Gratitude Letter
Choose a recipient, explore gratitude, and write your letter together.
Overview
Gratitude Letter is a guided writing experience where Onsen helps you compose a heartfelt letter of gratitude to someone important in your life. Research shows that expressing gratitude strengthens relationships and boosts personal wellbeing.
- Category: Emotional Wellbeing
- Duration: 5–10 minutes
- Repeatable: Yes — write to different people or revisit the same person
How It Works
Step 1 — Recipient
Your AI guide opens with a warm, personalised introduction that explains what you're about to do and why it matters. Drawing on your recent journal entries, it frames the experience around something relevant to your life before inviting you to think about who deserves your gratitude.
The guide then suggests five possible recipients — people, places, or even things that have had a positive impact on your life. These suggestions are tailored to your journaling history, so they feel grounded rather than generic. You can tap any suggestion to choose it, type your own, or speak it aloud.
Once you've chosen, the guide reflects back what it already knows about that person from your journal — or, if there isn't much context yet, gently asks a follow-up question to deepen your thinking before you move on. You can answer, add more detail, or skip straight ahead.
Step 2 — Gratitude
With your recipient in mind, the guide presents five tailored gratitude categories to explore — things like emotional support, shared memories, specific acts of kindness, or personal growth they helped spark. You pick whichever feels most meaningful and the guide responds with a personalised question about it, along with a few example answers to help you get started. You can type your response, speak it, or skip if a category doesn't resonate.
After you share your thoughts, the guide acknowledges what you've said and offers a fresh perspective on your reflection — it's not just collecting answers, it's helping you see your gratitude more clearly. It then suggests five new categories to explore, so each round covers a different angle. After a full round, the guide pauses to check in: you can continue with more categories to deepen the letter, or move on when you feel you've captured enough. There's no fixed number of rounds — you go at your own pace.
Step 3 — Write Letter
Once you're ready, the guide acknowledges everything you've shared and transitions into the final step. It weaves together all your reflections — your recipient, the categories you explored, and the specific things you wrote — into a complete, heartfelt gratitude letter written in your voice.
The letter appears for you to read through, and you can edit any part of it before saving. When you're happy with it, tap Add to Journal and the letter is saved as a journal entry, ready to revisit anytime.
Tips
- You don't have to send it — research shows that the act of writing a gratitude letter boosts your wellbeing whether you send it or not.
- Be specific — thinking about particular moments or actions ("the time you helped me move") creates a stronger emotional connection than general feelings.
- Write to anyone — a friend, family member, mentor, or even yourself. There is no wrong recipient.
- Take your time in Step 2 — the more categories you explore, the richer and more personal your letter will be. Even one or two extra rounds can make a real difference.