The Three Good Things Exercise — I Tried the Research-Backed Version for a Month

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-01 · 7 min read

Write three things that went well and why they happened. It sounds too small to matter. Here is the research behind the three good things exercise, and the honest arc of doing it for a month.

The three good things exercise is the one gratitude practice I keep coming back to, and I think it is because it asks almost nothing of you. You write down three things that went well today, and next to each one you write why it happened. That is it. No app required, no special notebook, no mood you have to be in first. I was sceptical the first time someone described it to me, mostly because it sounded too small to matter. It turns out the smallness is the point.

I want to walk through what this actually is, where it comes from, what happened when I did it properly for a month, and the bits nobody tells you about — including the days it felt pointless and I did it anyway.

What is the three good things exercise?

The three good things exercise comes out of a 2005 study led by Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology. His team gave people a handful of different exercises to try for a week and then followed up for six months. Most of the interventions gave people a short-lived bump that faded. Three good things — sometimes called "three blessings" in the original paper — was different. People who kept it up were measurably happier and less depressed at one month, at three months, and even at six.

The method is deliberately plain. Every evening, you write down three things that went well that day. They can be enormous or completely trivial. Then, and this is the part people skip, you write a short line about why each thing happened. Not just "had a good coffee with Sarah" but "because I actually messaged her back this time instead of leaving it three weeks."

That second step is doing quiet work. Listing good things trains you to notice them. Writing why they happened trains you to see your own hand in them, or to notice the people and circumstances that made them possible. It is the difference between a photograph and a caption.

Why does writing down why it happened matter so much?

When I first tried this years ago, I did the lazy version. Three bullet points, no reasons, done in about forty seconds whilst half-watching something. It did basically nothing for me, and I quietly concluded gratitude journalling was not for me and gave up.

The reason I bring that up is that I think most people who say "I tried gratitude journalling and it didn't work" tried the version I tried. A bare list is a to-do list with the emotion removed. You are just cataloguing. The "why" is what pulls you out of autopilot, because to answer it you have to actually think about the day rather than skim it.

Here is a real example from my own notebook. The good thing was: "a walk at lunch that fixed my mood." Easy to leave it there. But the why was: "because I put my phone on the windowsill before I left, so I wasn't reading work messages the whole way round." That is not a nice sentiment. That is a small, repeatable instruction to myself. The exercise turned a pleasant moment into a piece of self-knowledge I could use again the next day.

What happened when I did it for a month?

I will be honest about the arc, because the honest version is more useful than the tidy one.

The first week felt slightly forced and a bit smug, like I was performing wellness at myself. Some evenings the three things were genuinely lovely. Other evenings I sat there having had a flat, grey sort of Tuesday and had to properly hunt. "The bus came straight away." "The soup was better than I expected." "Nobody needed anything from me after six." Thin gruel, and I felt faintly ridiculous writing it.

But something shifted around the middle of the second week, and it was not what I expected. The change did not happen in the evening when I was writing. It happened during the day. I started clocking small good things as they were occurring, with a little internal note of "that will go in tonight." Knowing I would have to find three things at the end of the day made me go looking for them whilst the day was still on. That is the actual mechanism, I think. It is less a journalling habit and more a slow retraining of what your attention reaches for by default.

By the end of the month the flat days had not disappeared — I want to be clear I was not floating around transformed. But the flat days had more texture. I was less likely to write off a whole day as a write-off, because I had spent a month practising the skill of finding the three things that were fine even when the headline was not.

What are the hard parts nobody mentions?

Two things caught me out.

The first is that some days you will resist it, and those are usually the days it helps most and feels worst. On a genuinely rough day, sitting down to name three good things can feel almost insulting — like being told to cheer up. My workaround was to lower the bar completely on those days. The good thing is allowed to be "I got through it." The why is allowed to be "because I stopped trying to fix everything and just went to bed." That still counts. Forcing profundity on a bad day is how people quit.

The second is the copy-paste trap. After a couple of weeks you notice the same three things showing up — a coffee, a walk, a decent night's sleep — and it starts to feel like you are filling in a form. When that happened I made myself add one rule: at least one of the three had to be something specific to that day, something that could not have appeared on any other day's list. It kept the exercise from calcifying into a routine I was no longer paying attention to. This, incidentally, is a large part of why I ended up building Kansha — I wanted something that would gently notice when I was on autopilot and nudge me, rather than a blank page that lets you phone it in indefinitely.

Is three the magic number, or can you write more?

People ask this a lot, and the honest answer is that three is not sacred, but it is well chosen. Three is enough to force you past the single obvious thing and into the day's smaller stuff, but few enough that it never feels like a chore you can fail at. One thing is too easy to do on autopilot. Ten things and you are back to cataloguing, and you will dread it by Thursday.

What I would say is that the number matters far less than the consistency and the "why." If you genuinely only have the energy for one properly-thought-through good thing with a real reason attached, that beats three hollow ones every time. On my worst days I dropped to one and did not consider it a failure. The streak I cared about was showing up, not hitting a quota.

When is the best time to do it?

The original study had people do it at the end of the day, and I think that is right, though not for the reason I assumed. I had thought evening was best because you have the full day to draw from. That is true, but the better reason is that it changes how you go to sleep. Ending the day by deliberately naming what went well, rather than replaying what went wrong, is a genuinely different way to close a day. I noticed I was less likely to lie there running through the one awkward thing from an afternoon meeting.

That said, the best time is the time you will actually keep. If evenings are chaos in your house, do it over your morning coffee about the previous day. A slightly displaced version you sustain beats a perfectly-timed version you abandon in a fortnight.

How do you actually start, without overthinking it?

Do not buy anything. Do not design a system. Tonight, before you sleep, write down three things that went well today and one line each on why they happened. Keep the bar low enough that you cannot fail — the bus, the soup, the quiet after six all count. Do it again tomorrow. Do it on the bad days especially, with the bar dropped through the floor if you need to.

Give it two weeks before you judge it, because the shift I described — noticing good things as they happen rather than hunting for them at the end — takes roughly that long to show up, and everything before it can feel a bit pointless. The research says the benefits build over months, not days, so the whole thing rewards patience more than intensity.

The three good things exercise has lasted for me where fancier practices did not, and I think it is precisely because it is so unglamorous. It does not ask you to feel grateful on command. It just asks you to look at your day closely enough to notice that some of it was good, and to work out why. Do that often enough and you start doing it without the notebook, which was the whole point all along.