You probably know the feeling. Someone did something kind for you weeks ago, maybe months ago, and you still haven’t said anything proper about it. You meant to. You thought about it in the shower, on the bus, at 2 a.m. But every time you got close, it felt awkward, or too late, or too small to bother with.
So you said nothing.
That gap between feeling grateful and showing it is incredibly common, and it’s mostly built on bad guesses. We guess the other person will find it weird. We guess they already know. We guess a quick “thanks” covers it. Psychologists have spent the last decade testing those guesses, and most of them turn out to be wrong in a fairly consistent direction: we think our thanks matter less than they do.
What follows is a practical list of 27 ways to say thank you so the other person actually feels it, at home, at work and with strangers. Each one comes with the evidence behind it and one small thing you can do next. If you want to work on the broader skill underneath all of this, it’s worth reading up on how to improve your social skills too.
1. Say it sooner than feels comfortable
Most of us wait for the right moment. The right moment rarely comes, and the reason we wait is mostly fear of awkwardness.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested this directly in a set of four experiments published in Psychological Science in 2018. People wrote thank-you letters to someone who had mattered to them, then predicted how the recipient would react. The recipients were then asked how they actually felt. Writers consistently underestimated how surprised and happy the recipients would be, and overestimated how awkward the moment would feel. They also underestimated how warm and competent the recipients would judge them, and the biggest gap was on competence. That study is now several years old, but the broader pattern has held up in newer work on gratitude and kindness (see items 3 and 21).
So the hesitation you feel is real. It’s just poorly calibrated.
Your move: think of one person you’ve been “meaning to thank” and do it before the end of today, even if it’s two lines.
2. Stop polishing the wording and thank someone from years back
A lot of people stall because they want the message to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be.
In an August 2026 interview with the Next Pivot Point newsletter, Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, argued that people avoid warm gestures because they expect them to land worse than they do. His example was thanking a former mentor years later, and his verdict on timing was blunt: “There’s no bad time to get that.” Plain, honest words do the job, and the recipient isn’t grading your prose.
Picture this: you send a short email to a manager you had in your first job. You tell her you still use the way she taught you to run meetings. It takes four minutes to write. It sits in her inbox as proof that something she did a decade ago still matters to someone. That’s a hypothetical, but it’s the kind of message Epley is describing.
Pick a former teacher, coach or boss, write three honest sentences about what they did and what changed because of it, and hit send without rewriting it twice.
3. Put it in a letter, or simply send a text
Letters have a reputation as the gold standard of thanks. They’re good. Texts are good too.
In May 2025, Annabel Dang, Nicholas Coles, Shigehiro Oishi and Michael McCullough published two experiments in The Journal of Positive Psychology comparing seven gratitude exercises, including private gratitude lists, gratitude texts and gratitude letters, against several control tasks. One of the experiments was preregistered with eleven conditions. The exercises were broadly effective at raising positive emotion and lowering negative emotion, though they were less consistent at shifting life satisfaction. The exercises that boosted gratitude the most also moved mood the most. An earlier UC Riverside experiment with more than 900 undergraduates, by Annie Regan, Lisa Walsh and Sonja Lyubomirsky (Affective Science, 2022), found that writing a letter, sending a text and posting thanks publicly all helped, with texting giving a slight extra lift in feeling connected and supported.
In other words, the medium matters less than doing it at all.
Give it a go: send one gratitude text right now to someone who helped you this month, and say exactly what they did.
4. Name exactly what they did
“Thanks for everything” is pleasant. “Thanks for driving me to the hospital at 6 a.m. and waiting three hours with me” is something people remember.
The reason comes from psychologist Sara Algoe’s “find, remind and bind” theory of gratitude. The chain goes roughly like this. Specific thanks shows the other person that you noticed their effort, not only the result. Being noticed signals that you value them. Feeling valued makes them more inclined to keep investing in the relationship, which gives you more to be grateful for. Algoe and colleagues tested part of this chain with 77 couples in a study published in Emotion in 2013: people who received gratitude from a partner in the lab saw that partner as more responsive to their needs and reported higher relationship satisfaction, and the effect could still be detected six to nine months later. That’s a single study, and the long-term link is correlational, but the mechanism is consistent with later research.
