November 6, 2025 • 30 mins
We’re always told that gratitude is the route to happiness – that we should be grateful for every experience we have. But when life feels like it’s falling apart, gratitude can feel less like a comfort and more like pressure. In reality, gratitude and pain often have to coexist.
In this episode, we ask whether gratitude actually does make us happier - what it really is, how it rewires the brain, and why it sometimes feels impossible.
We explore:
• What makes gratitude so powerful
• The cognitive and neuroscientific mechanisms behind gratitude
• Toxic gratitude when life simply feels hard
• The gratitude paradox
• The guilt associated with not being grateful enough
• Some alternatives for when gratitude feels inaccessible
If you’ve ever struggled with the idea that you ‘should’ be thankful for the hard times in life, this episode is for you.
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Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast
For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Wherever you are in the world, it is so great
to have you here back for another episode as we
of course break down the psychology of our twenties. You
guys might not want me to say this, but like
it or not, we are coming closer to the end
of the year and also the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanuka,
(00:49):
New Year, and famously there is a huge emphasis on
reflecting on the year and showing gratitude for our lives.
So I thought, what better time than now to do
an episode on gratitude, which for some reason I have
never done before. I don't know exactly how I've missed it,
(01:10):
but today is the day. Also, before we get into it,
I want to let you know this episode is actually
also a video episode on YouTube. So if you prefer
watching episodes with video and getting to like see I
don't know, see me speaking to you through a screen,
go and check that out. I'll leave a link in
(01:30):
the description, but let's get into it. Gratitude journals, gratitude challenges,
daily affirmations. You know, I even have a Daily Affirmations
for a weekly Affirmations podcast. It's everywhere. If you've ever
opened Instagram, which I'm assuming you have, you have probably
seen a post at some time, at some point about
manifesting abundance. If you've ever been to therapy, chances are
(01:53):
you have encountered a therapist that is encouraged gratitude. I
know I shall have. It is presented to us as
this most like magical cure, or be grateful and you
will be happy. People talk about gratitude like it is
this like magic pill, this magic way to be a
(02:14):
more happy, well rounded person. In some ways it is,
but that claim can feel a little bit too neat,
a little bit too like one dimensional. Can it really
fix everything? Probably not. Is it always that easy to
tap into? Definitely not. But today we're gonna talk about it,
(02:34):
and we're gonna ask that big question, does gratitude actually
make us happier? And what forms all ways of expressing
gratitude are the most effective. We're gonna look at of course,
the psychology, do I even need to say that? Probably
not the neuroscience, and also importantly the limits of gratitude,
(02:55):
because yes, it is amazing, Yes it does fundamentally change
your brain. There's also a more nuanced side to it.
Toxic gratitude can elicit a lot of guilt and a
pressure to be thankful, and it can actually stop or
halt emotional processing. That needs to be part of the conversation.
So I am excited to dive deep into this topic.
(03:18):
It has been a long time coming. Without further ado,
let's get into the psychology of gratitude. First things. First,
definition of gratitude. We need to kind of get that,
get that ironed out. This is actually, ironically kind of
a hard concept to get a clear definition on. One
(03:42):
of the best ways it's described and that I found
it described was actually in a twenty ten paper written
by researchers in Ohio who actually talked about how gratitude
is both a trait, so for example, some people just
naturally feel more grateful, and it's also an attitude or
an emotion. It's also something that we can elicit for
(04:06):
ourselves and kind of force into occurring. There are even
more definitions about this. Is gratitude also just like a
coping response? Is it a coping mechanism? Is gratitude like
a spiritual experience? Is it just something that like we
have to trip into to find Is it just something
that comes up spontaneously. A lot of people actually have
(04:29):
different thoughts about it. How I like to see it
and how this paper defined it. And gratitude in the
broader sense is an appreciation of what is valuable and
meaningful to oneself. Whether it is a trait, whether it
is forced, it's just an appreciation. To add to this,
Psychologist Robert Edmonds and Michael mcleough, they are like the
(04:54):
leading researchers on gratitude, and I like their definition as well.
They define it as a two step process, which is
recognizing that something good has happened and acknowledging that someone
else or something else beyond you had to play a
role in it. So the first definition is really like
it's just feeling like the world or something is beautiful
(05:15):
and being able to notice it. The second definition that
we're working with is that you're able to attribute it
to something. In other words, it's not just an experience,
it's also a feeling of being connected, but also supported
more broadly, whether it's by your family, whether it's by
the God you believe in, by the universe, by nature.
(05:37):
Whatever it is is an appreciation for that outside force. Psychologically,
gratitude is seen. This is like mental superpower. Why is
that well, firstly because it promotes positive appraisal or positive reappraisal. Essentially,
why that's so powerful is because bad things are always
(05:58):
going to happen. Terrible, annoying things, frustrating things are always
going to occur. You can't change that. You can change
how your brain interprets these experiences. Instead of fixating on
what went wrong, gratitude allows you to retrain your mind
to notice what's still working. You might not know this,
(06:20):
but our brains are actually wired by default to have
a negativity bias, basically to see the worst in things,
to see the worst in people, to see the worst
in circumstances. This has actually been a good thing in
the past. It meant that we were more attuned to threats,
to danger, to the poisonous plants, the big saber toothed tigers.
(06:44):
But it also means that left unchecked, our minds are
naturally quite pessimistic. Gratitude, though, is the counterbalance to this
that allows us to kind of really just zoom out
and see the full picture, not just the negative or
shadowy parts. If we take a look at how this
(07:05):
works cognitively, there's a few processes that are involved here.
