Does Gratitude Journalling Actually Help With the Winter Blues?

By Matt Hughes · 2026-08-04 · 8 min read

Gratitude journalling doesn't fix the biology behind the winter blues, but it stops a grey week from erasing all the evidence that good things still happened in it. Here's what worked over four winters, and what didn't.

Gratitude journalling in winter is a much harder habit to keep than gratitude journalling in June, and for years I assumed that was a discipline problem — that I was simply lazier in November. It isn't. It's biology getting in the way of a practice that relies on noticing things, at exactly the time of year when there's less light to notice them by. I've now been through four winters with Kansha open every evening, and I want to be honest about what actually shifted and what stayed stubbornly the same.

What actually happens to your mood in winter?

The clinical term is seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, and it's a real, diagnosable subtype of depression linked to reduced daylight — not a mood, a medical condition with its own diagnostic criteria. Most of us who feel worse in winter don't meet that bar. What we've got is sometimes called the "winter blues": lower energy, a pull towards hibernating, a flatter mood that lifts again in spring. It's milder, it's extremely common in the UK given how little daylight we get past October, and it's the version I'm writing about here. If what you're feeling is closer to the clinical picture — if it's affecting your ability to work, sleep, or function most days — that's a conversation for your GP, not a paragraph in a blog post, and I'll come back to that properly at the end.

The mechanism behind the milder version is reasonably well understood. Less daylight disrupts your circadian rhythm and dampens serotonin activity, which is part of why you feel groggier and lower in mood through the darker months. None of that is about willpower. It's genuinely harder to feel bright and notice good things when your body is quietly running on a different setting.

Does gratitude journalling actually help with the winter blues?

The honest answer is: it helps with the symptom, not the cause. Gratitude journalling doesn't touch the underlying biology — it isn't light, and it isn't going to correct a serotonin dip. The strongest evidence-based treatment for SAD is light therapy, specifically a lightbox used for around 20–30 minutes each morning, alongside the general depression treatments of CBT and, where appropriate, medication. If you want the one intervention with genuine trial evidence behind it, that's it, not a notebook.

What gratitude journalling does is work on the layer above the biology — the way you interpret and remember your days. Emmons and McCullough's original gratitude research, and the studies that have followed it, consistently show that regularly noting things you're grateful for improves mood and life satisfaction over weeks, independent of what's causing the low mood in the first place. It's not fixing the dimmer switch. It's making sure you don't lose track of the good things that are still happening while the switch is turned down.

That distinction matters more in winter than any other season, because winter has a specific way of erasing evidence. In summer, good moments are everywhere and hard to miss — a barbecue, a long evening walk, sitting outside with a coffee. In winter, the good moments still happen, but they're smaller and easier for a tired brain to skip past: the flat felt warm when you got in, a friend texted back straight away, the soup you made actually worked. Your brain has a well-documented negativity bias at the best of times — it holds onto threats and irritations far more readily than it holds onto small wins. Add reduced light and lower energy, and that bias gets a free pass. Gratitude journalling is, at its core, a forcing function against that. It doesn't need you to feel good to work. It needs you to look, on a day when looking is the last thing you feel like doing.

What actually changed for me in November?

The honest log: my mood didn't lift. I still felt flatter, slower, and more inclined to be in bed by half nine. What changed was what I could tell you about my week if you asked me on a Friday. Without journalling, my memory of a grey November week is one long grey smear — nothing to hold onto, which then reinforces the feeling that nothing good is happening. With journalling, I had an actual list: my neighbour dropped round a plant cutting, I finished a piece of client work I'd been dreading, I had a proper laugh on a video call with an old colleague. None of those things felt big enough to register on their own. Written down, they added up to a week that wasn't as bleak as it felt from inside it.

That's the real value in winter — not making the low mood disappear, but stopping it from writing the whole story. There's a specific bit of research on this that I find genuinely useful: how you feel about your day and how you'd describe your day, if asked to recall it later, aren't the same measurement. Journalling closes the gap between the two. In winter, that gap widens on its own, so closing it back up does more work than it would in July.

Does the time of day you journal matter more in winter?

I moved my own habit from evening to morning for three winters running, on the theory that starting the day by naming something good would set a better tone than ending it half-asleep on the sofa. It didn't work for me, and I think I know why: in a British winter, the first hour of your day is often the darkest, most reluctant part of it. Asking yourself to be reflective and grateful before you've had coffee, in the dark, at 7am, is asking a lot. I went back to evening journalling, five or ten minutes before bed, and it's stuck every winter since.

I don't think there's a universally correct answer here — some people do genuinely find a morning entry sets them up better, and if that's you, keep it. But if you've tried mornings in winter and it's felt like a chore rather than a lift, that's not a sign you're bad at gratitude. It might just be a bad fit for the season. Evening, when the heating's on and the day is behind you rather than ahead, is worth trying instead.

What doesn't gratitude journalling fix, even when it's working?

It doesn't fix low energy. It doesn't fix the 4pm dusk making the whole afternoon feel like it's already over. It doesn't fix the fact that plans are harder to make and easier to cancel when it's cold and dark by the time you finish work. I used to expect journalling to compensate for all of that, and when it didn't, I'd decide the habit wasn't working and quietly drop it by mid-December — which, looking back at four winters of entries, is almost exactly when I stopped every single year until this one.

What finally helped wasn't journalling harder. It was journalling alongside the boring, unglamorous basics that actually address the biology: getting outside during daylight hours even when it's grey, especially around midday when what little light there is peaks; keeping some kind of consistent sleep and wake time even though the urge in winter is to drift later and later; and, for me specifically, a lightbox on my desk in the mornings, which took about ten days before I noticed anything and then genuinely did help. Gratitude journalling was never meant to replace those things. It works best as the layer that captures the evidence that the other things are helping, which in turn makes it easier to keep doing them.

Is it worth starting a gratitude habit in the darkest months, or should you wait for spring?

Start in winter, not spring, and I say that having done it the other way round more than once. Waiting for spring to start a habit that's supposed to help you notice good things means you skip the exact months when noticing is hardest and most needed. It also means you go into next winter without the habit already built, which is the worse position to be in. The people I've spoken to who journal through Kansha and who say it helps most in winter aren't the ones who feel amazing every evening — they're the ones who've kept a small, low-effort version of the habit going regardless of how the day felt, so that by February they've got a written record proving the season wasn't as uniformly grey as it felt.

Keep the bar low. On the flattest days, one line is enough — "the flat was warm," "M messaged back," "the soup worked." You're not trying to talk yourself into feeling good. You're keeping a ledger your winter brain is too tired and too light-starved to keep on its own.

When is journalling not enough?

I want to be as clear here as I was in the anxiety piece I wrote for this blog, because the stakes are the same. If what you're feeling in winter is mild — flatter mood, lower energy, less motivation, but you're still functioning, still getting through your days — gratitude journalling alongside daylight, movement, and decent sleep habits is a genuinely useful, evidence-informed thing to do. If it's more than that — if you're struggling to get up, to work, to see people, if it's happening most days for weeks and it isn't lifting — that's a pattern worth taking to your GP, because seasonal affective disorder is a real, treatable condition and light therapy or other proper treatment can make a much bigger difference than any journal will.

There's no conflict between doing both. Get the light, get the sleep, get the professional help if you need it, and keep the notebook open alongside all of it. I built Kansha because I wanted the noticing part to be as easy as possible on the days I had the least energy for it. It was never meant to be the only thing carrying the weight of a British winter, and it shouldn't have to be.