Counting Blessings After You Write Down the Self You Fear Becoming

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise is a writing session, usually twenty quiet minutes with a notebook. You write out, in present tense and in physical detail, a version of yourself some years from now that you hope to become — where you wake up, what you are doing at ten on a Wednesday morning, who is in the room, what you no longer do. Then you write a second portrait in the same amount of detail: the version of yourself you are afraid of becoming. Neither is a prediction and neither is an affirmation. They are there so that a want and a dread you have been carrying around in a blurry, half-articulated form get specific enough that you can look straight at them, hold them next to where you actually are today, and see which of this week's habits belongs to which picture. The psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius gave these images the name possible selves in 1986 — the selves you could become, would like to become, and are afraid of becoming — and the exercise is nothing more elaborate than getting them out of your head and onto paper where they hold still.

Counting Blessings

Counting Blessings is simpler to describe and it is the better studied of the two. On a set schedule — classically once a week, though plenty of people do it at night before bed — you write down a short list of specific things in your life you are grateful for. Specific is the entire discipline. Not "my family," but "my brother sent me a photo of his kid on Tuesday and I actually laughed out loud in the car." Not "my health," but "my knee did not hurt on the stairs this morning for the first time in a month." The practice was formalised by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough in 2003: one group listed blessings weekly, a second listed hassles, a third listed neutral events, and the blessings group reported better mood and, oddly, a bit more exercise over the following ten weeks. Nothing about anyone's circumstances changed. What changed was which parts of the week they had actually looked at, and how long they had looked.

What you get out of pairing them

Doing the Possible Selves Exercise gets you something a general wish for a better life cannot give you: a picture concrete enough that today's ordinary decisions start sorting themselves against it. A vague intention to be healthier does not tell you anything about the phone call you are avoiding this afternoon. A written portrait of yourself at sixty, still hiking, still with the friends you have now, does — because you can hold the afternoon next to it and see which direction the afternoon points. That is the door: your future stops being a mood you occasionally have and becomes something you can compare things to.

Counting Blessings gets you something different and, on a hard week, more urgent. It gives you a reliable way to correct a reading of your own life that has quietly drifted. Most people, most weeks, run an internal tally that is heavily weighted toward what went wrong, not because they are pessimists but because unfinished and unpleasant things stay noisy while finished and pleasant ones go silent. Writing down four specific good things does not argue with the tally. It just adds the entries that were already true and were never being counted.

Put the two in the same notebook and each covers the other's known weak spot. The future-self writing gives the gratitude list a direction so it does not become a way of settling. The gratitude list gives the future-self writing a floor so the distance you just measured does not become the only thing in the room.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Counting Blessings rests on

• Attention shapes affect plausible mechanism
  Deliberately directing attention toward positive events changes emotional experience even when circumstances stay the same.
• Gratitude practice boosts wellbeing randomised trials
  Regularly recording things one is grateful for increases subjective wellbeing and positive affect over time.
• Positive attentional bias can be trained observational studies
  Repeated practice of noticing positive events trains an attentional bias toward noticing the positive by default.

Where they actually meet

Both practices rest on the same underlying finding — that deliberately directing attention changes what a person feels, not just what they notice (Counting Blessings names this directly: pointing attention at specific good events shifts how you feel even when nothing about your circumstances has moved; the Possible Selves Exercise leans on the same mechanism when it holds that noticing the distance between who you are and who you hope or fear to become is itself what makes you move, just aimed at the future instead of the present). The difference is direction: possible-selves work opens a gap and holds attention there to generate motivational tension, while counting blessings closes attention onto present, already-realized good and holds it there to generate wellbeing. Held together, what starts as a raw feeling — general dissatisfaction, or general contentment — becomes something more specific and choosable: a felt gap you can act on without it curdling into despair, or a present good you can appreciate without it dulling into complacency about the gap that's still there.