I feel like people talk about gratitude all the time,
no one talks about what it's actually doing to your
brain inside the skull of ours. First, gratitude allows us
to direct our attention more conveniently or positively to things
that we actually want to see. You can't appreciate good
(07:27):
things if you don't look for them right and if
you don't direct yourself to notice them. Gratitude builds that skill.
The next is memory encoding. When we focus on positive
experiences and we repeat them through those common exercises of
a gratitude journal or reflection or speaking openly about them,
(07:47):
those memories get encoded more deeply, the same way that
when you study by writing and rehearsing and reflecting on
your knowledge. This is objectively better than just like reading
your note or listening to the lecture. Research that was
published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that so
(08:07):
called grateful memories actually showed less fading over time even
compared to other positive memories. This has actually seen a
lot in dementia patients who can remember really beautiful memories
with their family when they were kids, when they were younger.
They're encoded almost in a separate way to other kinds
(08:28):
of memories, mainly because they are appraised as valuable. Because
they are so significant and they carry meaning, our brain
kind of locks them in like this sneaky safe that
it has at the back, meaning that when everything else
starts to fade and decay, they remain. There's also an
(08:49):
aspect of emotional regulation going on here. Gratitude activates the
prefrontal cortext. This is the part of the brain that
is responsible for emotional regulation. If you're going through a
really tough time and you're stressed and you're frustrated, what
gratitude actually does is allow this part of your brain
to I guess, work better by having a more rational
(09:13):
perspective and truthworth perspective on your circumstances. It allows you
to hold two truths at the same time. This moment
is hard, but it's not always going to be hard.
There is more than this that is an incredible ability
to have. Also, we have to talk about this from
a more social, less individualized standpoint. Gratitude has been proven
(09:39):
to increase pro social behavior and when practiced on an
individual level, to actually make a community and a society better. Kindness, empathy, generosity,
they all increase. When people have a higher level of
personal gratitude, we are more likely to act in favorable
ways to others and to be acting positively and strengthening
(10:02):
relationships when we feel like there is good in the
world and that other people possess good as well. So
gratitude is like incredible for society as well. It's like
something that really does like mend and heal fractured systems.
So what does this actually do to the brain, Like
neurologically that was like cognitively, what's happening like to our neurons,
(10:25):
to our synapses to yeah, to this big organ Well
I can tell you using this twenty fifteen fMRI study
from these people at Indiana University. So in this study,
they basically asked participants to write down letters of gratitude
to people in their lives. They didn't have to send
the letters, they just had to write the letters. That
(10:46):
was enough to a grandmother, to an aunt, to an uncle,
or a brother, whoever. It was three months later when
those same participants were scanned in the fMRI machines, their
brains showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex that's
the region involved in emotional regulation, in learning and decision making.
(11:08):
Like there was physical changes to how their brain was operating.
The researchers concluded that gratitude is it has a long
lasting neural footprint, and they saw that footprint, I guess
in trench deeper when people did this over and over
and over again. Essentially, this practice changed the brain's baseline
(11:31):
response to both positive and negative experiences. There was also
a further twenty fifteen study published in Frontiers in Psychology,
also using fMRI scanners, which basically induced gratitude and participants
and then scanned their brain at the time. Instead of
just giving these people like random gratitude prompts, instead of
(11:53):
asking them just to write letters of gratitude, they told
them stories that were really precious and beautiful. These stories
actually came from real Holocaust survivors who'd been helped by
strangers during the war, people who had risked their own
lives to offer food, to offer shelter, to offer protection,
and the participants were asked to imagine themselves as this
(12:15):
person being helped and being rescued, to picture that moment,
to feel what it would have been like to receive
that kind of of help when you were just like
so desperate. And as they did that, the scans showed
significant activation in a couple of areas, the ventral striatum
(12:36):
and the nucleus accumbents, both key parts of the brain's
reward system. Long names, all you need to know is
that these are the areas that are most active when
we experience pleasure, love, or deep connection, and that activity
increased even after the story was over. What's so beautiful
(12:57):
about this study is that it's that gratitude isn't just
like something that's nice. It's not just surface level. It's
like viscerally rewarding, like the reward is something that we
can literally see. And what's even more interesting was that
they didn't even have to perform gratitude themselves to have
(13:19):
this feeling. No one in this study actually received anything
like it was entirely empathetic. Just imagining the kind of
generosity was like enough to trigger the brain's reward circuits.
When people say gratitude changes your brain, this is what
they're talking about. This is what they are referring to.
(13:41):
There is hard science behind why it's recommended. But and
this is equally an important thing to remember only under
the right conditions. Gratitude isn't something that we can actually
always access, and it might not actually always be helpful.
(14:03):
Sometimes it can backfire. Sometimes it can leave us feeling
worse than before. And that's like a part of the
conversation that I don't think people really want to have
all the time, but we are going to have it today.
How could gratitude possibly be bad for us? We're going
to answer that question after this shortbreak. So here's where
(14:27):
it gets a little bit tricky. Gratitude when it's real
and when it's self motivated, is really fantastic. When it
bubbles up naturally, it's even more fantastic. You know, we
will have those moments where we're just like, Wow, I'm
so lucky to be here, this is such a beautiful day.
