Does Gratitude Journalling Actually Make You More Creative?

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-25 · 7 min read

I noticed I had more ideas in workshops on mornings I'd journalled first. Turns out there's real research on what gratitude and mood do to creative problem-solving.

Does gratitude journalling make you more creative? The honest answer is probably yes — though not for the reason most wellness content implies. It isn't that gratitude is some kind of creative fuel you're pouring into a tank. It's that gratitude reliably shifts your mood in the minutes before you sit down to solve a hard problem, and mood turns out to matter far more to creative thinking than I ever gave it credit for. I only went looking into the research because of a pattern I'd noticed before client workshops: on the mornings I'd journalled, I walked into the room with more ideas already half-formed. On the mornings I hadn't, I sat there waiting for the room to produce them for me.

What actually happens in your brain when you're stuck on a problem?

The clearest evidence here has nothing to do with gratitude at all, which is exactly why it's worth starting with. In 1987, the psychologist Alice Isen and colleagues Kimberly Daubman and Gary Nowicki published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that's now a classic of the field. They gave people Duncker's candle problem: a candle, a box of tacks and a book of matches, with the task of fixing the candle to a wall so it burns without dripping wax on the floor. The elegant solution — emptying the tack box and using it as a wall-mounted shelf — requires you to stop seeing the box as a container and start seeing it as a possible platform. That small mental leap is what researchers use as a stand-in for creative insight.

Before the task, some participants watched a few minutes of a comedy film or received a small bag of sweets. Nothing to do with the problem. Just a brief lift in mood. The results: 58% of the positive-mood group solved the candle problem, against 13% in the neutral control group. A negative-mood group and two exercise-only groups — included specifically to check whether it was simply "feeling activated" rather than "feeling good" — all failed to show the same jump. It was specifically positive mood doing the work, not arousal, and not anything to do with the problem itself. If a few minutes of a funny film can more than quadruple your odds of a creative solution, it's worth asking what a daily habit that reliably produces a small mood lift might do.

Is it gratitude specifically, or just feeling good in general?

This is where it gets more interesting, and more honest. The mechanism most researchers point to is Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory: positive emotions temporarily widen your attention and your "thought-action repertoire" — the range of things you notice, associate and consider possible — while negative emotions narrow it down to whatever the threat is. A wider attentional net catches more unlikely connections, which is most of what creative problem-solving actually is. Under this theory, gratitude is just one of several positive emotions that should broaden thinking. Nothing gratitude-specific yet.

The closest thing I found to gratitude-specific evidence is a 2022 study in the Journal of Intelligence by Dandan Tong, Hanxiao Kang, Minghui Li, Junyi Yang, Peng Lu and Xiaochun Xie. In its second study, 926 university students completed measures of emotional intelligence, resilience, trait gratitude and real-world creative achievement — actual output across ten domains like invention, writing, design and science, not just a lab task. Resilience mediated the link between emotional intelligence and creative achievement, which is interesting but not surprising. The more striking finding was that gratitude moderated that pathway: the benefit of emotional intelligence on real creative achievement, running through resilience, was significantly stronger in people who scored highly on trait gratitude than in those who didn't. Put plainly — being good with your emotions translated into actual creative output more reliably if you were also a grateful person. Gratitude wasn't just a pleasant feeling sitting alongside the creativity. It looked like part of the mechanism that let emotional skill turn into something real.

What I've actually noticed doing this before client work

I want to be careful here, because "I noticed a pattern" is not a study. But for what it's worth: I've got into the habit of journalling first thing, before I look at email, and I started paying attention to whether it changed the first ten minutes of workshop days. Informally, unscientifically, it does. Mornings where the entry was something specific and recent — a good line that landed in a pitch, a problem that resolved itself overnight, a client email that was kinder than it needed to be — seem to correlate with more ideas going up on the whiteboard early, and fewer "let's park that" moments in the first half hour. Mornings where I skip it, or where the entry is vague and rushed, don't feel noticeably different at the time, but looking back at meeting notes afterwards, they often are.

I'd love to tell you I've run this as a controlled trial on myself, alternating journalling days and non-journalling days and counting ideas on the board. I haven't. It's a pattern I've noticed, not a result I've proven, and the sample size is one increasingly biased observer. Which is exactly why the research above matters more than my anecdote does — but the anecdote is what sent me looking for the research in the first place, so I'm including it.

Where the evidence runs out

Here's what I don't want to oversell. Isen's studies induced mood with comedy films and sweets, not gratitude — so they prove positive affect helps creative problem-solving, not that gratitude specifically does. The Journal of Intelligence study measured gratitude as a stable personality trait using a questionnaire, not as the outcome of a journalling habit — it tells you grateful people's emotional skill converts to creative achievement more efficiently, not that making someone more grateful via journalling would raise their creative output. Nobody, as far as I could find, has run the specific trial of "assign one group to gratitude journalling, another to a neutral writing task, then measure creative problem-solving a few weeks later." Each link in the chain has real evidence behind it. Nobody has tested the whole chain as a single experiment.

So the fair version of the claim is this: journalling reliably raises how grateful and how positive you feel in the short term, which is well established. Positive mood reliably improves performance on creative-insight tasks, which Isen's work and plenty of replication since has shown. Trait gratitude specifically seems to strengthen the route from emotional skill to real creative output, which is a genuinely gratitude-specific finding, even if it's correlational rather than causal. Add those together and "probably, a bit, via mood" is a defensible answer. "Gratitude journalling makes you a genius" is not a claim I'm going to write, because nobody has earned it yet.

How to actually use this if you want to try it

Journal right before creative work, not after. If the effect is about the mood you're in when you attempt the task, an evening journalling habit does very little for tomorrow's 9am brainstorm. Try it as the first thing you do before a session that needs ideas, not the last thing you do before bed.

Write about something small and recent, not a grand life summary. The mood lift in Isen's studies came from a few minutes of comedy or a small bag of sweets — modest, specific, immediate inputs. An entry like "the printer actually worked first time this morning" is doing a more precise job for this particular purpose than "grateful for my health and family," useful as the bigger entries are for other things.

Don't try to journal your way out of the block itself. This is a mood-setting tool, not an in-the-moment problem-solving one. If you're forty minutes into a stuck brainstorm, a diary entry isn't going to rescue it — a walk, a change of room or talking it through with someone else is a better move at that point.

Don't turn it into a performance metric. The fastest way to ruin this is to start checking whether today's entry produced today's brilliant idea. That's homework, not journalling, and forced positivity is its own well-documented trap — I've written about that one separately, and it applies here too.

I can't tell you gratitude journalling will make you the next great inventor. What I can tell you, with genuine research behind it rather than just my own workshop mornings, is that the version of you who noticed something good five minutes ago walks into the next hard problem measurably better equipped than the version who didn't. That's a small claim. It also happens to be one worth acting on.