Specific praise also means paying attention to the other person rather than yourself, a skill that pairs well with learning how to stop talking about yourself in conversations.
Next time, do this: describe the action, the effort it took and the effect it had on you, in that order.
5. Mean every word
This one stings a little. Gushing can backfire.
A 2025 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by C. J. Shimshock, B. M. Le and colleagues looked at “gratitude amplification,” meaning thanking a partner more than you actually feel. Across four studies with 639 couples, people who amplified their gratitude felt less authentic and reported lower relationship quality. Partners who sensed amplification felt worse about the thanks they got and rated their partner as less responsive. You can read the full paper in the 2025 gratitude amplification study, hosted by the Le Lab at the University of Rochester. The researchers note that most of the data is correlational and comes from North American couples, so treat it as a strong warning sign rather than a final verdict.
So thank accurately. If you feel mild appreciation, say mild appreciation. Real gratitude, said at its real size, lands better than a performance.
Next time you’re about to type three exclamation marks, ask yourself whether you’d say it that way out loud, and trim it until the answer is yes.
6. Thank the coworkers who make your week easier
Workplace thanks often get treated as a nice extra. The numbers suggest it’s closer to essential.
A Gallup and Workhuman study released in September 2024 tracked more than 3,400 U.S. employees from 2022 to 2024. Three figures stand out:
| Finding | Figure |
|---|---|
| Employees with high-quality recognition in 2022 who were less likely to have left by 2024 | 45% less likely |
| U.S. employees who get no recognition, or recognition that meets none of the five quality criteria | 55% |
| Senior executives who strongly agree recognition must be central to retention (up from 28% two years earlier) | 42% |
Gallup’s five criteria describe recognition that is fulfilling, authentic, personalized, equitable and built into the culture. Notice that none of them requires a budget. A colleague can do most of this in a sentence.
If you work with others every day, it helps to think about how to collaborate more effectively, and recognition is one of the cheapest tools for that.
Start small: thank one colleague this week for something specific they did that saved you time, and copy their manager if it feels natural.
7. Say “thank you” instead of “sorry”
“Sorry to bother you, sorry this took so long, sorry, sorry.” Many of us apologize when someone helps us. It feels polite. It also quietly shifts the spotlight onto our own guilt.
The logic is simple once you see it. An apology centers the burden you placed on the other person. A thank-you centers their generosity and their ability to help. People like being seen as capable and kind more than they like being reminded they were inconvenienced, so gratitude tends to leave them feeling better about the exchange and about you. A 2022 study by Imai in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology tested this with Japanese college students, a culture where apologizing after a favor is common. When a hypothetical friend responded to a favor with thanks alone, students were the most willing to help again and the most willing to trust that friend with a secret. Apologies didn’t have the same effect. The scenarios were imagined, not real favors, so the findings are suggestive rather than conclusive.
A quick experiment: for one week, every time “sorry” starts to come out after someone helps you, swap it for “thank you for…” and finish the sentence.
8. Thank your partner for the everyday stuff
Big gestures get the attention. Daily thanks may do more of the work.
Brian Don and Renato Ferrer published two studies in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in March 2025. The first used German Family Panel data on 4,990 people in committed relationships, tracked across 11 yearly waves. The second followed 119 New Zealand university students through a 10-day diary. In both, receiving more gratitude from a partner was linked to higher self-esteem, even after accounting for earlier self-esteem. In the diary study, the link ran through feeling valued and accepted. Both studies are correlational, and the diary sample was small, so the direction of cause isn’t proven.
The everyday version is unglamorous. Thank them for the dishes. Thank them for remembering your dentist appointment.
Tonight, thank your partner for one thing they did today that you’d normally treat as routine, and leave it at that.
9. Thank your long-term partner for the life you’ve built
Long relationships are a bit like a house you’ve lived in for twenty years. You stop seeing the beams holding up the roof because they’ve always been there. The comparison holds in one way: familiarity makes the structure invisible. It breaks down in another, because beams don’t notice when nobody appreciates them, and people do.
