The self-help / positive thinking industry can be misleading and sometimes plain wrong but… gratitude journals shine through…

How to feel up in a downturn by Oliver Burkeman – The Guardian article is here – guardian.co.uk

Extract…”For the past year or so, sporadically, I have kept what the University of California psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky calls a “gratitude journal”: a notebook in which I list between three and five things for which I am currently thankful. Naturally, I am hugely embarrassed to admit this. Keeping the journal contradicts my sense of myself as a sceptical, rational, irony-appreciating British person, immune to the lures of cheesy, Oprah-esque, feelgood nonsense. Besides, I have political qualms about techniques that might turn me into a grinning, uncomplaining conformist: perhaps we should be angry and gloomy about, say, our politicians’ behaviour, or the state of the climate. The awkward truth, though, is that keeping a gratitude journal has made a detectable and sustained difference to my state of mind….”