You go searching for that feeling, you feel incredible, you
(14:49):
feel like like there's a lightness to you. The moment
that gratitude becomes something we're told to feel or something
that we owe because of our circum stances, it shifts
from being an emotion to being a performance, and it
stops being a resource that helps us and starts essentially
becoming a tool for emotional suppression. This is where we
(15:12):
veer into what we call toxic gratitude. This is an
offshoot of toxic positivity. This is when we start to
use it to bypass uncomfortable emotions, and what ends up
happening is that we actually don't honor them, and we
don't actually process why they happen in the first place
and why that just has like deeply impacted us. You
(15:37):
might have heard this yourself. You definitely have. It's very
silent sometimes, like the use of gratitude to kind of
silence emotions that people don't want to look at is
sometimes invisible. But it sounds like, oh, could have been worse.
It sounds like, at least I have a roof over
(15:59):
my head. It sounds like, you know, there's someone out
there who has it harder than me, so I'm just
gonna shut up about it. And the thing is those
statements are totally true. Yeah, someone does have it worse
than you, Like people do have it harder than you.
Having that kind of awareness and perspective is important. It
also doesn't undercut the fact that if something is painful
(16:22):
and sucky for you, it's still painful and sucky for you.
Like how I like to I always say this to
my friends, and I always say this to myself. Someone
with a broken arm, it's still gonna like their arm
still hurts, whether or not someone else has a broken spine,
Like it's entirely separate. They are still feeling all that
(16:43):
pain and themselves like someone else's suffering, doesn't like undercut it.
There's not only a certain amount of suffering that can
go around. We cannot have this idea that if your
suffering isn't the absolute worst kind, you do not deserve
to feel it. And sometimes the use of gratitude as
(17:05):
a solution to these feelings is a way that we
actually make people believe that. This is podcast that I
love called Live Happy Now. Big fan, big fan of
that podcast, And I was listening to an episode that
they did with Whitney Goodman talking about the impact of
toxic positivity, and what she said was that toxic positivity
(17:25):
denies an emotion, It denies a feeling, which is actually
just as bad as what that feeling might be listening
in the first place. When we use toxic positivity, we're
basically telling ourselves like, this emotion shouldn't exist, it's wrong.
And so not only are we feeling the feeling, we're
also feeling shame about the feeling. And it's obviously impossible
(17:49):
to ignore it anyways, because we know it does exist.
Otherwise we wouldn't be feeling it right now, and so
the whole situation becomes a lot more confusing. Refusing in
a motion or not feeling it doesn't make you more healed,
because it actually means that the battle between you and
that emotion is probably more of a vicious daily thing
(18:13):
than if you processed it appropriately in the first place.
If you actually let yourself just not be grateful for
a little while, if you just let yourself be like,
this just really really sucks, and I don't want to
be grateful for my situation. I don't want to be
grateful for what else I have. I don't necessarily want
(18:33):
to be resilient right now. I don't want to be
the bigger person. I just want to have some self
pity that's actually and you may not think that I
would say this honestly totally fine. Gratitude just sometimes doesn't
feel accessible to you, and trying to force it to
(18:54):
be actually creates this really weird paradox where the more
when you try, the harder and more elusive it becomes.
Gratitude requires a certain baseline level of safety. It requires
the belief that even subconsciously, you know you're okay to relax,
like you're okay to take in what's around you. When
(19:17):
your nervous system is dysregulated, when it's stuck in fight, flight, freeze,
or fawn, your brain is all focused on living through
and getting through this experience. So it's not going to
be scanning your surroundings for beauty or blessings. It's scanning
for threats and threats only. It is not a choice
in that moment to be ungrateful. It is actually just
(19:38):
plain inaccessible. When we don't feel safe, the part of
us that connects us, that feels joy, that expresses appreciation,
it just goes offline. Because from an evolutionary perspective, again,
it's not immediately necessary for how survival. The body can't
access gratitude if it does, don't believe the world is
(20:01):
safe enough to let its guard down, and yet that's
often when again people double down. I saw another article
from the psychologist Susan David where she talks about this
cultural obsession with like good vibes and how that actually
creates more emotional fragility. When we're not allowed to name pain,
we can't process it, and unprocessed pain doesn't magically vanish
(20:24):
the same way that energy doesn't magically vanish. It just
hides behind all the gratitude bandages until like that defense
mechanism doesn't work anymore. And look, I'm not saying that
gratitude is bad. It's just that, like it can't be
forced from a place of fear or from a place
(20:44):
of shame. It can't be forced from a place of
I should of shouldz. Maybe that's the best way to
say it. Sometimes, like the kindest thing you can do
to yourself is and do for yourself is just be like, yeah,
it's just really sucks. So I want to talk about
some alternatives. I feel like I've been blabbing on about
(21:04):
that for a while. When gratitude is inaccessible, what else
is there? Because we do actually need some kind of
thing to hold on to what might that be if
gratitude feels too heavy. One of these recommendations that I
heard from someone was to just look for niceness instead.
