351. How gratitude changes your brain

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, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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. 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

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

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 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 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

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?

you're still growing and adapting through life. This might be 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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,