Some practices that improve wellbeing require months of effort. One of the most effective requires a pen, some paper and an afternoon.
The gratitude letter is a letter written to someone who did something important for you and whom you never properly thanked. It has been studied by psychologists for two decades, and its results are consistently strong. This article looks at what the research shows, why the letter works, and how to write one this week.
The gratitude visit
In 2005, Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson published a study in American Psychologist comparing five positive psychology exercises with a placebo exercise. Participants were recruited online and asked to complete one exercise over a week.
One exercise was called the gratitude visit. Participants wrote a letter of gratitude to someone who had been especially kind to them but whom they had never properly thanked, then delivered it in person and read it aloud.
The gratitude visit produced the largest immediate increase in happiness and the largest decrease in depressive symptoms of all the exercises. Those benefits remained one month later, though they faded by three months. Other exercises, such as writing down three good things each day, produced effects that took longer to appear but lasted longer. The lesson I draw is that the letter gives a strong start, and lasting change depends on building gratitude into ordinary habits.
Why we underestimate the letter
Many people who hear about gratitude letters assume they would feel awkward to write and strange to receive. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley tested this assumption in 2018. Participants wrote letters of gratitude and predicted how their recipients would feel. Recipients then reported how they actually felt.
Across several experiments, writers underestimated how surprised and how happy recipients would be, and overestimated how awkward recipients would feel. Kumar and Epley argue that this mistaken expectation is one of the main reasons people do not express gratitude more often. We imagine an uncomfortable moment. The other person experiences something closer to a gift.
What the letter does to the writer
In 2016, Prathik Kini and colleagues at Indiana University worked with adults who were receiving counselling for anxiety or depression. Some were asked to write gratitude letters as part of their treatment. Three months later, participants completed a task in a brain scanner where they could pass money on to others and express gratitude for gifts received.
Those who had written gratitude letters showed greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex during the task, an area associated with gratitude and social understanding. The researchers suggested that practising gratitude may train the brain to become more sensitive to it over time. The letter is a moment of kindness to someone else and also a form of practice for the writer.
Choosing who to write to
The hardest part of the exercise is often choosing the person. These questions can help:
Who believed in you before you had evidence to support their belief?
Who gave you an opportunity you might not have been offered elsewhere?
Who stood with you during a difficult season, perhaps without being asked?
Who taught you something you still use every week?
For many people in Nigeria, the answer is a teacher, an aunt or uncle, or a church or mosque leader who stepped in at a decisive moment. For many in the United Kingdom, it is a teacher, a first manager or a family friend. The setting differs. The debt feels much the same.
A simple structure
A gratitude letter does not need to be long. Three hundred words is plenty. A simple structure works well:
What they did. Describe the specific action or season, with enough detail that they can picture it. “In my second year at the firm, when I lost the Shell account and thought I would be let go, you invited me for lunch and told me one mistake would not define me.”
What it made possible. Explain the effect. “I stayed. I learnt from that loss, and two years later I led the team that won the account back.”
Where you are now. Tell them how their influence continues. “I now manage eleven people, and when one of them makes a serious mistake, I take them to lunch.”
Close with a plain thank you. There is no need for flourish.
Delivering it
Seligman’s participants read their letters aloud, in person. That is ideal but not always possible. A video call works well. So does reading it over the phone. If neither is possible, posting a printed letter still carries weight, because it can be kept and reread.
If the person has died, the letter can still be written. Some people read it at a graveside or share it with the person’s family, who often have little idea how far their loved one’s kindness reached.
A practice worth repeating
One letter will not change your life. A letter written each season to a different person, though, can change the way you see your own story. It reminds you how many people contributed to it.
My free appreciation letter guide, available at www.deleagbogun.com, includes these prompts, the structure above and a full example letter. Choose your person this week, and give yourself fifteen minutes to begin.