(21:26):
Looking for something nice feels a lot more neutral, feels
way less intimidating than being like, you have to find
something that you are grateful for one absolutely, just look
for one small thing each day that's like you just
think is cool, or you just think is beautiful. You're
not necessarily grateful for it, but you know, it was
(21:48):
really nice that the pavement smelt really beautiful after it
rained today. It was really nice that, like you saw
that childholding that flower on the bus. I'm not necessarily
grateful for it, but it was enjoyable. It was nice
to see that. When we lessen the pressure to feel
this like huge expansive feeling and this expansive like impact
(22:15):
of some outside force on our lives, we can start
to just welcome in a few more moments of just
like joy and pleasure and contentment throughout our day. The
next thing to do if you're finding it hard to
be grateful for what you have and for your life
is just to do something completely new. Sometimes, and especially
when life feels hard, we find it difficult to access
(22:37):
gratitude because everything feels the same. Then like you ad
a layer of like this just I'm just feeling crap
onto that, like it just gets even worse. So pursue
novelty over gratitude. Go to a new part of your
city for the day. Make like a bucket list for
where you live. Just wander around. Studying at the public
library instead of studying at home. Maybe change up your
(22:59):
weekly routine if you can, like start cooking new meals
in the evening. Choose like an elaborate dessert recipe and
commit to making it. Do something on Friday night that's
not drinking. Go and like explore, or go to your
local bouldering gym, go to like I don't know what
painting class, Just like do something else. You know what
(23:20):
me and my friends did the other day. We were
having this conversation of like I'm so sick of like
going out drinking on like a Saturday or Friday night,
and like everything in the city feels the same. So
we went to a trampoline park like the one you
used to go to when you were twelve years old,
and like someone would always end up like breaking something,
(23:41):
or like ripping their jeans and it was the best
night ever. Having novel experiences has been evidenced time and
time again to be essential for adaptability and for your
overwhel well being. Like people actually cannot thrive in situations
that are completely and constantly the same. They need new stimulus.
(24:02):
So if you're not feeling grateful, that might be a solution.
Another way to experience like newness is to put yourself
in someone else's shoes and to you know, create gratitude
for somebody else if you can't experience it for yourself.
Volunteering acts of kindness, those kinds of things are deeply powerful.
Try and do like one kind thing a day for
(24:25):
the next two weeks. Not only does this give you
a sense of purpose, like I'm changing somebody else's life,
even if they don't notice it, it also allows others
to be grateful for you, and that can create feedback
for modeling gratitude in general. When you're finding it really
hard to access it, maybe you just need to create
more of it for other people and it will come
(24:47):
back to you in time. Similar to like, both of
these like is just being curious novelty Curiosity somewhat similar,
but it just keeps the mind open when I can't
necessarily access these absolute positive emotions. Just try and explore,
Just try and be interested in life, Try and find
(25:11):
new things that you can learn about, and then see
if gratitude comes some questions. You might also want to
ask yourself to prompt this in your own life. Is like,
when I'm looking at an experience, I might see it
as only good or only bad. What is the gray area?
What actually might this experience be teaching me that I
(25:32):
don't have to be grateful for, but I don't have
to be terrified of either? What might this be preparing
me for? Or you know, if this was like a
chapter of my life in a movie or a book
and I was someone watching from the outside looking in,
what's the purpose of this moment? Can I see where
this is guiding me to in the future? What should
(25:53):
my character do next? Instead of seeing things in like absolutes,
this is only good, this is only bad. Yeah, Like
there's zones us in on, like what's in the middle,
what's like the meat of the situation? What it'm meant
to be learning?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And this like isn't.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Supposed to be invalidating or it's not supposed to romanticize
your pain. It just encourages you just just like stay
engaged with like the nuances of life. And except that,
like just because something doesn't make sense yet doesn't mean
that it won't down the line. Like it's an acknowledgment that,
especially if you're in your twenties, like you're still learning,
you're still growing and adapting through life. This might be
(26:32):
the worst thing that's ever happened to you now, but
life will get bigger and like be able to hold
more space for new and better things. I think the
biggest takeaway from today is that gratitude is like fabulous.
It's like I honestly think it's like a human gift.
It's a miracle in many ways that we can like
(26:54):
appreciate things so deeply that the only thing we can
do is say that some otherworldly thing must be responsible
for it. It's so beautiful that we can see beauty,
and just like it's honestly an indescribable emotion. Like I
imagine trying to just describe like gratitude to an alien
and I just like feel like they probably wouldn't understand it.
(27:18):
That doesn't mean that it's a moral test. You don't
have to be relentlessly positive. You don't have to be
grateful all the time just because it's a beautiful feeling.
You don't have to pretend everything's fine. I think it's
just important to know that, like you're allowed to have
a diversity of emotions. But if you can access gratitude,
it's not going to be a quick fix. It's not
(27:39):
going to be some vitamin, but it is something that
you can like come back to that might make life
just feel a little bit better. That might be able
to like hold your hand through grief and through exhaustion
and through hard times and just give you, like it's
like a nice place to like go and lay your
head down when like everything else in world feels really terrible.
(28:02):
Doesn't mean you like am morally obligated to feel it
all the time. It's just like a superpower, and it's
this brilliant thing that we're very lucky to have when
we really need it. So thank you so much for
listening to this episode. If you have made it this far,
what's something you're grateful for? Please leave a comment below,
Share why that makes you feel grateful. Share Yeah, whether
(28:25):
it's a person, whether it's a pet, whether it's like
a movie, a TV show, like the best chocolate cake
you've ever had. I want to hear it. I want
to know. Something I'm grateful for right now is air conditioner.
It's like, genuinely like forty degrees in Sydney right now.
If you're like, I don't know, if you're you do
(28:46):
Fara and eight, it's like over one hundred degrees. And yeah,
I'm so grateful for air condition I'm so grateful for
the people who discovered how to make air colds. So
that's my little that's my little touchdoone for the day.
I'm gonna go to pet thinking, God, that's nice. But yeah,
I appreciate you listening. Thank you again to our research
assistant Lubye Colbert for her contributions to this episode. She's amazing.
(29:07):
We love her and we appreciate all of her work.
If you want more from the Psychology of Your twenties,
you can follow us on substack. If you want the
transcript of this episode, you can also follow us on YouTube.
