How to Create a Gratitude Junk Journal

Trying to find happiness through materialism is common, but it doesn't work. Instead, we should focus on the things we are grateful for in life instead of amassing more things.

What you need:

• Paper trash (paper bags, envelopes, spare paper of any sort)
• Cardboard trash (box, juice or milk carton, other packaging)
• Scissors, carpet knife, or rotary cutter
• hole punch
• Thick thread or yarn

Step 1: Collect the junk

Go and find the paper trash you have lying around the house. The paper should be good enough to draw or write on but doesn't need to be white, or flat. I collected some food delivery bags, and a pile of the envelopes that bills come in (turning bills into art is another silver lining of this exercise).

Also, find a piece of cardboard you can use for the front and back covers. I used an empty orange juice carton.

Step 2: Cut the pages

I used a small A6 notebook as a template to cut my trash into pages. A6 is a good format - it's big enough to draw in and small enough to get many pages out of your trash.

If you don't have any suitable template, you can cut out the cardboard first, then put it on top of the paper to cut around it.

Step 3: Punch holes in your pages

Normally, I would tell you exactly what to do here, but much to my surprise I found out when I moved to Sweden, that hole punches are not universally normed. So your hole punch might look very different than mine.

The Swedish one I have made two holes toward the top of the page, and two holes toward the bottom. Depending on what you have, you can also do three or four evenly spaced holes along the side. Basically, we want 3-5 holes on the side of every page that we can use to sew our journal together.

Step 4: Sew your journal together

Find some yarn, thick thread, or similar, and thread it through the holes to sew your journal together. Here is a super simple way (for first graders) that you can use to start. I used embroidery thread and did a combination of this stitch and a cross stitch across the spine.

You want to make sure that you don't bind it too tightly, otherwise, it'll constantly pop open on one side, and it'll be hard to turn the pages around.

Since my paper was very wrinkled, the pages stood apart quite a lot. So I also attached some thread to the other side, so I could tie it shut.

Here's the finished product:

Step 5: Gratitude

Now your brand new journal is ready, fill the first page with something you are grateful for today. Friends, family, a nice meal, beautiful weather, a good book? Anything that brought you joy today. You can write, draw, or collage. It only needs to make sense to you.

If you can, take a moment each evening and journal in your own style about three things that went well that day.

What the Science Says:

Emmons, R. A., & Shelton, C. M. (2002). Gratitude and the science of positive psychology. Handbook of positive psychology, 18, 459-471.

Kasser, T., Rosenblum, K.L., Sameroff, A.J. et al. Changes in materialism, changes in psychological well-being: Evidence from three longitudinal studies and an intervention experiment. Motiv Emot 38, 1–22 (2014).