How to Maintain Your Gratitude Journaling Habit Once and for All

Practicing gratitude can make us healthier, happier, and more enjoyable to be around. But I’ve found both gratitude letters and journaling to be a pain.

Gratitude letters are hard to make time for — writing a genuine letter to someone is not a quick, five-minute task. The gratitude apps I saw on the app store were clunky or ridden with ads.

Solutions like The Five Minute Journal worked well for me, but I hated carrying it around with me everywhere. On days when I was traveling, if I didn’t bring my journal in my bag, my journaling habit fell apart. The lack of consistency drove me mad.

That’s why I was so glad to see that the creators of The Five Minute Journal finally created a mobile app. At first, I was a bit turned by the price tag, but given that the hardcover version was ~$20 for a few hundred pages, paying $5 for an app that allowed for unlimited entries and PDF exports seemed totally worth it.

In short, the app is phenomenal. Not only is it significantly easier to do my journaling through my phone on the morning commute, but by allowing photos to be associated with each entry, it encourages me to be more mindful of capturing something great about each day.

Note: I have no association with the app developers, I’m just a happy customer.

In the example entry below, I took a photo of some lab tests I’m looking forward to doing to gauge my health progress since last year. (Is it weird that I get excited by lab tests?)

The prompts are simple enough to do in a few minutes, but effective enough to pull out some real gratitude each morning and evening.

Some people may never be happy, but you you can avoid that fate by expressing gratitude, among other practices. As Naval Ravikant is fond of saying, “happiness is a skill.” I consider this app essential to helping me build that skill.

It may not be the be-all and end-all of gratitude journaling, but The Five Minute Journal app is the best I’ve found so far. You can check out the app here.