The principle underneath both

How your life feels to you at any given moment is only loosely tied to what is actually in it, and tightly tied to which parts of it you happened to be looking at, and for how long. Nobody looks at their whole life. You look at a slice, and the slice supplies the feeling, and the feeling then arrives disguised as a verdict on the whole thing.

Both of these practices are ways of choosing the slice on purpose instead of letting the week choose it for you — and both do the choosing in writing, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Thought about in your head, a hoped-for future stays a pleasant fog and a good week stays an untallied impression; neither of them holds still long enough for you to examine it or disagree with it. Written down in specifics, each becomes an object on a page. What was a mood you were inside of turns into something sitting in front of you that you can read back, argue with, and put next to something else.

So the shared move is not gratitude and it is not vision. It is this: take a feeling that was running the day from behind your eyes, aim attention at the concrete material it is actually made of, write that material down, and let the feeling become something you are looking at rather than something you are in.

What that makes the real goal

If aiming attention on purpose is what does the work, then the goal here is not gratitude and it is not ambition. It is a two-sided, accurate read on your own life — being able to hold, at the same time, an honest account of what is missing and an honest account of what is already here, with neither one deleting the other.

That goal belongs to no tradition. It is worth stating on its own because both practices, run alone and for long enough, tend to erode it from one side. Months of future-self writing with nothing counterweighting it can leave a person permanently measuring themselves against someone they have not become. Months of gratitude lists with nothing pointing anywhere can leave a person warmly reconciled to a life they would have changed if they had let themselves look at the gap. Each is a partial read presented as a complete one.

Stated plainly, what you are after is this: at the end of a week you can say what is genuinely not right and what is genuinely fine, in specifics, without one of those sentences being the only one you are able to make.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Several other practices go at that same two-sided read from other angles, and some of them carry evidence neither of these two lineages can claim on its own.

The Best Possible Self writing exercise — twenty minutes describing a future in which everything has gone as well as it reasonably could, and you have worked to make it happen — has been tested in randomized trials and reliably lifts mood in the short term. It is essentially the hoped-for half of possible-selves work with the feared half removed, which makes it the gentler option when the feared self is the part that has been going wrong for you.

Savoring, the deliberate practice of slowing down inside a good moment while it is still happening — stopping mid-meal to notice that the meal is good, rather than logging it that night — aims at the same present-side accuracy as a blessings list but in real time. Fred Bryant's research on it is largely observational and questionnaire-based, so the evidence is thinner than gratitude journaling's, but it does not require a notebook, which for some people is the difference between doing it and not.

The gratitude letter, where you write in detail to someone who helped you and, in the strongest version, read it to them out loud, showed the largest and most durable mood effect of the five exercises tested in Martin Seligman's 2005 randomized study — larger than the daily good-things list. It is a one-off rather than a habit, which is exactly what makes it worth keeping in reserve for the weeks when the routine list has gone hollow.

And the plain, unfashionable move of writing down what specifically is not working — a hassles list, the third arm of the original 2003 gratitude study — is the honest counterpart on the other side. It did not improve mood in that study. That does not make it useless; it makes it a tool for accuracy rather than for feeling better, and there are weeks when accuracy is the thing you actually need.

A tradition that already does this

These two lineages have already been put in the same room, and by the researchers who built them. In a 2006 study, Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky ran the Best Possible Selves writing exercise — the same future-self move, in its hoped-for-only form — and a gratitude exercise as parallel arms of one randomized experiment, and positive psychology has treated the two as siblings ever since, with future-self visualization and gratitude journaling appearing side by side in the same intervention menus for two decades.

Be clear about what that does and does not establish. They were compared, not combined. Nobody in that study did both. What the shared history shows is that the same field, working on the same question of how a person's read on their own life can be shifted, arrived independently at one practice aimed forward and one aimed at the present — which is a reasonable indication that the pairing described on this page is not a novelty someone invented, but it is not evidence that running them together does more than running either.

