The Neuroscience Behind Gratitude

With November being the month of Thanksgiving, many individuals seek to incorporate gratitude into their daily rhythms.

However, often when I discuss gratitude practices with some of my clients, there is often some resistance to this word. This resistance is often because culture has often overlooked life’s hardest moments by covering them up with phrases like “just be grateful,” or “count your blessings,” or “you have so much to be grateful for.”  While these phrases mean well, they can be shame-inducing and leave us feeling resistant to gratitude.

When used at best, gratitude can shift our perspective, but when used at worst, it can negate our very real emotions surrounding life’s most challenging circumstances. Therefore, I suggest we take a new approach.

While gratitude will NOT fix the very hard realities we go through, it can be a way to decrease the intensity of negative emotions coming from these difficult life circumstances.

I often quote Aundi Kolber, who recommends the practice of “beauty hunting,” which is essentially looking for small moments of beauty in our everyday lives.

When we train our brain to look for the beautiful, it signals safety to the brain by challenging the concept of negativity bias, where we are biologically wired to look for the negative “threats” in order for survival. While this is the brain attempting to protect us, we all know that looking for the negative doesn’t lead to much good. When we direct our attention to places where we find beauty instead, the brain starts to develop more serotonin and feels less need to be in a stress mode. If we go back to the basics of the nervous system, this makes sense because the brain wouldn’t be pausing to be grateful in a moment of “danger.”

When we pause to be grateful, it is almost like the brain realizing, “Oh wait, false alarm here! We are appreciating something in life, so there must not be a threat or danger,” which then, in turn, softens and soothes the tension in the body.

It is also helpful to take a moment to consider the science behind gratitude. What is it exactly that is happening in our brains when we pause to be grateful?

Chemicals like serotonin (the happiness hormone), dopamine (the motivation hormone), and oxytocin (the bonding hormone) are released, leading to several benefits such as…

• Lower anxiety and stress. It is very hard for the brain to be anxious or depressed while also experiencing gratitude. Gratitude decreases cortisol!
• More connection and contentment in social relationships
• Better memory retention
• Improved emotional regulation in life’s most overwhelming moments
• Decreased chronic stress on the body, leading to lower inflammation and stress-induced health problems

So what might it look like for you to incorporate gratitude/beauty hunting into your daily life? Here are some ideas!

• Listen to gratitude meditations (example: https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/gratitude_meditation )
• Write a letter to one person you are grateful for each week for a month.
• Visualize one part of your day that you were grateful for as you go to sleep (shown to enhance sleep quality)
• Name what you are grateful for in a moment of high anxiety as a grounding mechanism.
• Text your group of friends something you were grateful for at the end of the week as a way of enhancing connection.
• Set a reminder on your phone to pause and reflect on something from the day you are currently grateful for (even if it is just your sandwich or song you heard on your commute to work)
• Download a gratitude app such as 5 Minute Journal or Gratitude Garden.
• Try a gratitude challenge calendar for a month (https://www.towardwellbeing.com/30-days-of-gratitude)
• Go around the table with your family and name one moment you were grateful for from the day (the more specific, the better for the brain!)
• Take a photo each day of one thing you are grateful for and put it in an album on your phone.

If you are interested in finding more beauty in your life and feeling more serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, one of our trained counselors would love to come alongside you in this endeavor.

Sources:

Algoe, S. B., & Way, B. M. (2014). Evidence for a role of the oxytocin system, indexed by genetic variation in CD38, in the social bonding effects of expressed gratitude. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(12), 1855–1861. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst182

Katsumi, Y. et al. (2022). Association between gratitude, the brain, and cognitive function in older adults: The NEIGE study. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Kolber, A. (2020). Try softer: A fresh approach to move us out of anxiety, stress, and survival mode–and into a life of connection. Tyndale House Publishers.

Kini, P., Wong, J., McInnis, S., Gabana, N., & Brown, J. W. (2016). The effects of gratitude expression on neural activity. NeuroImage, 128, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.12.040