A qualitative study by Katharina Weitkamp, Guy Bodenmann and colleagues at the University of Zurich, published in Health Psychology Open in December 2025, interviewed 43 older couples, each partner separately. The couples described gratitude for their partner’s personality, the quality of the relationship, support, shared achievements and the life they had built together. They expressed it in words, and also through affection and gifts. Because the study is based on interviews, it describes what couples do rather than proving what works, but it gives a good map of what long-term partners actually value.
Here’s a simple way in: name one thing you’ve built together, a home, a family tradition, a hard year you got through, and tell your partner you’re grateful you did it with them.
10. Thank your manager, too
We tend to aim gratitude downward or sideways. Managers often get feedback only when something has gone wrong.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, released in April 2026 and based on 2025 data from more than 141,000 employed respondents, found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work. Managers were barely ahead at 22%, compared with 19% for individual contributors, and 40% of employees said they’d felt a lot of stress the previous day. Managers sit in the middle of that pressure, absorbing it from above and below. A specific thank-you from their team is one of the few signals that reaches them from below and isn’t a complaint.
Done honestly, it’s useful information about what’s working, and it fits naturally with any effort to understand how to impress your boss at work without sucking up.
Test it this week: tell your manager about one decision or habit of theirs that made your work easier, and why.
11. Thank people in front of others
Public thanks does something private thanks can’t. It changes how other people see the person you’re thanking, and how they see you.
Sara Algoe, then an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has studied what happens to people who simply witness gratitude. As UNC reported in November 2019, her experiments found that watching someone express thanks made observers think better of both the grateful person and the person being thanked. Observers saw the helper as more morally good, saw the grateful person as caring and competent, and were more willing to spend time with them. Algoe describes gratitude as “uniquely suited to promote high-quality relationships.” That work dates from 2019, so it’s older than ideal, but nothing newer has overturned it.
Keep public thanks short and specific so it reads as sincere, not as a show. A two-sentence mention in a team meeting or a toast is plenty. Thank one person publicly this month, and make sure what you say is concrete enough that nobody could mistake it for politeness.
12. Celebrate the person, not just the performance
Most recognition is about output. Hit a target, get a thank-you. But people have lives outside their jobs, and noticing that matters.
In a Gallup and Workhuman survey of 10,026 working U.S. adults conducted in February 2023, employees who were recognized for life events and milestones unrelated to performance were three times as likely to strongly agree their organization cared about their wellbeing. Only 23% strongly agreed their organization had a system for doing this. These figures are from 2023, so they’re older than ideal, and they come from a recognition-software company working with Gallup, which is worth keeping in mind.
You don’t need a system. You need a calendar and a little attention. If you lead people, this is part of how to be a good boss that rarely gets mentioned.
Your move: note one teammate’s upcoming milestone, a work anniversary, a kid starting school, a marathon, and say something about it on the day.
13. Build a thank-you habit into your team
Sometimes the most useful gratitude is organized.
In 2014, Adrian Plunkett, a pediatric intensive care consultant at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in the UK, started a project called Learning from Excellence. The idea flipped the usual safety model. Hospitals already had systems for reporting mistakes, so why not report excellent work too? In February 2016, David Sinton, G. Lewis and D. Roland piloted a version called GREATix in the pediatric emergency department at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Any staff member could nominate a colleague for great practice, the nominee received direct feedback, and the themes were discussed at monthly meetings. In their report in the Emergency Medicine Journal, the authors said nominations quickly spread beyond the pilot department and other hospitals asked to set up similar systems. They were careful to say the effect on morale hadn’t yet been measured. The approach is still used today, for example by the Scottish Ambulance Service.
The lesson for an ordinary team is that a lightweight, shared way of saying “this was great” keeps gratitude from depending on one person’s memory.
Bring it to work: suggest a five-minute slot at the end of a weekly meeting where anyone can name a colleague who helped them, or set up a shared channel for it.
14. Listen like you mean it
Gratitude isn’t always spoken. Sometimes it’s the quality of attention you give someone.
A paper accepted in 2026 for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Dvori Saluk, Guy Itzchakov, Netta Weinstein and Moty Amar ran five studies with 1,624 participants. People who received high-quality listening during a disagreement reported higher well-being and optimism afterward. The main pathway was relatedness, the sense of being connected to the other person. The authors note that most participants were Western and most measures were self-reported, and the paper was still in press at the time of writing.