If you want to watch this episode or watch any
of the other episodes that we have recorded for you
guys in the recent months, make sure as well that
(29:28):
you are following us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast
if you want to see what's coming up. I think
we have a few meetups planned soon, so if you
live in Europe, are be coming your way very very soon,
so stay tuned for that. But until next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, be grateful when you
need to be or when you want to be. And
we always hope very very soon,
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Wherever you are in the world, it is so great
to have you here back for another episode as we
of course break down the psychology of our twenties. You
guys might not want me to say this, but like
it or not, we are coming closer to the end
of the year and also the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanuka,
(00:49):
New Year, and famously there is a huge emphasis on
reflecting on the year and showing gratitude for our lives.
So I thought, what better time than now to do
an episode on gratitude, which for some reason I have
never done before. I don't know exactly how I've missed it,
(01:10):
but today is the day. Also, before we get into it,
I want to let you know this episode is actually
also a video episode on YouTube. So if you prefer
watching episodes with video and getting to like see I
don't know, see me speaking to you through a screen,
go and check that out. I'll leave a link in
(01:30):
the description, but let's get into it. Gratitude journals, gratitude challenges,
daily affirmations. You know, I even have a Daily Affirmations
for a weekly Affirmations podcast. It's everywhere. If you've ever
opened Instagram, which I'm assuming you have, you have probably
seen a post at some time, at some point about
manifesting abundance. If you've ever been to therapy, chances are
(01:53):
you have encountered a therapist that is encouraged gratitude. I
know I shall have. It is presented to us as
this most like magical cure, or be grateful and you
will be happy. People talk about gratitude like it is
this like magic pill, this magic way to be a
(02:14):
more happy, well rounded person. In some ways it is,
but that claim can feel a little bit too neat,
a little bit too like one dimensional. Can it really
fix everything? Probably not. Is it always that easy to
tap into? Definitely not. But today we're gonna talk about it,
(02:34):
and we're gonna ask that big question, does gratitude actually
make us happier? And what forms all ways of expressing
gratitude are the most effective. We're gonna look at of course,
the psychology, do I even need to say that? Probably
not the neuroscience, and also importantly the limits of gratitude,
(02:55):
because yes, it is amazing, Yes it does fundamentally change
your brain. There's also a more nuanced side to it.
Toxic gratitude can elicit a lot of guilt and a
pressure to be thankful, and it can actually stop or
halt emotional processing. That needs to be part of the conversation.
So I am excited to dive deep into this topic.
(03:18):
It has been a long time coming. Without further ado,
let's get into the psychology of gratitude. First things. First,
definition of gratitude. We need to kind of get that,
get that ironed out. This is actually, ironically kind of
a hard concept to get a clear definition on. One
(03:42):
of the best ways it's described and that I found
it described was actually in a twenty ten paper written
by researchers in Ohio who actually talked about how gratitude
is both a trait, so for example, some people just
naturally feel more grateful, and it's also an attitude or
an emotion. It's also something that we can elicit for
(04:06):
ourselves and kind of force into occurring. There are even
more definitions about this. Is gratitude also just like a
coping response? Is it a coping mechanism? Is gratitude like
a spiritual experience? Is it just something that like we
have to trip into to find Is it just something
that comes up spontaneously. A lot of people actually have
(04:29):
different thoughts about it. How I like to see it
and how this paper defined it. And gratitude in the
broader sense is an appreciation of what is valuable and
meaningful to oneself. Whether it is a trait, whether it
is forced, it's just an appreciation. To add to this,
Psychologist Robert Edmonds and Michael mcleough, they are like the
(04:54):
leading researchers on gratitude, and I like their definition as well.
They define it as a two step process, which is
recognizing that something good has happened and acknowledging that someone
else or something else beyond you had to play a
role in it. So the first definition is really like
it's just feeling like the world or something is beautiful
(05:15):
and being able to notice it. The second definition that
we're working with is that you're able to attribute it
to something. In other words, it's not just an experience,
it's also a feeling of being connected, but also supported
more broadly, whether it's by your family, whether it's by
the God you believe in, by the universe, by nature.
(05:37):
Whatever it is is an appreciation for that outside force. Psychologically,
gratitude is seen. This is like mental superpower. Why is
that well, firstly because it promotes positive appraisal or positive reappraisal. Essentially,
why that's so powerful is because bad things are always
(05:58):
going to happen. Terrible, annoying things, frustrating things are always
going to occur. You can't change that. You can change
how your brain interprets these experiences. Instead of fixating on
what went wrong, gratitude allows you to retrain your mind
to notice what's still working. You might not know this,
(06:20):
but our brains are actually wired by default to have
a negativity bias, basically to see the worst in things,
to see the worst in people, to see the worst
in circumstances. This has actually been a good thing in
the past. It meant that we were more attuned to threats,
to danger, to the poisonous plants, the big saber toothed tigers.
(06:44):
But it also means that left unchecked, our minds are
naturally quite pessimistic. Gratitude, though, is the counterbalance to this
that allows us to kind of really just zoom out
and see the full picture, not just the negative or
shadowy parts. If we take a look at how this
(07:05):
works cognitively, there's a few processes that are involved here.
I feel like people talk about gratitude all the time,
no one talks about what it's actually doing to your
brain inside the skull of ours. First, gratitude allows us
to direct our attention more conveniently or positively to things
that we actually want to see. You can't appreciate good
(07:27):
things if you don't look for them right and if
you don't direct yourself to notice them. Gratitude builds that skill.
