How to Use Gratitude Journalling to Get Unstuck From a Rut

By Matt Hughes · 2026-06-05 · 9 min read

I'd tried the usual rut advice — a new project, a weekend away, more stimulation. None of it stuck. A five-minute notebook habit did, and not for the reasons I expected.

I used gratitude journalling to get unstuck from a rut a couple of summers ago, and I'm still a bit surprised it worked. I'd been in one of those low, sticky stretches where nothing was particularly wrong but nothing felt particularly right either — the kind of months where you keep waiting for the weather of your own head to change and it just doesn't. I'd tried the usual things. A new project. A weekend away. Talking to a friend about it. None of them shifted anything for more than a day or two. The thing that eventually did was a five-minute notebook habit I'd been quietly dismissing as too small to count.

This post is the long version of how that actually worked. Not the marketing version. The honest version, including the bits that didn't.

What does a rut actually feel like?

I think it's worth defining, because "rut" is one of those words that gets used to mean wildly different things. The version I mean isn't depression. It isn't burnout, although the edges blur. A rut, for me, is a stretch — a few weeks, sometimes a few months — where my days have collapsed into a kind of grey efficiency. I'm still doing the work. I'm still seeing people. Nothing is on fire. But the texture has gone. I'm not noticing anything. The week ends and I couldn't tell you what was in it. I get to Sunday night and I genuinely can't remember what I did on Tuesday.

If I'm honest, the bit I found most disturbing wasn't the flatness. It was the forgetting. Whole weeks were dissolving and I couldn't account for them. That's the part that made me try the notebook in the end. Not because I expected it to fix my mood, but because I wanted there to be a record of what I was actually living through, even if it didn't feel like much.

Why doesn't the usual advice work when you're stuck?

The standard rut advice is, roughly: change something. Go somewhere. Do something different. See people. The trouble with this advice — and I say this as someone who's enthusiastically followed it — is that it treats a rut as a problem of stimulation, when most of the ruts I've been in have been problems of attention.

I wasn't bored, exactly. I had plenty going on. I just wasn't really noticing any of it. The events were happening and I was sliding past them. So when I followed the usual advice and added more events — a trip, a project, a new course — I'd briefly feel better for the novelty and then settle straight back into not-noticing the new thing, the same way I hadn't been noticing the old one. The container was the problem. The contents weren't.

What I've found is that this is why so much rut advice produces a sugar-rush of relief that fades inside a week. It's giving you new things to fail to notice. It isn't addressing the actual machinery that's gone offline, which is the noticing itself.

How can journalling help when you can't think of anything to be grateful for?

This was the bit I was sceptical about, and I want to be careful here, because the usual gratitude pitch — "just write three things you're grateful for!" — sounds genuinely useless when you're in a rut. I know, because I tried it twice and gave up both times. Sitting there, pen in hand, trying to summon enthusiasm for "my morning coffee" felt worse than not journalling at all. It made the flatness more visible without doing anything about it.

The shift, for me, was lowering the bar to something almost embarrassingly small. Not "what are you grateful for", which implies you should feel something. But "what did you notice today, even slightly". That's a different question. You can answer it even in a flat week. Someone said something to me at the bus stop. The cat sat on my keyboard. The sky was a particular kind of grey at four. None of those are gratitude in the postcard sense. But they're noticing, and noticing is the muscle that's gone weak in a rut, and noticing is what writing them down apparently rebuilds.

What I didn't expect was how quickly the entries started to drag actual gratitude back in by their coat-tails. After about ten days of writing down what I'd noticed — most of it small, neutral, observational — the entries started, of their own accord, including the occasional warm thing. Not because I was trying. Because once you're paying attention again, warm things come back into view. They were always there. I just hadn't been looking at them.

What three prompts did I use to break out?

I'll be honest, I tried a lot of prompts before I landed on the ones that worked. Most of them were too ambitious. "What did I learn today" felt like homework. "What am I proud of" sounded like a LinkedIn post. The three that finally stuck were small and slightly boring, which I think is why they worked.

