Express Appreciation 💌

Express Appreciation means thanking a specific person, in a specific way: a short message, a text, or a handwritten note that names what they did and why it mattered to you. It is the interpersonal side of gratitude practice — instead of listing what you are grateful for privately, you deliver it to the person involved.

Start small. Once a day or a few times a week, pick one person and send one or two sentences: what they did, and the effect it had on you. It can be a colleague, a friend, a family member, or someone from your past. The evidence suggests the expressing step matters: in one study, only students who actually delivered their gratitude letter, not those who only wrote it, improved (Christanto et al., 2017).

Studies suggest this habit can lift your mood. In two experiments comparing seven gratitude exercises, interpersonal ones like gratitude texts and letters increased positive emotion and reduced negative emotion (Dang et al., 2025). Among health care workers, even a single gratitude letter-writing exercise was followed by improvements in emotional exhaustion, happiness, and work-life balance a week later (Adair et al., 2020).

The evidence is not uniform. Five days of gratitude letter writing did not significantly raise well-being in high school students, though a positive trend appeared (Bakar et al., 2025), and effects on life satisfaction are less consistent than effects on momentary emotion (Dang et al., 2025).

One more nuance: for people with higher depression or lower natural gratitude, expressing thanks can feel uncomfortable at first, and that discomfort predicts dropping the practice (Enko et al., 2020). If it feels awkward, begin with very short, low-stakes messages and build from there.