🤲 Can you be too grateful?

What if I told you journaling about things you’re grateful for every day actually wasn’t good for you?

Sonja Lyubomirsky (Researcher and PhD) and her colleagues knew gratitude worked for making people happier, but they wanted to find its limits.

Specifically, they wanted to know the optimal frequency that would make people happiest.

They organized a 6-week study:

• half were told to practice gratitude 3x/week

• the other half were told to do it just once a week

All followed the same prompt - to simply write up to 5 things they were grateful for that day.

They recorded things as simple as:

• mom

• a healthy body

• instant messenger

You get the idea.

The results were incredible!

Compared to the control, the gratitude group was significantly happier at the end of the 6 weeks.

Surprisingly though, this was only true for those who did it ONCE per week.

People who did it 3x/week didn’t benefit at all from it.

Seems like they got bored. It started feeling like it was more of a chore than a treat.

Once a week, on the other hand, was frequent enough to work - but not so frequent to become boring.

If you regularly use a gratitude journal, try switching to once a week and see how it goes.

If you don't gratitude journal, try writing just 5 simple things you're grateful for once a week. Set a reminder in your phone for Sunday (or whichever day you'll have more time).