Gratitude journaling for burnout
Three Good Things turns up often in burnout programs, especially in hospitals. Here is why, and what to expect from it.
Why this exercise, in these jobs
Burnout programs have a practical problem: the people who need them have the least time and the least patience for another initiative. Anything that takes a workshop, a login, or a weekly meeting tends to die quietly.
Three Good Things survives that constraint. It takes a minute or two at the end of a shift, requires no training to explain, and can be done alone.
What the study found
In 2019, J. Bryan Sexton and Kathryn C. Adair at the Duke Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality published a pilot study of the exercise with healthcare workers. Participants recorded three good things each day for fifteen days.
The study reported improvements in emotional exhaustion, depressive symptoms, work-life balance, and happiness. It was a pilot rather than a large randomized trial, and the authors are explicit about that limitation.
Sexton & Adair (2019). Forty-five good things. BMJ Open, 9:e022695.
Running it with a team
- Keep the ask to the exercise itself. Three short entries, once a day.
- Let people choose their own reminder time. Shift schedules vary.
- Do not ask anyone to share entries. The exercise works in private.
- Do not track participation individually. It turns a habit into a performance review.
- Give it more than a week. The original studies ran one to two weeks and looked for effects later.
An honest caveat
A journaling habit does not fix understaffing, unsafe workloads, or a bad manager. It is worth being straight about that with a team, because offering a wellbeing app in place of a structural fix is a good way to make people cynical about both.
Used alongside real changes, it is a small thing that some people find genuinely steadying.
Using the app for a program
Three Good Things is free, requires no account, and keeps entries only on the person's own device or in their own private iCloud, which means there is usually nothing to review before recommending it. There is more detail on the page for teams, schools, and clinicians.
Keep reading
Keep your good things close.
Write three good things each day, and look back on what went well.
