Become aware of God’s presence and give thanks

Open the review by pausing, settling, and naming specific gifts from the day.

Why it works

Deliberate gratitude review shifts the attentional frame of the whole reflection from threat-scanning to appreciation, which lowers the defensive arousal that would otherwise make honest self-examination feel dangerous. Naming specific rather than generic gifts also counters the negativity bias that allows positive events to pass unregistered, building an accurate rather than threat-skewed ledger of the day.

How to do it

1. Find a few minutes of quiet and let yourself arrive — release the momentum of the day with a slow breath.
2. Call to mind two or three specific good things from today, including small ones.
3. Sit with genuine appreciation before moving to the review — not as a formula but as an actual felt state.
4. If you practice within a devotional frame, direct the gratitude explicitly; if not, the felt quality of gratitude is the active ingredient.

Evidence

Gratitude practices reliably improve positive affect and well-being across multiple meta-analyses. Opening with gratitude before honest review is mechanistically sound: it reduces threat arousal before self-examination. The Ignatian framing of this step is a devotional practice rather than a trialed protocol. (mechanistic)

The gratitude evidence supports the mechanism broadly; applying it as the opening of the Examen specifically is tradition and practitioner report rather than direct study.

Sources

• Emmons & McCullough (2003), Counting blessings versus burdens, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Common mistake

Treating the gratitude step as a brief formality before the "real" review. Rushing past it means the self-examination happens from a threat-detection stance rather than security, making honesty harder.