The Psychology of your 20s - 351. How gratitude changes your brain

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

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.   ORDER MY BOOK Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast For business: [e-mail]    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.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes. and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, 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 20s. 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 whole. holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, 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, 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, well, 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 has encouraged gratitude. I know I shall have. It is presented to us as this almost like magical cure all. 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 going to talk about it. And we're going to ask that big question. Does gratitude actually make us happier? And what forms or ways of expressing? gratitude are the most effective. We're going to 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 deeper 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 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 in that I found it described was actually in a 2010 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 invaluable and meaningful to one's self, whether it is a trait, whether it is forced. It's just an appreciation. To add to this, psychologist Robert Edmonds and Michael McLeow, 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. whatever it is, there's an appreciation for that outside force. Psychologically, gratitude is seen as just 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 things, annoying things, frustrating things are always going to occur. You can't change that. You can change how your brain interpret. 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 are 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 notes 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 cortex. 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 truthful 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 2015 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 change. to how their brain was operating. The researchers concluded that gratitude has a long-lasting neural footprint, and they saw that footprint, I guess, entrenched 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 2015 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, also using fMRI scanners, which basically induced gratitude in 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 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 shows 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 short break. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong.

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He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 all 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 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 circumstances, 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 it 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 going to 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 going to, like their arm still, 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 in 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 a 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 like just as bad as what that feeling might be eliciting 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 an emotion, 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 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 once around you. When your nervous system is dysregulated when it's stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, your brain like 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 our survival. The body can't access gratitude if it doesn'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. An 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 shoulds. 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's what else is there because we do actually need some kind of thing to to hold on to um 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 100% 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 smelled really beautiful after it rained day. It was really nice that like you saw that child holding that flower on the bus. I'm not necessarily grateful for it, but it was enjoyable. It was nice to see that. When we lessened 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 add 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 buckle list for where you live. Just wander around. Study 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, a 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 12 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 overall 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 like 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 you 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 absolute, 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 this situation? What am I meant to be learning? And this like isn't supposed to be invalidating or it's not supposed to romanticize your pain. It just encourages is just to stay engaged with like the nuances of life and accept that like just because something doesn't make sense yet doesn't mean that it won't down the line like it's an acknowledgement that

especially if you're in your 20s like you're still 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. 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 the world feels really terrible. Doesn't mean you like a 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 40 degrees. Sydney right now. If you're like, I don't know if you do Fahrenheit, it's like over 100 degrees. And yeah, I'm so grateful for air conditioner. I'm so grateful for the people who discovered how to make air cold. So that's my little, that's my little touchstone for the day. I'm going to go to pet thinking, God, that's nice. But yeah, I appreciate you listening. Thank you again to our research assistant Libby 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 20s. 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, I'll 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 will talk very, very soon. On the Look Back at it podcast. From 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me. I'm Sam J. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down,

and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black. people listen to look back at it on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey what's good y'all you're listening to learn the hard way with your favorite therapist and host

kear games this space is about black men's experiences having honest conversations that's really not safe to have anywhere but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing how many men carry a suit or armor it signals to the world that you not to be played with and just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen and learn the hard way on the AHA radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.

You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Ellen's, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. The lesbian. Michael Ranchini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%.

I break down the signs of mental tough. fitness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWA% on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.

I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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