If the experience of being properly listened to lifts people even in an argument, it’s a powerful way to show appreciation in calmer moments. The practical part is mostly restraint, which is why it helps to learn how to stop interrupting people when they talk.
Next conversation: put your phone face down, ask one follow-up question before you share anything of your own, and let the other person finish.
15. Reach out to someone you’ve drifted from
A random “thinking of you” message can feel pointless. It isn’t.
Peggy Liu and colleagues ran a series of experiments with more than 5,900 participants, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in July 2022. People consistently underestimated how much others appreciated an unexpected call, text or email. The mechanism they identified was surprise. Recipients focused on the unexpectedness of the contact much more than senders did, and that surprise is what pushed appreciation up. The step-by-step logic goes like this: an unprompted message tells the other person you thought of them without a reason, that reads as genuine care, and genuine care is what people value most. The gap was biggest when the contact broke a routine or the relationship had grown weak, which is exactly when people are most likely to hold back. The study is from 2022, but it’s the most thorough test of this idea so far.
Send a short message to someone you haven’t spoken to in six months or more, mention one good memory, and don’t apologize for the silence. If the reply turns into a call, brush up on how to have a good conversation with anyone.
16. Hug, if hugs are welcome
Physical affection is one of the oldest ways to say thank you. It also has measurable effects.
Julian Packheiser and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Nature Human Behaviour in April 2024, pooling more than 130 studies with about 10,000 participants. Touch interventions reduced pain, depression and anxiety, with smaller benefits for heart rate and blood pressure. Frequent touch helped more than long sessions, and the researchers stressed that the touch was consensual. Keep in mind that the studies looked at touch interventions in general, not hugs as a form of thanks specifically. It’s still the most comprehensive review available.
Consent is the whole point here. Some people love hugs. Others don’t, and a forced hug says “I’m grateful” in a voice they can’t hear.
Give it a go: next time someone you’re close to helps you, and you know they’re a hugger, thank them with a quick hug instead of only words.
17. Check on people who might be lonely
Sometimes the best way to thank someone is simply to show up.
In June 2025, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection published its report on loneliness. It estimated that about 1 in 6 people worldwide feel lonely, and that loneliness is linked to more than 871,000 deaths a year, roughly 100 every hour. Social isolation may affect up to 1 in 3 older adults. The WHO’s suggested personal actions are modest: reach out to a friend who might need support, greet a neighbor, put your phone away during conversations. The phone advice is worth taking seriously, and a bit of digital minimalism makes it much easier.
Think about the older relatives, neighbors and former colleagues who once helped you. Some of them may now be quieter than you realize.
Today, if you can: call one older person who did something for you years ago and tell them you still remember it.
18. Compliment strangers more often
Gratitude doesn’t always need a prior favor. A compliment to a stranger is a small thank-you for making the world a bit nicer to look at.
Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bohns tested this in five studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2021. In one field study, 95 pairs of strangers took part. The giver complimented a stranger’s clothing. Recipients’ positivity averaged 4.66 on the study’s scale, while givers had predicted 3.93. In another study, givers expected recipients to feel noticeably uncomfortable (4.17), while recipients actually reported low discomfort (2.42). The samples were small, and the study is a few years old, but it lines up with a separate nine-experiment program by Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley on the same mistake.
Compliments to strangers work best when they’re about something the person chose, like a jacket, a dog’s name tag or a well-made coffee, and when they’re not about their body. That small skill is a big part of how to be charming without trying too hard.
Pay one genuine compliment to a stranger today about something they chose.
19. Tip well, and add a note
Tipping has become a sore subject. That’s exactly why a thoughtful tip stands out.
Bankrate’s tipping survey, reported in July 2025, found that 64% of Americans hold at least one negative view about tipping, up five points from the year before. Complaints focus on “tip creep,” tip prompts at self-checkouts and other unexpected places. At the same time, 58% said they tip based on the quality of service. The coverage didn’t publish the sample size, so take the exact numbers as a snapshot rather than a precise measurement.
