The Denver Stationery Society launched in April in 2024 to support deep, meaningful relationships with sweet correspondence. April is National Letter Writing Month to promote the art of card and letter writing. A good time to launch Denver Stationery Society! Created for those who find the health benefits of slowing down, reflecting, and expressing thoughtful and sincere feelings through personalized handwritten messages intriguing. Our first Meetup was a nice discussion around why we started this group and feedback. We were fortunate to have in attendance Sara, the organizer of Colorado Correspondence Coalition!

In our second Meetup, we discussed gratitude until breaking out into letter writing mode.  

Read about past topics.

Can Saying Thank You Once A Day Change Your Life? “I’ll have an americano, thanks.” “I’m doing well, thanks.” We use thank you as a sign off on business emails and we whisper it to ourselves when someone lets us merge onto the exit ramp. Thanking one another is built into much of our society’s expectations of daily exchanges. But often this gratitude is an auto-pilot response — does the hackneyed nicety actually mean anything anymore?

Saying thank you once a day can change your life. Expressing what we are thankful for is more important than ever before.

Here are a few reasons to consider making gratitude a sweet addition to your life.

Writing down what you are grateful for makes you more optimistic, one Harvard research paper reports. It only makes sense that you’d feel brighter and more cheerful when you’re focusing on the positives. We’ve personally found that expressing gratitude is a delight that makes you (quite literally) happy to be here. The paper goes on to suggest: “Make a habit of sending at least one gratitude letter a month. Once in a while, write one to yourself.”

The same Harvard Health post documented that gratitude has physical health benefits, too. Researchers reported they were surprised to find participants who expressed gratitude daily also “exercised more and had fewer visits to physicians than those who focused on sources of aggravation.” In addition, another study found that “when participants felt appreciation, an emotion related to gratitude, their heart rate variability, an indicator of good heart health, improved.”

Besides improved physical health, a grateful individual sleeps better at night, too. Studies find that those who write down what they are thankful for sleep longer and are more refreshed than those who do not. If you’re tossing and turning through the night, consider making a mug of chamomile tea and jotting down one thing that made you smile during the day.

You attract the energy you want is something you may expect to hear in a yoga or meditation class. Once again, the yogis are onto something! A Berkley study found that saying thank you has a ripple effect - a witness to an exchange of gratitude between two strangers also reports improved mental and physical health.