Why gratitude isn't working for you (and what to do instead)

Gratitude practices are everywhere. But consistency is where most of us fall down. Here are two practices that actually work, inspired by Gabby Bernstein.

We need to talk about gratitude.

Not because it doesn't work. It does. The evidence is solid, the practice is sound, and if you have ever genuinely committed to it you will already know the shift it creates.

But here is the thing nobody says out loud.

Knowing something works and actually doing it consistently are two completely different things. And in the world of wellbeing, the gap between those two things is where most of us quietly live.

So this is not another post telling you that gratitude is powerful. You already know that.

This is about what actually happens when you sit down to do it, and two specific practices that cut through the noise and make consistency feel less like discipline and more like relief.

First, a word on journalling.

Everyone has an opinion on what it should look like. The leather bound notebook. The morning pages. The five year diary. The app. And most of those opinions, however well intentioned, come loaded with an unspoken suggestion that if you are not doing it a certain way you are probably doing it wrong.

You are not doing it wrong.

If your version of journalling gets something off your chest, helps you arrive at solutions, sets a tone for your day or simply makes you feel more like yourself, that is enough. It does not need to look like anyone else's practice. It needs to work for you.

With that said, here are the two practices I return to again and again.

Rage on the Page.

Exactly what it sounds like.

A4 lined paper. Pen. And everything that is in your head, out onto the page. No hesitation, no grammar, no spell check, no reading back over it afterwards. Just a fast, unfiltered stream of consciousness until there is nothing left to say.

It does not have to be rageful, though it absolutely can be. What it needs to be is honest. Uncomfortably, un-performatively honest.

The kind of honest you are not always able to be out loud.

It is, in my experience, some of the most powerful work you can do in twenty minutes on a Tuesday morning. Inspired by Gabby Bernstein, and something I have used with clients and in my own practice for years.

Four morning questions (takes one minute)

Who do I want to be today?

How do I want to feel today?

What do I want to give today?

What do I want to receive today?

Simple. Fast. Quietly transformational if you mean them.

These are not questions to perform.

They are questions to drop into from your most grounded, honest self. Ideally after a walk or a moment of stillness, before the day has fully arrived and started making demands of you.

And here is the part I love most. They are just as useful at two in the afternoon when everything has gone sideways and you have completely lost the thread of who you were trying to be that morning.

They bring you back. Gently, without judgment, to your own intentions.

Just a quiet conversation with yourself, every day, about what actually matters to you.

Try one of them for one week. One week. And notice what shifts.

Adrienne Say is a Horsham based Life Coach, yoga teacher and Ayurveda practitioner. She works with women who are outwardly successful and inwardly exhausted. Women who suspect that the life they have built, however impressive it looks from the outside, doesn't feel like it was built for them. adriennesay.com