Can gratitude journalling help with grief? In small, specific ways, yes β though not in the transactional sense the wellness internet sometimes implies, where you write down three nice things and grief hands back a lighter feeling in exchange. That isn't how it worked when I lost my grandad, and it isn't how the research on this says it should work either. What a gratitude practice can actually do, slowly and without fanfare, is give grief somewhere to put down a little of its weight alongside the sadness, rather than instead of it.
I want to be upfront about who this is and isn't for. If you're newly bereaved and looking for something that will fix the pain, this won't do that, and neither will anything else β grief isn't a problem with a solution, it's a process with a shape. But if you're a few months or years into a loss and wondering whether writing anything gratitude-shaped alongside the grief is a betrayal of it, or quietly the opposite, this is for that question.
What does grief actually do to your sense of gratitude?
Grief flattens things before it does anything else. Colours are duller, food tastes of less, and the small good moments that used to register β a decent coffee, a text from a friend β often just don't land the way they used to. This isn't you being ungrateful or broken; it's closer to what psychologists call anhedonia, a temporarily reduced capacity to feel pleasure, and it's an entirely normal part of acute grief. If you've sat down to write a gratitude entry in the weeks after a loss and stared at a blank page feeling nothing but numb, you're not doing it wrong. You may recognise some of this from the wider experience of not being able to think of anything to be grateful for β grief is simply the sharpest version of that.
The other thing grief does is make gratitude feel dangerous, like admitting things are fine when they aren't. I've felt that specifically: a flash of something like thankfulness for a sunny afternoon, immediately followed by a stab of guilt, as though feeling anything good was a small act of disloyalty to the person I'd lost. That reaction has a name too β it's related to what grief researchers call "continuing bonds," the ongoing relationship the bereaved maintain with someone who's died, and the guilt often comes from mistaking gratitude for moving on, when it's usually just moving alongside.
Isn't asking someone to feel grateful during grief just toxic positivity?
This is the right question to ask, and the answer is: it can be, if it's done badly. There's a real and important difference between gratitude and toxic positivity, and grief is where that line matters most. "At least they're not suffering anymore" or "everything happens for a reason," said to someone mid-grief, is toxic positivity β it asks the bereaved person to reframe their loss for someone else's comfort. "I'm grateful I got to know him for thirty years" is different. It doesn't ask the pain to leave. It just sits next to it.
The test I use is whether the grateful thought replaces the grief or accompanies it. A journalling practice that says "focus on the good, not the loss" is asking you to perform recovery. One that says "you can hold both of these at once, here's some space to do it" is doing something genuinely useful. The second is what the research below is actually about.
What does the research say about gratitude and grief?
This is a newer area than most of what I write about, and the evidence is thinner than it is for, say, sleep or anxiety β worth saying plainly rather than overselling it. A 2025 qualitative study by Pelacho-RΓos, KΕlves and Bernabe-Valero, published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, interviewed bereaved parents β about as severe a form of grief as exists β and found that gratitude showed up in three distinct forms: interpersonal (thankfulness for the support of others), transcendental (a shift in what mattered, or in spiritual meaning), and adversity-related (a hard-won appreciation that came specifically because of, not despite, the loss). None of the parents described gratitude as replacing their grief. They described it running alongside it, sometimes for years.
A separate 2024 study by Elfers, Hlava, Sharpe, Arreguin and McGregor, surveying over 600 bereaved adults, found that gratitude correlated positively with resilience, personal growth and valuing the relationship that was lost β and negatively with the effort it took to control overwhelming grief-related emotion. That last part is the interesting bit: gratitude wasn't linked to feeling less grief, but to needing to fight it less. That distinction β less struggle against the feeling, not less feeling β is close to what the toxic positivity test above is trying to protect.
Both studies are correlational or qualitative, not trials, so I can't tell you that journalling caused any of this. What I can tell you, cautiously, is that gratitude and grief were never found to be opposites in either study β they were found sitting in the same room, which is more than the "just think positive" version of this advice usually credits.
What does a gratitude entry actually look like when you're grieving someone?
Not a list of nice things about the day. When I got back into journalling after my grandad died, the entries that actually helped were the ones addressed to him, not about him β closer to a running, unfinished conversation than a diary. That's essentially the gratitude letter format repurposed for someone who can't read it: "grateful you taught me to fix a puncture, still annoyed you never showed me how you did the crossword so fast." Specific, a bit funny, occasionally furious. Grief and gratitude for the same person are rarely clean feelings, and this is especially true if the relationship itself was complicated β you can be grieving someone and still working through what you're grateful and not grateful for about them, at the same time, in the same entry.
What I'd actively avoid is a nightly "three good things" format in the first weeks. It assumes a baseline of noticing good things that acute grief often removes, and coming up empty every night just adds failure on top of loss. Weekly, unstructured, and addressed to the person rather than about your day tends to work better early on.
Does it help with the loneliness that follows a loss?
Often, yes, and this is where I'd point you to what the research on gratitude and loneliness more broadly suggests, because bereavement loneliness has a specific shape worth naming: it's not just missing the person, it's the world going quiet around you once the immediate flurry of condolence cards and casseroles stops, usually a few weeks after everyone else has moved on and you very much haven't. Writing down who actually showed up for you β the friend who kept texting after week three, the colleague who covered for you without being asked β doesn't fill the gap the person you lost left. But it does seem to sharpen your view of who's still there, which matters more than it sounds like it should when grief makes everyone feel far away.
Where does journalling stop being enough?
I want to be direct here rather than tuck this in a footnote. As the NHS's guidance on grief puts it, there's no right or wrong way to feel, and grief symptoms β shock, numbness, exhaustion, anger β are a normal response to loss, not a sign anything has gone wrong with you. But grief that stays this intense for many months without softening at all, or that stops you functioning day to day, is sometimes something more specific β prolonged grief disorder is now a recognised clinical diagnosis β and a journal is not the right tool for that. If that sounds like where you are, please talk to your GP, or a bereavement-specific service such as Cruse. That's a conversation with a person, not a page.
For everything short of that, I think gratitude journalling earns a small, honest place in grief β not as a way out of it, and not as a performance of coping for anyone watching, but as somewhere to note, in your own time, that loss and thankfulness for what you had are the same shape of feeling, seen from two sides. I still don't have all the crossword clues my grandad would have got in seconds. I'm still glad he existed long enough to make me feel stupid about it.