The next is memory encoding. When we focus on positive
experiences and we repeat them through those common exercises of
a gratitude journal or reflection or speaking openly about them,
(07:47):
those memories get encoded more deeply, the same way that
when you study by writing and rehearsing and reflecting on
your knowledge. This is objectively better than just like reading
your note or listening to the lecture. Research that was
published in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that so
(08:07):
called grateful memories actually showed less fading over time even
compared to other positive memories. This has actually seen a
lot in dementia patients who can remember really beautiful memories
with their family when they were kids, when they were younger.
They're encoded almost in a separate way to other kinds
(08:28):
of memories, mainly because they are appraised as valuable. Because
they are so significant and they carry meaning, our brain
kind of locks them in like this sneaky safe that
it has at the back, meaning that when everything else
starts to fade and decay, they remain. There's also an
(08:49):
aspect of emotional regulation going on here. Gratitude activates the
prefrontal cortext. This is the part of the brain that
is responsible for emotional regulation. If you're going through a
really tough time and you're stressed and you're frustrated, what
gratitude actually does is allow this part of your brain
to I guess, work better by having a more rational
(09:13):
perspective and truthworth perspective on your circumstances. It allows you
to hold two truths at the same time. This moment
is hard, but it's not always going to be hard.
There is more than this that is an incredible ability
to have. Also, we have to talk about this from
a more social, less individualized standpoint. Gratitude has been proven
(09:39):
to increase pro social behavior and when practiced on an
individual level, to actually make a community and a society better. Kindness, empathy, generosity,
they all increase. When people have a higher level of
personal gratitude, we are more likely to act in favorable
ways to others and to be acting positively and strengthening
(10:02):
relationships when we feel like there is good in the
world and that other people possess good as well. So
gratitude is like incredible for society as well. It's like
something that really does like mend and heal fractured systems.
So what does this actually do to the brain, Like
neurologically that was like cognitively, what's happening like to our neurons,
(10:25):
to our synapses to yeah, to this big organ Well
I can tell you using this twenty fifteen fMRI study
from these people at Indiana University. So in this study,
they basically asked participants to write down letters of gratitude
to people in their lives. They didn't have to send
the letters, they just had to write the letters. That
(10:46):
was enough to a grandmother, to an aunt, to an uncle,
or a brother, whoever. It was three months later when
those same participants were scanned in the fMRI machines, their
brains showed increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex that's
the region involved in emotional regulation, in learning and decision making.
(11:08):
Like there was physical changes to how their brain was operating.
The researchers concluded that gratitude is it has a long
lasting neural footprint, and they saw that footprint, I guess
in trench deeper when people did this over and over
and over again. Essentially, this practice changed the brain's baseline
(11:31):
response to both positive and negative experiences. There was also
a further twenty fifteen study published in Frontiers in Psychology,
also using fMRI scanners, which basically induced gratitude and participants
and then scanned their brain at the time. Instead of
just giving these people like random gratitude prompts, instead of
(11:53):
asking them just to write letters of gratitude, they told
them stories that were really precious and beautiful. These stories
actually came from real Holocaust survivors who'd been helped by
strangers during the war, people who had risked their own
lives to offer food, to offer shelter, to offer protection,
and the participants were asked to imagine themselves as this
(12:15):
person being helped and being rescued, to picture that moment,
to feel what it would have been like to receive
that kind of of help when you were just like
so desperate. And as they did that, the scans showed
significant activation in a couple of areas, the ventral striatum
(12:36):
and the nucleus accumbents, both key parts of the brain's
reward system. Long names, all you need to know is
that these are the areas that are most active when
we experience pleasure, love, or deep connection, and that activity
increased even after the story was over. What's so beautiful
(12:57):
about this study is that it's that gratitude isn't just
like something that's nice. It's not just surface level. It's
like viscerally rewarding, like the reward is something that we
can literally see. And what's even more interesting was that
they didn't even have to perform gratitude themselves to have
(13:19):
this feeling. No one in this study actually received anything
like it was entirely empathetic. Just imagining the kind of
generosity was like enough to trigger the brain's reward circuits.
When people say gratitude changes your brain, this is what
they're talking about. This is what they are referring to.
(13:41):
There is hard science behind why it's recommended. But and
this is equally an important thing to remember only under
the right conditions. Gratitude isn't something that we can actually
always access, and it might not actually always be helpful.
(14:03):
Sometimes it can backfire. Sometimes it can leave us feeling
worse than before. And that's like a part of the
conversation that I don't think people really want to have
all the time, but we are going to have it today.
How could gratitude possibly be bad for us? We're going
to answer that question after this shortbreak. So here's where
(14:27):
it gets a little bit tricky. Gratitude when it's real
and when it's self motivated, is really fantastic. When it
bubbles up naturally, it's even more fantastic. You know, we
will have those moments where we're just like, Wow, I'm
so lucky to be here, this is such a beautiful day.
You go searching for that feeling, you feel incredible, you
(14:49):
feel like like there's a lightness to you. The moment
that gratitude becomes something we're told to feel or something
that we owe because of our circum stances, it shifts
from being an emotion to being a performance, and it
stops being a resource that helps us and starts essentially
becoming a tool for emotional suppression. This is where we
(15:12):
veer into what we call toxic gratitude. This is an
offshoot of toxic positivity. This is when we start to
use it to bypass uncomfortable emotions, and what ends up
happening is that we actually don't honor them, and we
don't actually process why they happen in the first place
and why that just has like deeply impacted us. You
(15:37):
might have heard this yourself. You definitely have. It's very
silent sometimes, like the use of gratitude to kind of
silence emotions that people don't want to look at is
sometimes invisible. But it sounds like, oh, could have been worse.
