. Roth, Guy Bodenmann and colleagues surveyed 163 Swiss couples about how they helped each other with stress. For men, helping their partner raised their own relationship satisfaction, and it rose further when they felt their partner was grateful. For women, perceiving their partner’s gratitude was the only significant predictor of satisfaction. Help that went unacknowledged didn’t seem to count for as much.
Where the analogy breaks down: receipts are transactional. Relationships aren’t ledgers, and if thanks start feeling like scorekeeping, you’ve lost the point. Also note this was a single study of mostly mixed-gender Swiss couples, and it shows associations rather than cause.
The skill underneath is noticing and naming what someone did. That’s a core part of emotional intelligence.
Start small: tonight, thank your partner for one specific thing they did this week that you haven’t mentioned yet.
13. Savor good moments, ideally together
Gratitude and savoring are close relatives. One looks back at what someone gave you; the other stretches out a good moment while it’s happening.
The NHS lists paying attention to the present moment as one of its five steps to mental wellbeing, saying it “can improve your mental wellbeing” (page reviewed October 2026). The guidance is general, but it points in a useful direction: you can’t appreciate what you rush past.
There’s evidence it works even better shared. Noah Larsen, Allen Barton and Brian Ogolsky at the University of Illinois surveyed 589 US adults in romantic relationships, publishing in Contemporary Family Therapy in 2025. People who savored good experiences jointly with their partner reported less conflict, more satisfaction and more confidence in the relationship’s future. The link was stronger for couples under higher stress. It’s correlational and only one partner answered, so treat it as promising rather than settled.
Savoring works solo as well. A slow walk or a good meal alone counts, as we explain in how to enjoy being alone.
The next time something good happens, stop for ten seconds, take in the details, and if someone’s with you, say what you’re enjoying out loud.
14. Bring gratitude to the table
Meals are one of the few routines most households still share, at least sometimes.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and an editor of the World Happiness Report 2025, argued at the report’s launch in March 2025 that “we need to find ways to bring people around the table again.” The report found that sharing meals is strongly linked with wellbeing in every global region, while the number of people dining alone in the US rose 53% over two decades.
A shared meal is a natural slot for gratitude, because everyone is already there and there’s a built-in pause.
Say you’re at dinner with your family, as a hypothetical. Someone suggests a quick round: each person names one good thing from their day. The first few times it’s awkward and the kids roll their eyes. Stick with it anyway. Small, repeated rituals like this tie into broader advice on how to keep family relationships strong.
Here’s a simple way in: at your next shared meal, ask “what was the best part of your day?” and go first.
15. Turn it into a team or household challenge
Practices are easier to keep when other people are doing them with you.
At Kaiser Permanente’s San Rafael Medical Center in California, nurse leaders Sarah Montague and Angelica Rincon ran a 30-Day Gratitude Challenge, described in the 2025 Northern California Annual Nursing Report (published January 2026). After reviewing the literature, they chose gratitude as the focus and asked nurses to lead it on their own units. Activities included sharing gratitude at daily shift huddles, posting gratitude cards on walls, handwritten thank-you notes, electronic kudos, photo boards of people or things nurses were grateful for, and journals. A toolkit with a 30-day calendar went out across the medical center.
The results were modest and measured loosely. Scores on a gratitude questionnaire improved among the 26 people who completed both surveys, though the report gives no numbers. On a staff survey item, “At work, my team regularly expresses gratitude for one another,” the score rose from 83 to 85. That’s not proof of anything. It is, however, a working template for a real organisation that you could copy at home or at work.
Doing things alongside others is a proven motivator in other areas too, which is the idea behind body doubling.
Give it a go: print a simple 30-day calendar, stick it on the fridge or the team board, and give each day a tiny prompt.
16. Thank your own body
Most gratitude advice points outward. This one turns it around.
Psychologists A. Dennis and J. Ogden published two studies in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology in 2025. In the first, with 382 participants, gratitude for one’s own body was more strongly linked to positive mood, exercise intentions and body compassion than general gratitude was. In the second, an experiment with 425 people, a short body-gratitude exercise increased body compassion compared with a control. People who were better at regulating their emotions got more out of both kinds of gratitude.
Body gratitude isn’t about appearance. It’s about function: legs that carried you up the stairs, hands that cooked dinner, lungs that kept going through a long run. That framing can soften a harsh inner voice. If self-criticism runs deep, our guide on how to stop hating yourself goes further.
A quick experiment: after a shower or a walk, thank one part of your body for something specific it did today.
What to do when you slip
You will skip days. Probably whole weeks. That’s normal, and what matters is what you do next.
First, drop the guilt. Charlotte Hagerman and colleagues at Drexel University’s WELL Center followed 140 people in a weight-loss program through smartphone surveys several times a day, publishing in Appetite in 2024. When participants responded to a diet lapse with self-compassion rather than self-criticism, they reported better self-control afterward. It’s a different behavior from gratitude, but the lesson transfers: beating yourself up makes it harder to restart.
Second, recalibrate your timeline. Singh’s 2024 review found habit formation ranges from 4 to 335 days. A missed week sits comfortably inside that range.
Third, restart small. The Coles megastudy measured benefits immediately after a single session. You don’t need to rebuild a streak to feel something; one message to one person can lift your mood today. If the day itself has gone sideways, our steps on how to turn a bad day around can help you reset.
So, after a slip: notice it, skip the lecture, and do the smallest version of the practice within 24 hours.
Conclusion
Gratitude works best when it leaves your head. The strongest recent evidence favours practices that involve other people, like a message you actually send, a thank-you at work, or a round of good news at dinner. Short journaling helps. Variety helps. Anchoring it to a routine you already have helps most of all.
You don’t need to do all 16. Choose one social practice and one private one, give them a couple of months, and adjust as you go. For more evidence-based ideas on building a better daily routine, explore our self-improvement section.
Start today: who’s getting your thank-you message?