When the tip screen feels automatic, it stops feeling like thanks to either side. Adding a few words changes that. A note on the receipt, or a sentence to the person directly, turns a transaction back into gratitude.
Start small: the next time someone gives you genuinely good service, tip according to that service and add one line saying what they did well.
20. Give a gift that proves you were listening
Gifts can express gratitude well, but the best ones show attention, not spending.
Farnoush Reshadi, an assistant professor of marketing at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, discussed her research on gift-giving in a WPI interview during the 2025 holiday season. Her work on “self-improvement” gifts, like a fitness tracker or a course, found that givers tend to avoid them because they worry the gift will look like criticism. Recipients, though, were often more open to such gifts than givers expected, as long as the gift didn’t touch an area they felt sensitive about. The point for gratitude is that a gift tied to something the person is actively working on can say “I see what you care about” better than anything generic.
Say you’re thanking a friend who helped you move. She mentioned twice that she’s learning to cook Thai food. A good cookbook for that cuisine, with a note about the move, says far more than a gift card. (That’s an invented example, not a case from the research.)
Before the next birthday or thank-you moment, write down one goal or interest the person mentioned recently, and build the gift around it.
21. Do a small kindness, no credit needed
Gratitude can flow outward to people who never helped you directly. It still counts.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley published a set of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in August 2022. In one, people in a Chicago park could give a cup of hot chocolate to a stranger. Out of 84 participants, 75 chose to give it away. Givers expected recipients to rate their mood at about 2.7 on a scale from minus 5 to plus 5. Recipients actually reported 3.5. In a lab game, people who had received an act of kindness later gave away more money to an unknown person, about $48 on average compared with $41 for people who had received the same gift without the kindness. So kindness seems to spread. The study is from 2022, and the dollar amounts came from a lab game rather than real life.
If you’d like a broader approach, there’s more on how to be friendly and kind in daily life.
A quick experiment: once this week, pay for the coffee of the person behind you or leave a small treat for a delivery driver, and don’t stick around for the reaction.
22. Thank a teacher
Teachers are often near the top of the list of people we owe and almost never thank.
RAND’s State of the American Teacher survey, published in June 2025 and based on responses from more than 1,400 U.S. teachers collected between January and early March 2025, found that 53% reported burnout, down from 60% in 2024. Sixteen percent said they intended to leave their job. Teachers did worse than similarly educated working adults on all four well-being measures RAND tracked. These are U.S. numbers, but pressure on teachers is high in many countries.
A specific note from a parent or a former student is not going to fix pay or workload. It does tell a teacher that the work landed somewhere. Email your child’s teacher, or your own from years ago, with one concrete thing they did and what it changed.
23. Volunteer for something you care about
Some gratitude is aimed at your community as a whole: the library you used as a kid, the food bank that helped a friend, the park you walk in every morning.
AmeriCorps and the U.S. Census Bureau released their Volunteering and Civic Life in America report in November 2024, based on 2023 data. More than 75.7 million Americans, or 28.3%, volunteered formally through an organization, contributing about 4.99 billion hours valued at $167.2 billion. More than half of Americans, 54%, informally helped neighbors. The WHO’s 2025 report on social connection also lists volunteering as one of the practical ways to reduce loneliness, both your own and other people’s. This report is the latest edition in the series.
Here’s a simple way in: pick one organization that once helped you or someone you love, and sign up for a single shift this month.
24. Teach kids gratitude beyond manners
Most parents drill “say thank you.” That’s a start. Research suggests it’s only a quarter of the job.
Andrea Hussong, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leads the Raising Grateful Children project. In a 2017 Greater Good article, she described a 10-day diary study of 100 parents of 6- to 9-year-olds. About 85% prompted polite thank-yous. Only 39% encouraged expressions of gratitude that went beyond manners, and only 22% asked their child why someone had given them a gift. Hussong’s team breaks gratitude into four parts: what we notice, what we think about it, how we feel, and what we do. Parents mostly coach the doing. This work is from 2017 and is the clearest data available on how parents teach gratitude, though it should be replicated with more recent samples.
