The Practice I Almost Wrote Off

A New Way to Look at an Old Practice

A 2025 review pulled together 145 studies on gratitude practices, covering nearly 25,000 people across 28 countries (Choi et al., 2025). The headline was honest. Gratitude practices help with well-being. The size of the help is small. Not zero. Not magic. Small.

That alone made me look again. A small but consistent effect, across many cultures and study designs, is more useful than a big effect found once. It means something is real underneath all the noise.

And then a different paper, a 2025 trial out of Germany, asked a sharper question (Kalon et al., 2025). Not "does gratitude make people happier on average?" but "does gratitude help the people whose minds will not stop?"

The Loop the Research Was After

The technical name for the thing they were chasing is repetitive negative thinking — the loop of worry, regret, or rumination that runs the same track over and over without getting anywhere new (Watkins, 2008). Most people know the feeling. The 3 a.m. replay of the awkward thing you said. The week-long argument with someone who is not in the room. The same fear, the same five sentences, on a loop.

Researchers care about this loop because it is one of the few patterns of mind that shows up in many different mental health struggles at once (Ehring & Watkins, 2008). Anxiety has it. Depression has it. Stress has it. Quiet that loop, even a little, and a lot of things ease at the same time.

This is the doorway the new gratitude research walks through.

Why I Was Reading the Wrong Reviews

I think I had been reading gratitude as a feeling. A warm one, the kind people post about on a Sunday morning.

That is not what the research is studying. The research is studying a small daily action — write a sentence about a moment that mattered, take a photo of something that caught your eye, name the person whose text felt good — and watching what that small action does to the loop a few weeks later.

That is a much more interesting question than whether grateful people are happier. It is a question about whether a small page-based habit can move a stuck mind. And that, finally, sounded like something worth paying attention to.

Earlier work hinted at this. A 2009 review of positive psychology practices — gratitude exercises included — found that they helped people feel better and reduced symptoms of depression (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009). The effects were modest, but they were measurable, and they lasted.

What we did not know, until recently, was who was getting the most out of these practices.

The Bridge

The next chapter walks through the new study carefully. Three hundred and fifty-two people. A simple phone-based gratitude habit. And a finding that I think changes how the practice should be pitched.

References

Choi, H., Cha, Y., McCullough, M. E., Coles, N. A., & Oishi, S. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(28), e2425193122.

Ehring, T., & Watkins, E. R. (2008). Repetitive negative thinking as a transdiagnostic process. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 1(3), 192–205.

Kalon, L. S., Freund, H., Rinn, A., Watkins, P. C., Zarski, A. C., & Lehr, D. (2025). Effectiveness of a gratitude app at reducing repetitive negative thinking as a transdiagnostic risk factor in the general population: Results from a pragmatic randomized controlled trial. Journal of Affective Disorders, 389, 119664.

Sin, N. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: A practice-friendly meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(5), 467–487.

Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163–206.