I have a bad habit with journals: I buy the handsome one, write in it for three nights, then let it become a very expensive coaster. The problem is not the paper. It is that I keep imagining reflection has to be relentlessly upbeat.

Gratitude journaling gets marketed that way. List three good things. Smile at the small stuff. Please do not mention the overdue bill or the ache in your chest. The Psalms, thankfully, are less tidy. They give us another kind of spiritual notebook: lament.

At first, gratitude and lament look like opposites. One names what is good. The other names what hurts. But both are practices of attention. Both slow the blur of a day and ask us to tell the truth about what we find there.

The research on gratitude is encouraging, with an important asterisk. A 2025 meta-analysis of 145 papers, 163 samples, and 24,804 participants found a small overall improvement in well-being from gratitude interventions such as journals and gratitude letters. Small is not nothing. It is also not magic. The effect varied by country and by study design, which is a useful reminder that a journal is a tool, not a vending machine for happiness. Read the meta-analysis if you enjoy the sort of footnote that wears sensible shoes.

Now open a lament. In Bible Odyssey’s overview, the pattern is wonderfully direct: address God, describe the trouble, ask for help, remember trust, and leave room for thanksgiving. Psalm 13 does not begin with “I am grateful for this learning opportunity.” It begins, “How long?” That is not a failure of faith. It is a relationship honest enough to complain.

A Yale Bible Study guide calls complaint or lament the most common type of psalm, in both individual and communal forms. The psalm gives suffering a shape that can be carried by more than one person. It does not solve the crisis on contact. It makes the crisis speakable.

That may be the shared spiritual work. Gratitude asks, “What gift was here?” Lament asks, “What wound is here?” Both resist the lazy story that our inner life is either fine or ruined. Both turn scattered feeling into a truthful practice. Both can move us from private fog toward relationship: with God, with another person, or simply with the self we keep avoiding.

So tonight, try a three-line examen: one gift, one grief, one next faithful step. Do not sand down the grief to make the page look nicer. Do not let the grief erase the gift, either. What happened? You noticed the whole day. What did it mean? Your attention became a form of care. What can you carry forward? Perhaps just enough honesty for tomorrow’s page.