It sounds like, at least I have a roof over
(15:59):
my head. It sounds like, you know, there's someone out
there who has it harder than me, so I'm just
gonna shut up about it. And the thing is those
statements are totally true. Yeah, someone does have it worse
than you, Like people do have it harder than you.
Having that kind of awareness and perspective is important. It
also doesn't undercut the fact that if something is painful
(16:22):
and sucky for you, it's still painful and sucky for you.
Like how I like to I always say this to
my friends, and I always say this to myself. Someone
with a broken arm, it's still gonna like their arm
still hurts, whether or not someone else has a broken spine,
Like it's entirely separate. They are still feeling all that
(16:43):
pain and themselves like someone else's suffering, doesn't like undercut it.
There's not only a certain amount of suffering that can
go around. We cannot have this idea that if your
suffering isn't the absolute worst kind, you do not deserve
to feel it. And sometimes the use of gratitude as
(17:05):
a solution to these feelings is a way that we
actually make people believe that. This is podcast that I
love called Live Happy Now. Big fan, big fan of
that podcast, And I was listening to an episode that
they did with Whitney Goodman talking about the impact of
toxic positivity, and what she said was that toxic positivity
(17:25):
denies an emotion, It denies a feeling, which is actually
just as bad as what that feeling might be listening
in the first place. When we use toxic positivity, we're
basically telling ourselves like, this emotion shouldn't exist, it's wrong.
And so not only are we feeling the feeling, we're
also feeling shame about the feeling. And it's obviously impossible
(17:49):
to ignore it anyways, because we know it does exist.
Otherwise we wouldn't be feeling it right now, and so
the whole situation becomes a lot more confusing. Refusing in
a motion or not feeling it doesn't make you more healed,
because it actually means that the battle between you and
that emotion is probably more of a vicious daily thing
(18:13):
than if you processed it appropriately in the first place.
If you actually let yourself just not be grateful for
a little while, if you just let yourself be like,
this just really really sucks, and I don't want to
be grateful for my situation. I don't want to be
grateful for what else I have. I don't necessarily want
(18:33):
to be resilient right now. I don't want to be
the bigger person. I just want to have some self
pity that's actually and you may not think that I
would say this honestly totally fine. Gratitude just sometimes doesn't
feel accessible to you, and trying to force it to
(18:54):
be actually creates this really weird paradox where the more
when you try, the harder and more elusive it becomes.
Gratitude requires a certain baseline level of safety. It requires
the belief that even subconsciously, you know you're okay to relax,
like you're okay to take in what's around you. When
(19:17):
your nervous system is dysregulated, when it's stuck in fight, flight, freeze,
or fawn, your brain is all focused on living through
and getting through this experience. So it's not going to
be scanning your surroundings for beauty or blessings. It's scanning
for threats and threats only. It is not a choice
in that moment to be ungrateful. It is actually just
(19:38):
plain inaccessible. When we don't feel safe, the part of
us that connects us, that feels joy, that expresses appreciation,
it just goes offline. Because from an evolutionary perspective, again,
it's not immediately necessary for how survival. The body can't
access gratitude if it does, don't believe the world is
(20:01):
safe enough to let its guard down, and yet that's
often when again people double down. I saw another article
from the psychologist Susan David where she talks about this
cultural obsession with like good vibes and how that actually
creates more emotional fragility. When we're not allowed to name pain,
we can't process it, and unprocessed pain doesn't magically vanish
(20:24):
the same way that energy doesn't magically vanish. It just
hides behind all the gratitude bandages until like that defense
mechanism doesn't work anymore. And look, I'm not saying that
gratitude is bad. It's just that, like it can't be
forced from a place of fear or from a place
(20:44):
of shame. It can't be forced from a place of
I should of shouldz. Maybe that's the best way to
say it. Sometimes, like the kindest thing you can do
to yourself is and do for yourself is just be like, yeah,
it's just really sucks. So I want to talk about
some alternatives. I feel like I've been blabbing on about
(21:04):
that for a while. When gratitude is inaccessible, what else
is there? Because we do actually need some kind of
thing to hold on to what might that be if
gratitude feels too heavy. One of these recommendations that I
heard from someone was to just look for niceness instead.
(21:26):
Looking for something nice feels a lot more neutral, feels
way less intimidating than being like, you have to find
something that you are grateful for one absolutely, just look
for one small thing each day that's like you just
think is cool, or you just think is beautiful. You're
not necessarily grateful for it, but you know, it was
(21:48):
really nice that the pavement smelt really beautiful after it
rained today. It was really nice that, like you saw
that childholding that flower on the bus. I'm not necessarily
grateful for it, but it was enjoyable. It was nice
to see that. When we lessen the pressure to feel
this like huge expansive feeling and this expansive like impact
(22:15):
of some outside force on our lives, we can start
to just welcome in a few more moments of just
like joy and pleasure and contentment throughout our day. The
next thing to do if you're finding it hard to
be grateful for what you have and for your life
is just to do something completely new. Sometimes, and especially
when life feels hard, we find it difficult to access
(22:37):
gratitude because everything feels the same. Then like you ad
a layer of like this just I'm just feeling crap
onto that, like it just gets even worse. So pursue
novelty over gratitude. Go to a new part of your
city for the day. Make like a bucket list for
where you live. Just wander around. Studying at the public
library instead of studying at home. Maybe change up your
(22:59):
weekly routine if you can, like start cooking new meals
in the evening. Choose like an elaborate dessert recipe and
commit to making it. Do something on Friday night that's
not drinking. Go and like explore, or go to your
local bouldering gym, go to like I don't know what
painting class, Just like do something else. You know what
(23:20):
me and my friends did the other day. We were
having this conversation of like I'm so sick of like
going out drinking on like a Saturday or Friday night,
and like everything in the city feels the same. So
we went to a trampoline park like the one you
used to go to when you were twelve years old,
and like someone would always end up like breaking something,
(23:41):
or like ripping their jeans and it was the best
night ever. Having novel experiences has been evidenced time and
time again to be essential for adaptability and for your
overwhel well being. Like people actually cannot thrive in situations
that are completely and constantly the same. They need new stimulus.