Using Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Counting Blessings

Counting blessings on its own has a known soft spot: gratitude for what already is can slide into simple contentment with the status quo, with nothing in the practice itself pointing anywhere. The Possible Selves Exercise gives gratitude a direction. When you sit down to list what you're grateful for, include specific evidence that you're moving toward the hoped-for self you wrote out — not just "I'm grateful for my health" but "I'm grateful I made it to three workouts this week, which is who I'm trying to become." The concrete move is anchoring at least one blessing per session to progress toward the hoped-for self, so gratitude reinforces the trajectory instead of just the snapshot.

Using Counting Blessings to enhance Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise works by opening a gap between where you are and where you hope to be, and that gap is supposed to motivate — but for many people, dwelling on the distance, especially alongside the feared self the exercise also asks you to write, tips past motivating into discouraging, and discouragement is a well-documented way this kind of future-focused reflection backfires. Counting blessings is a direct counterweight: after writing the possible-selves picture, close the session by listing three specific things already true and good, right now, unconnected to the gap. The concrete move is pairing every possible-selves session with a blessings list immediately after it, so the exercise ends on present, verified good rather than on the unclosed distance to a self you haven't reached yet.

Writing out who you're afraid of becoming, and closing the notebook

You've just finished the feared-self half of the Possible Selves Exercise — the version of you who let the business fail, stopped calling old friends, let the weight keep climbing — and it's vivid, because that's the point, and now you're sitting with a knot in your stomach instead of motivation. This is where the exercise on its own can misfire. Turn to a blank line underneath and count three blessings instead: the call you had with your sister last week, the fact that you showed up to write this at all, the meal you'll eat in twenty minutes that you don't have to worry about affording. The gap you just wrote is still there and still true, but you're not left alone with it — you've deliberately put something real and present next to it, which is what keeps the feared self a working tool instead of a spiral.

When this is worth reaching for

Three situations fit, each fairly specific.

The first is the session right after you write the feared self. That is the moment the exercise most reliably misfires — you have just spent fifteen minutes making a bad outcome vivid, your body has responded to it as though it were news, and the motivational pull the exercise is supposed to produce arrives as dread instead. A blessings list at the end of that session is not decoration; it is what returns you to the actual present before you close the notebook.

The second is the opposite complaint: a gratitude practice that has gone flat. If you have been listing blessings for eight months and the entries have started repeating, the practice has usually stopped being an act of noticing and become a form to fill in. Attaching one entry per session to evidence of movement toward the future self you wrote — not "I am grateful for my health" but "I am grateful I went on the Thursday walk, which is the thing the other version of me does" — gives the list new material to actually look for during the week.

The third is any stretch where you are attempting a genuinely long change, the kind measured in years rather than weeks — leaving a career, getting sober, rebuilding after a loss. Over that timescale the gap between where you are and the self you are aiming at stays open for a very long time, and a practice that only measures the gap will grind you down before you arrive. Something has to keep counting what is already true while the long thing is still unfinished.

Where this does not apply

Someone using the Possible Selves Exercise purely for planning — mapping concrete steps toward a hoped-for self with no feared-self component and no strong emotional charge — may not need a counterweight at all; adding a blessings list to a purely tactical planning session can dilute focus rather than protect against discouragement that isn't happening. And counting blessings done as a stable, standalone daily habit doesn't need future-self content mixed in every time; making every gratitude entry about a hoped-for trajectory risks turning a practice whose value is partly its lack of an agenda into another to-do list.

What the evidence does and does not support

Concrete future-self imagery and gap-awareness both have observational and mechanistic support for motivating present action; gratitude practice has solid randomized-trial support for improving wellbeing, and the underlying idea that deliberately aiming attention changes what you feel rests on mechanistic evidence in both domains. That pairing the two — using gratitude specifically to offset discouragement from possible-selves work, or using possible-selves content to direct gratitude — improves outcomes over either alone has not been tested; this page describes a plausible interaction between two well-evidenced but separately studied principles, not a finding about the combination.