# Morning gratitude journal prompts > These are morning gratitude journal prompts for the version of you that has about ninety seconds and has not properly woken up yet. The day has barely started, so most of them point backwards at yesterday or at what is already in the room. Pick one, answer it in a sentence, and get on with the morning. Source: https://www.begrateful.co.in/prompts/morning ## The prompts 1. What is one thing about this morning you would miss if you woke up somewhere else? 2. Who did something for you yesterday that they did not have to do? 3. What is within arm's reach right now that you would replace immediately if it broke? 4. Which ten minutes of yesterday would you keep if you could only keep ten? 5. What does the room sound like before anyone else is awake? 6. What went right yesterday that you did not stop to notice at the time? 7. Who is asleep in this house, or one phone call away, that you are glad exists? 8. What was the first warm thing you touched today? 9. What did your body let you do yesterday without being asked twice? 10. Name one thing on today's calendar you are not dreading. 11. What almost went wrong yesterday and then didn't? 12. Which piece of clothing are you glad to own on a morning like this one? 13. What does this morning smell like — coffee, rain, soap, someone else's cooking? 14. Who taught you something you used yesterday without thinking about it? 15. What is one problem you had five years ago that you no longer have? 16. What is the easiest part of today going to be? 17. Which message on your phone from the last week is worth rereading? 18. What did you eat yesterday that you actually enjoyed? 19. What is one thing you own that someone gave you? 20. Which sound from outside can you hear right now? 21. What did you get to skip this morning that other people are doing right now? 22. Who will you see today that you would be sorry to lose touch with? 23. What did past-you set up that this morning is quietly benefiting from? 24. Which part of your routine would have felt like a luxury to you ten years ago? 25. What is one thing about where you live that you chose on purpose? 26. What worked yesterday and therefore went unnoticed — the bus, the boiler, the wifi? 27. Whose day would be slightly better if you sent them one line this morning? 28. What did you finish recently that you have already stopped thinking about? 29. What do you have this morning that you spent a long time wanting? 30. What are you looking forward to that is smaller than a holiday? Mornings are a good slot for this mostly because of what has not happened yet. Nothing has gone wrong, nobody has asked you for anything, and the decision costs less than it will at 9pm. That is the whole case for a morning entry — availability, not some property of dawn. ## Using these morning gratitude journal prompts Answer one prompt in one sentence. Do not answer all thirty. The list is long so that you never have to reuse a question you have gone numb to, not because working through it is the exercise. Two things make a morning entry worth rereading. The first is specificity: "my sister" is a category, "my sister sent a photo of the dog at 11pm for no reason" is a moment, and only one of those survives contact with next March. The second is smallness. A morning entry competes with getting dressed, so it has to lose gracefully — if you skip it, skip it. The [repair rule that matters](/blog/missed-a-day-journaling-repair-rule) is never miss twice, and it does not involve catching up on the days you missed. If a prompt asks about yesterday and yesterday is a blank, take the one about the room instead. Prompts about what is physically near you work on days when memory is not cooperating, which is most Tuesdays. ## What the evidence supports The best-known result here is a 2003 experiment by Emmons and McCullough, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which people who spent a few minutes each week listing what they were grateful for reported more optimism and higher life satisfaction than people who listed hassles instead. That is a real finding about [gratitude journaling](/glossary/gratitude-journaling), and it is narrower than how it usually gets quoted. A 2010 review by Wood, Froh and Geraghty in Clinical Psychology Review pulled the wider literature together and reported gratitude as strongly related to well-being however well-being is defined. The same review was more careful about the exercises themselves, calling interventions promising while arguing that the positive-psychology literature had been too quick to skip past their limitations. Neither paper tested morning entries specifically, or thirty prompts, or this app. Writing in the morning rather than at night is a reasonable bet about your own schedule, not a tested variable. Worth saying plainly: a journal is not treatment. If mornings are hard in a way that is not fixed by a better routine, that is a conversation for a professional rather than a notebook. ## Research - [Counting blessings versus burdens: an experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12585811/) — Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003) - [Gratitude and well-being: a review and theoretical integration](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20451313/) — Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010) ## Who this is for - [The Gratitude Habit That Finally Sticks](https://www.begrateful.co.in/journal-quitters) ## Glossary terms - [Three good things](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/three-good-things) - [Gratitude journaling](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/gratitude-journaling) - [Affect labeling](https://www.begrateful.co.in/glossary/affect-labeling) ## Related reading - [Why gratitude journaling works: the one bad review](https://www.begrateful.co.in/blog/why-gratitude-journaling-works) - [Missed a day of journaling? The repair rule beats streaks](https://www.begrateful.co.in/blog/missed-a-day-journaling-repair-rule) ## FAQ ### What should I write in a gratitude journal in the morning? Write something specific enough that you would recognise the moment a year from now. In the morning the day has not happened yet, so most of the material is from yesterday, from the room you are sitting in, or from something you are mildly looking forward to. One sentence per prompt is enough. Three of them is a complete entry. ### Is it better to journal in the morning or at night? No study we cite has compared the two, so treat any confident answer as a preference rather than a finding. The practical argument for mornings is that the slot is more reliable — nothing has gone wrong yet, and nobody has messaged you. The argument for nights is that the day is available in full. The one you will actually do is the better one. ### How long should a morning entry take? About thirty seconds to two minutes. If it starts taking ten, the entries get better and the habit gets worse, which is the wrong trade in the first month. Length is something to add later, once writing the entry in the morning has stopped requiring a decision. ### What do I write when yesterday was completely unremarkable? That is what the narrower prompts are for. An unremarkable day still contained a temperature, a meal, a message and a functioning boiler. The point is not to argue that the day was good; it is to write down something true that would otherwise be gone by Thursday.