Positivity is good... for the bank balance at least

LAST week, I was in Dubai as speaker at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. My sessions may not have been quite as popular as those of David Walliams, whose book-signing queues had under-10s spiralling around the festival site, but my audience in one session was no doubt boosted by having Kaushal Modha, the South Asian wellness and beauty influencer, on my panel. She has some two million social-media followers and, along with her wellness guru husband Vex King, featured in You magazine (in the Irish Daily Mail) a few weeks back. Kaushal was there to promote her first book, a gratitude journal.

Now, I know I am behind many curves, but I had never heard of a gratitude journal, although it seems they are becoming as popular as cookery books.

My idea of a journal is where I record what I did on various days, both the bad news and good.

But gratitude journals only have space for positivity – no heartache, doubt or anxieties. If you break up with your boyfriend, that is not a difficulty – it’s an opportunity to make a note to yourself to embrace the new. Or at least the pain.

It made me reflect on what a difference there is between myself, a Baby Boomer and the Millennials and Gen Z. (Younger people, in other words.) My lot say it as we see it, which might well be critical and unvarnished.

But this generation flood Instagram with empowering and supportive messages, and are helped by these journals to encourage listing reasons to be cheerful at the start of every day and heading to sleep counting not sheep but reasons to be grateful.

I don’t know which is better, but I wish I had it in me to publish a gratitude journal, since clearly that is where the money lies.