The first was: what did I actually do today? Just a list. Phone call at ten. Walked to the shop. Made soup. The point wasn't to be grateful for any of it. The point was to prove the day existed. That alone broke the forgetting, and breaking the forgetting was, on its own, a significant shift.

The second was: what did I notice that I wouldn't normally bother to write down? This one is the engine. It's the prompt that builds the attention muscle. The detail you'd normally skip is exactly the detail your brain has stopped registering, and writing it down is how you teach it to register things again. The light through the kitchen window. The fact your colleague was wearing a new jumper. The smell of the laundry.

The third was: if I had to find one good thing about today, what would it be? Note the "had to". This was the bit that made it possible to write on the bad days. I wasn't claiming the day had been good. I was just answering the question. Often the answer was small and slightly grudging. "I had a hot shower." "My daughter laughed at something I said." That was enough. The point of the prompt isn't sincerity. It's reps.

What changes when you start writing about a rut on purpose?

A few things, and not the ones I expected.

The first thing that shifted wasn't my mood. It was my sense of time. Within about a fortnight, weeks stopped dissolving. I could open the notebook on Sunday and see, in my own handwriting, what Tuesday had actually been. That sounds like a small thing. It isn't. A rut, in the way I'd been experiencing it, was partly a crisis of evidence — I couldn't prove my own life was happening. The notebook was the proof. Once the proof was there, the rut had less to grip onto.

The second shift was that the entries started to surface things I'd been quietly ignoring. Patterns. The fact I'd written "tired" eleven days running. The fact I hadn't mentioned a single person I lived with for a week. The fact every evening entry had been written after ten. None of those were revelations on their own, but lined up in a notebook they made it harder to pretend everything was fine. They gave me something concrete to change, which is a thousand times more useful than a vague sense that something should change.

The third shift, the one I'm most cautious about claiming, was that the colour came back. Not dramatically, not all at once. But after about a month, the entries had stopped being a list of grey observations and started, here and there, including things I genuinely liked. A walk that had been actually nice. A conversation that had landed. A meal that had been worth sitting down for. I don't think the journalling caused those things. I think it caused me to see them again.

How long until something actually shifts?

Longer than the wellness internet would have you believe, and not as long as you'd fear. For me, the forgetting stopped within two weeks. The patterns started surfacing around week three. The mood properly lifted somewhere around weeks five and six, and I want to be clear that the journalling wasn't the only thing going on by then — I'd also started walking more, talking to a friend about it, and getting to bed before midnight. But the journalling was the thing that made the other interventions stick, because it was the thing that let me see they were working.

What I'd say is don't trust week one. The first week of journalling out of a rut is dreary and self-conscious and feels pointless. The entries are short and slightly bitter. The temptation to give up is high. If you can get to day fourteen, the practice changes character. The entries get longer without trying. The prompts start answering themselves. It begins to be the small good thing in the day, instead of the thing you have to make yourself do.

What you could try this week

If you're in a rut and you want to try this, the experiment is small. A notebook, a pen, five minutes before bed. Don't aim for gratitude. Aim for noticing. Write down what you actually did, what you actually saw, and one thing — even a grudging one — you wouldn't mind happening again tomorrow. Do it for fourteen days before you decide if it's working.

That's it. That's the whole method. I'm slightly embarrassed by how simple it is, given how much it shifted for me. But I think the simplicity is the point. A rut isn't a complicated problem and it doesn't need a complicated solution. It needs a small, repeatable act of attention, done badly, every day, until the noticing comes back online.

If you want a digital version of the same thing, with prompts and a streak and a way to look back at the patterns, that's what I built Kansha to do, and you're welcome to try it. But the notebook is fine. The notebook is what got me out. The tool barely matters. The fourteen days matter, and the willingness to write something dull at the end of a flat day matters, and the small specific thing you noticed that you weren't going to bother writing down — that matters most of all.