(24:02):
So if you're not feeling grateful, that might be a solution.
Another way to experience like newness is to put yourself
in someone else's shoes and to you know, create gratitude
for somebody else if you can't experience it for yourself.
Volunteering acts of kindness, those kinds of things are deeply powerful.
Try and do like one kind thing a day for
(24:25):
the next two weeks. Not only does this give you
a sense of purpose, like I'm changing somebody else's life,
even if they don't notice it, it also allows others
to be grateful for you, and that can create feedback
for modeling gratitude in general. When you're finding it really
hard to access it, maybe you just need to create
more of it for other people and it will come
(24:47):
back to you in time. Similar to like, both of
these like is just being curious novelty Curiosity somewhat similar,
but it just keeps the mind open when I can't
necessarily access these absolute positive emotions. Just try and explore,
Just try and be interested in life, Try and find
(25:11):
new things that you can learn about, and then see
if gratitude comes some questions. You might also want to
ask yourself to prompt this in your own life. Is like,
when I'm looking at an experience, I might see it
as only good or only bad. What is the gray area?
What actually might this experience be teaching me that I
(25:32):
don't have to be grateful for, but I don't have
to be terrified of either? What might this be preparing
me for? Or you know, if this was like a
chapter of my life in a movie or a book
and I was someone watching from the outside looking in,
what's the purpose of this moment? Can I see where
this is guiding me to in the future? What should
(25:53):
my character do next? Instead of seeing things in like absolutes,
this is only good, this is only bad. Yeah, Like
there's zones us in on, like what's in the middle,
what's like the meat of the situation? What it'm meant
to be learning?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
And this like isn't.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Supposed to be invalidating or it's not supposed to romanticize
your pain. It just encourages you just just like stay
engaged with like the nuances of life. And except that,
like just because something doesn't make sense yet doesn't mean
that it won't down the line. Like it's an acknowledgment that,
especially if you're in your twenties, like you're still learning,
you're still growing and adapting through life. This might be
(26:32):
the worst thing that's ever happened to you now, but
life will get bigger and like be able to hold
more space for new and better things. I think the
biggest takeaway from today is that gratitude is like fabulous.
It's like I honestly think it's like a human gift.
It's a miracle in many ways that we can like
(26:54):
appreciate things so deeply that the only thing we can
do is say that some otherworldly thing must be responsible
for it. It's so beautiful that we can see beauty,
and just like it's honestly an indescribable emotion. Like I
imagine trying to just describe like gratitude to an alien
and I just like feel like they probably wouldn't understand it.
(27:18):
That doesn't mean that it's a moral test. You don't
have to be relentlessly positive. You don't have to be
grateful all the time just because it's a beautiful feeling.
You don't have to pretend everything's fine. I think it's
just important to know that, like you're allowed to have
a diversity of emotions. But if you can access gratitude,
it's not going to be a quick fix. It's not
(27:39):
going to be some vitamin, but it is something that
you can like come back to that might make life
just feel a little bit better. That might be able
to like hold your hand through grief and through exhaustion
and through hard times and just give you, like it's
like a nice place to like go and lay your
head down when like everything else in world feels really terrible.
(28:02):
Doesn't mean you like am morally obligated to feel it
all the time. It's just like a superpower, and it's
this brilliant thing that we're very lucky to have when
we really need it. So thank you so much for
listening to this episode. If you have made it this far,
what's something you're grateful for? Please leave a comment below,
Share why that makes you feel grateful. Share Yeah, whether
(28:25):
it's a person, whether it's a pet, whether it's like
a movie, a TV show, like the best chocolate cake
you've ever had. I want to hear it. I want
to know. Something I'm grateful for right now is air conditioner.
It's like, genuinely like forty degrees in Sydney right now.
If you're like, I don't know, if you're you do
(28:46):
Fara and eight, it's like over one hundred degrees. And yeah,
I'm so grateful for air condition I'm so grateful for
the people who discovered how to make air colds. So
that's my little that's my little touchdoone for the day.
I'm gonna go to pet thinking, God, that's nice. But yeah,
I appreciate you listening. Thank you again to our research
assistant Lubye Colbert for her contributions to this episode. She's amazing.
(29:07):
We love her and we appreciate all of her work.
If you want more from the Psychology of Your twenties,
you can follow us on substack. If you want the
transcript of this episode, you can also follow us on YouTube.
If you want to watch this episode or watch any
of the other episodes that we have recorded for you
guys in the recent months, make sure as well that
(29:28):
you are following us on Instagram at that Psychology Podcast
if you want to see what's coming up. I think
we have a few meetups planned soon, so if you
live in Europe, are be coming your way very very soon,
so stay tuned for that. But until next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself, be grateful when you
need to be or when you want to be. And
we always hope very very soon,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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