My superpower is seeing the bad in everything, so could keeping a gratitude journal... make me happier?
‘‘It’s making your brain actively look for more positive things. Our brains are more designed to look for danger and threats because that’s how it keeps us safe.’’
Needing to assign someone the task of keeping a gratitude journal, my news director turns to the team’s Eeyore. That’s me, by the way, and even if being both a relentless ruminator and perpetual neurotic wasn’t enough, a loathing of all things woo-woo apparently makes me the perfect candidate.
‘‘Writing down all the things you’re grateful for is going to make you a happier person,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d be grateful and happy if someone else could do this story,’’ I reply.
Journaling is of course the newish name for the age-old practice of keeping a diary. And, while there’s nothing so simple as jotting your thoughts down on paper, of late the exercise has been commercialised, modernised and promised as a cure-all for almost everything.
A quick glance through a bookstore or web search will give you some idea of what we’re dealing with. There are mindfulness journals, write-to-yourchild journals, wellness, planning, calming journals. And then of course the gratitude journals, one of which arrives in my letterbox.
Tearing open the packaging I find a pink and white box containing a pen and book with ‘‘note to self’’ scrolled in gold on the cover. There’s also a packet of stickers to prompt my writing and a personal note from the founder of Forget Me Not Journals.
The journal would have cost me $55 if I’d had to pay for it which seems a lot for a book with no words in it. Nonetheless, it’s beautiful, and this house never has enough pens, so I pop the box on the coffee table and ignore it.
‘‘When are you filing the gratitude story?’’, my boss asks at our next planning meeting.
‘‘Not this week,’’ I say. ‘‘This week isn’t going to be a grateful one.’’
The blurb sent out by the PR company says gratitude journaling has long been supported by research as a way to help with anxiety, depression and maintaining an overall positive outlook.
And therein lies the problem. I don’t have a positive outlook to maintain in the first place. I’m not so much a glass-half-empty person as a ‘‘someone’s probably pissed in this cup’’ type. My superpower is seeing the bad in everything; I even managed to be depressed at Disneyland.
Of course, I’ve kept diaries in the past, filling them with neuroses and half-truths I hoped someone would publish after my death. When I stumbled recently upon one I kept as a teenager, I found the pages heaved with self-pity and indulgence. I also had no idea how to use apostrophe’s.
According to Scriveiner, a behemoth in the journal market, the practice of keeping a diary originated in 15th-century Italy where diaries were used for accounting. These eventually shifted from recording public events to reflecting on the private lives of their owners.
The modern diary began with Samuel Pepys in England in 1660, recording details of London life, including historic events like the Great Fire of 1666 as well as quarrels with his wife.
Later there were travel diaries – like those kept by James Cook and Charles Darwin – as well as ones maintained by writers such as Tolstoy, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.
‘‘I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved and capable of love’’, wrote the doomed Sylvia Plath in hers.
Marie Curie kept a journal, as did Ernest Hemingway. Emilie Davis recorded life as a free black woman in Philadelphia at the time of the Civil War, and Isabelle Eberhardt wrote in hers of extraordinary travels and adventures
Then, of course, there is that most famous diary of all, penned by Anne Frank, who died at 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
My gratitude journal, however, is still sitting blank on the coffee table; something my boss is outwardly and increasingly ungrateful about.
Because of this there’s only one sensible thing to do when asked how my assignment is going, and that’s tell a bit of a fib.
‘‘Good,’’ I say. ‘‘Interesting and informative, and it’s going to make a really nice story.’’
‘‘You haven’t started it, have you?’’ she says.
‘‘This hasn’t been a good month for gratefulness,’’ I reply. ‘‘2023 is turning out to be as crap as 2022 was.’’
The idea that keeping a journal is good for you often comes back to the 1980s work of American social psychologist James Pennebaker, The Guardian reports.
Pennebaker’s study compared writing about a trivial topic with writing about important emotional events for a set period and found the latter saw participants making fewer visits to health professionals in the six months that followed their journaling.
International researchers have since gone on to link myriad health benefits to the practice, including mental health improvement and helping wounds heal faster.
Obviously my already precarious mental health is going to suffer if I’m fired, so I jump on the phone with my journal’s creator and wing it.
Megan Hutchison – the founder of Forget Me Not Journals – has created a raft of journals since 2016 including wedding planners, pregnancy and baby books as well as grandparent journals. The most recent is the gratitude one that I pretend I’ve been dutifully filling out.
‘‘Good’’, I say when she asks me how it’s been going, ‘‘interesting; helpful.’’
Hutchison is a self-described Eeyore as well, tending to over-think, over-worry and spend far more time dwelling on bad things than good. The idea of this most recent journal was prompted by her husband accusing her of not appreciating what she has; her undeniable privilege. That was a wakeup call, and she detests woo-woo too.
‘‘I hate it, there are no crystals on my mantelpiece. I was told to keep a journal by a GP and I was like ‘oh come on give me some medication’.’’
Just like me, she’s been struggling with the journal, though has been pushing herself to spend maybe 20 minutes on her entries. She hasn’t been writing in her journal long enough to experience much of a shift but reckons she’ll get there. The thought of appearing ungrateful to others is just too awful.
We talk about writing for nobody other than yourself and the freedom that comes from the knowledge nobody will read what you’ve put down. I ask what will happen to her journals in the future; does she have a friend like mine who’ll swoop in and destroy everything should something dreadful happen?
‘‘No, I don’t care, judge me when I’m dead.’’ Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland says for something like gratitude journaling to work, you have to both believe in it and want to do it.
‘‘The hypothesis of why it’s generally helpful for your emotional wellbeing is because it’s making your brain actively look for more positive things. Our brains are more designed to look for danger and threats because that’s how it keeps us safe.’’
He says the practice has been shown to improve our social relationships, though gratitude journaling – like many other mindfulness practices popular in the US – often doesn’t sit well with New Zealanders, who aren’t big fans of introspection.
Sutherland’s about to jump into another interview to talk about the anxiety people will be feeling due to Cyclone Gabrielle, which is the perfect opener to my next question: should we be trying to feel grateful when the world is undeniably turning to shit?
He says: ‘‘You could argue, what better time to do it than now? If we accept the evidence, and it helps people’s happiness and sense of wellbeing, then why wouldn’t you?’’
And because he’s right, I begin; the little gold stickers helping me along the way.
If I could write a letter to my past self it would say:
Forgive yourself. Everything is going to work out; everything will be fine.
An act of kindness I will always remember is:
The woman who hugged me at the supermarket when my twin toddlers were awful, other shoppers were angry, and I was utterly out of cope.
The best compliment I have ever received is: Recently, someone told me to look after my ‘‘big, generous heart’’ and that was just what I needed to hear, having never heard my heart described like that.
The best advice I’ve ever received is: ‘‘You’ll never be a perfect parent, just be a good enough one,’’ from a doctor who got it.
A teacher I’m most grateful for : The nowreverend Mr Mapplebeck who, back when he was an English teacher, told me to write what I know.
One of my happiest memories is: When she was sick, and we were lying in the dark laughing and for a moment we were kids again and nothing bad had happened. Oh, and that time the kids were young and piled into my bed during a storm.
I am grateful for: Getting to 44; writing; the pair of little hands that reaches for me so often. His sweaty head; his chubby legs.
I am grateful for: A mad friend who, upon my death, will read every private thing I’ve written and hidden, laughing herself stupid, before she destroys it.
I am grateful for: The privilege that lets me be so damn miserable when I really am so lucky.
Woo-woo nonsense, obviously, but it only hurts a little.