Not a lot of people know this about me, but I once took an eight-week class about how to cope with chronic pain. The class was run by a hospital, and everything they taught was based in science. I was attending because I had hit my head, and it had led to a slew of health problems, a lot of which entailed chronic pain. That class ended up not only reducing my pain, but also left me feeling happier and more peaceful in general.

One of the tools I learned in the class was intended to decrease stress, anxiety, and depression, and it was the simplest, most elegant nightly activity that I’d never heard of before. So, I thought I’d share it with you. If you have five minutes to spare each night, you can totally do this in bed on your phone (I know, I know, we’re not supposed to be on our phones before bed, but do what you gotta do), or write it in a notebook if you prefer.

Here’s the exercise. Feel free to write down the answers to these wherever it’s convenient for you, and do your best to do this every night, even when you’re sleepy or short on time.

What was the best part of your day? What are at least three values of yours that this best part of your day entailed? For instance, if the best part of my day was going to a new event with my friend, some values of mine that that entails are: courage, openness, and connection.
What was the worst part of your day? What are at least three values of yours that this worst part of your day entailed? Let’s say the worst part of my day was that I got a headache. Some values of mine that might be relevant are: radical acceptance, self-compassion, and resilience.
What was an ordinary part of your day? What are at least three values of yours that this ordinary part of your day entailed? I might say that an ordinary part of my day was eating lunch. Three values of mine that might be relevant are: self-care, mindfulness, and paying attention to my body.

As you may have noticed, whatever you count as a “value” is totally up to you. The point of this whole exercise is to help make meaning and positively reframe the big things that happen to you within the course of a day.

Now, that doesn’t mean ignoring or candy-coating anything negative that happens. This was a big sticking point for me when I first started doing this— I was concerned that reframing the difficult things that happened to me would somehow lead me to ignore the difficult things in my life.

But what I’ve found instead is that doing this every night gives me a lot more bandwidth to actually acknowledge the difficult stuff, and this exercise has given me such a more helpful perspective on how those negative things fit into my life. Even on the day I got my lifelong diagnosis of chronic pain, I was able to see that within that experience was also friendship, resilience, commitment to self-love, and hope.

Since humans have a tendency to focus on negative things (if you’re interested in the science behind that, you may want to give “negativity bias” a quick Google), I’ve found that reframing the negative, as well as celebrating the positive and the neutral, actually gives me a much more realistic perspective of my day-to-day experiences.

The class I attended also recommend writing down 3-5 things you’re grateful for that day. If you live with a partner or child, I think it’s a sweet alternative to tell each other 3-5 things you’re grateful for in each other. Either way, focusing on gratitude, too, has lots of studies behind it showing that it reduces depression and anxiety (feel free to give it a quick Google Scholar search if you’re curious to learn more about that).

Either way, I recommend giving this a shot for a couple weeks, and then seeing how you feel. I was blown away by just how much a difference such a short investment in time could make. If you’re intrigued, I hope you give it a try for at least a few weeks and see how you feel!

5 minutes a night to get you happier and less stressed