Tonight at dinner, ask your kids one question from each of the first three steps: “What did someone do for you today? Why do you think they did it? How did it make you feel?”
25. Keep a gratitude list so you notice more to say
You can’t thank people for things you never noticed. A gratitude list is a training tool for attention.
In 2025, H. Choi, Y. Cha, Michael McCullough, Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues published a meta-analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It pooled 145 studies with more than 24,000 participants from 28 countries. Gratitude practices improved well-being overall, mostly by increasing positive emotion rather than by reducing negative emotion. Effects varied between countries, and combining more than one practice made the effect stronger. In practice, a list is a good warm-up. It surfaces names, and then you can actually contact those people.
If you often feel like your days blur together, this pairs well with learning how to stop living on autopilot.
Test it this week: each evening, write down one person who made your day better, and on Sunday, message two of them.
26. Pick the practice that fits you and the other person
Not every method works for every person, and the research backs that up.
Courtney Beard, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, wrote about the 2025 PNAS meta-analysis in Psychology Today in November 2025. She pointed out that gratitude practices helped people in some countries more than others, and that cultural factors scientists expected to explain the gap didn’t. Her conclusion is that gratitude practices may need to be adapted to people’s cultural context, and that thanking a person face to face is quite a different act from a private gratitude meditation. For you, that means paying attention to the person on the receiving end as well. A reserved colleague might hate a public shout-out and love a private note. A grandparent might prefer a phone call over a text.
Reading people this way is a large part of emotional intelligence, and there’s more on how to improve your EQ if you want to go deeper. Before you thank someone important, ask yourself how they usually show care, and match that.
27. Let yourself feel it, not just say it
Everything above is about expressing gratitude. It works best when there’s actual gratitude behind it, and feeling it may be good for you too.
Y. Chen, Tyler VanderWeele and colleagues at Harvard published a study in JAMA Psychiatry in July 2024 using data from 49,275 older female nurses in the Nurses’ Health Study, with an average age of 79. Over roughly four years of follow-up, women in the top third of gratitude scores had a 9% lower risk of death from any cause than those in the bottom third, and the link was somewhat stronger for cardiovascular deaths. The study is observational, so it shows an association, not proof that gratitude extends life. The sample was also mostly white, female and college-educated.
Still, it’s a good reminder that the habit cuts both ways. The person you thank feels better, and so may you.
Next time, do this: before you thank someone, pause for ten seconds and actually recall what their help meant to you. Then say it.
What to do when you slip
You will forget to thank people. You’ll let a kind act go unmentioned for weeks. You’ll send a lazy “thx” when someone deserved better. Everyone does.
Building a new habit takes longer than the popular “21 days” myth suggests. A systematic review by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, pooled 20 studies with 2,601 participants. Health habits took a median of 59 to 66 days to form, with individual times ranging from 4 to 335 days. Habits practiced in the morning, and habits people enjoyed, tended to stick better. The review looked at health behaviors rather than gratitude specifically, but the lesson transfers: expect a couple of months of patchy effort, and don’t read a missed week as failure.
A few ways to recover:
- Thank them late. Remember Epley’s point from item 2: late thanks still land well. “I never told you how much that helped” is a perfectly good opening, weeks or years after the fact.
- Don’t overcorrect. After a long silence, the temptation is to gush. The 2025 amplification research in item 5 suggests sticking to what you genuinely feel.
- Anchor it to a routine. Attach your thank-you habit to something you already do, like your morning coffee or the commute home, so it doesn’t rely on memory. You’ll find more ideas in this guide to good habits to have in life.
- Have a reset day. If a week has gone badly, use one evening to send three quick messages and start again. When the whole day has gone wrong, here’s how to get over a bad day before you try.
Conclusion
Expressing gratitude is mostly a matter of overcoming a few bad predictions. We expect thanks to feel awkward, land flat, or come too late, and the research keeps showing the opposite. A specific, honest sentence, said sooner rather than later, does more than most of us expect.
You don’t need all 27 of these. Pick two that fit your week, one for someone close and one for someone you’ve drifted from, and try them before Sunday. If you want more practical ideas for the people in your life, browse the Relationships section on Perfect 24 Hours.
Then go thank someone. Today is fine.
