Three good things

This is the practice with the most evidence behind it, and it is almost embarrassingly simple. That simplicity is worth respecting, because simple is exactly where people quietly do it wrong, get nothing, and conclude it doesn't work.

The practice

Each evening, write down three things that went well today, and for each one, a line about why it happened. That is the entire practice. In the original study, people who did it for one week were measurably happier, and less depressed, and the effect was still there six months later, long after most of them had stopped writing anything down. No exercise in positive psychology has been replicated more often.

Why does something so small do so much? Because it counters the teflon directly. Once a day the joy detector goes on duty, gets aimed at the day you actually had, and banks three things before they slide off.

Doing it properly

Three details separate a practice that works from a rote list that fizzles:

• Be specific. Not "my family." Instead: "my daughter reached for my hand crossing the road without looking up." Specific memories carry the feeling; categories just file it.
• Ask why it happened. The why is doing quiet, important work. "The walk was lovely" is a pleasant note, while "the walk was lovely because I finally left my phone at home" has found a lever you can pull again. Naming the cause turns a nice moment into evidence that your life contains sources of good, not just one-off luck.
• Include your role in it. Sometimes the cause is the world, sometimes other people, and sometimes it is you. Noticing your own hand in a good thing is not about taking credit; it is a correction, because stressed and low minds reliably under-credit themselves for the good and over-blame themselves for the bad.

Then each entry gets the ten-second hold from last session. Stay with it long enough to feel it land. Three things, three causes, three holds, about a minute in all.

What counts

Everything counts. The three do not have to be big, or impressive, or worthy of a greeting card. Someone in one of these programs once logged, as an entire entry, "I got the parking spot," and said later it was the item that taught them the size never mattered. The noticing is what matters, and tiny-but-specific usually beats big-but-vague.

On genuinely rotten days

A rotten day is not a demand to paper anything over. The bad stays bad. Three good things can sit alongside one very bad thing, and "today was hard AND the dog was thrilled to see me" is a truer sentence than either half alone. Even "I got through it" counts. You are only making sure the bad is not the sole thing that got recorded.