Gratitude Isn’t a List. It’s a Lens.
A shift in perspective can change everything, even when nothing changes.
Gratitude is powerful. But the way most of us have been taught to practice it is kind of surface-level. Write three things you’re grateful for. Check a box. Feel better. Repeat.
And while that has value, let’s be honest it often doesn’t land….well not in the way we’re told it should, because if it did, wouldn’t we all be walking around more grounded, more at peace, more fulfilled?
Gratitude has the potential to completely rewire your brain, your body, your life but not when it’s reduced to a highlight reel or a self-help checkbox.
“Be grateful for your house. Be grateful for your health. Be grateful for your family.” And sure, those are beautiful things to be grateful for. But they’re also the easy ones.
Like you don’t need a reminder to be thankful for your dog. You already feel that. You feel it when they curl up next to you or greet you at the door. That kind of gratitude doesn’t need to be forced, it’s natural. Embodied. Effortless.
But are you still grateful when they shit on the floor?
This is where emotional mastery begins. It’s not about saying, “I’m grateful to even have a dog that loves me” while your nervous system is in full-blown frustration. That kind of gratitude, when it’s just words, doesn’t actually shift anything.
Because real gratitude isn’t a bypass. It’s not something you say to cancel out how you feel. It’s something you embody to help you stay in the moment with compassion, even when it’s messy.
That’s the kind of gratitude that rewires you. And that’s what we’re going to cover today.
It’s turning gratitude into a moment-by-moment process—not in a spiritual bypass-y way, but in a true, embodied way. It’s seeing how the thing you’re annoyed at even the dog shit is actually getting you closer to your goals. Helping you become who you want to be. So you naturally feel grateful. When you’ve learned how to dissect the clues life is handing you… that’s when everything starts to change.
Think about it: if you’re only feeling 10% today, and you use gratitude to list things you already know and feel… that 10% doesn’t grow. You just stay stuck in the same emotional loop, reinforcing what’s already safe, already known when what you actually need is a shift. A perspective that moves the needle. A felt sense that opens something new.
We’ve turned gratitude into a Pinterest board. A highlight reel of what’s already working. A feel-good checklist we cross off like it’s a productivity hack when really, it should be something we feel in our body.
There’s plenty of science that says gratitude boosts mood, reduces stress, even rewires the brain. And it’s true. But most of that research focuses on the brain, not the body. Not the nervous system. Not the emotional residue that lives beneath the surface.
Gratitude isn’t just a cognitive exercise. It’s a felt experience.
You can write ten things you’re grateful for every morning, but if your nervous system is dysregulated or your subconscious is still running on fear, your body won’t believe a word of it. True gratitude lives in the body. It’s not something you think, it’s something you feel. It creates coherence between your thoughts, emotions, and physiology. That’s when it becomes real. That’s when it starts to rewire.
It’s not just something you write down. It’s something you know. It’s embodied. It’s definitive. You don’t have to believe in gravity for it to be real, you feel it every time your feet hit the floor. That’s the power of real gratitude. It grounds you. It’s felt, not forced. You don’t try to believe your hair is brown. You know it’s brown. That’s what real gratitude feels like…undeniable.
So when you’re forcing yourself to be grateful without that deeper emotional truth, when you're trying to believe something your body or subconscious doesn’t actually agree with, it won’t land. And not only that, it can actually make you feel worse.
If someone is repeating affirmations or gratitude lists while their subconscious mind doesn’t believe them (likely because of unresolved resentment, trauma, regret, shame or grief) it doesn’t stick. Instead of creating a shift, it creates tension. Resistance. A subtle sense of failure, like you’re doing something wrong because it’s not working.
The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. It runs on proof, not just positive language. When what you’re writing or saying doesn’t match your internal reality, it creates cognitive dissonance—a gap between what you’re saying and what your body knows to be true. That mismatch triggers the amygdala, your brain’s alarm system, reinforcing stress instead of soothing it.
And this is also why you might feel like your gratitude list always includes the big, obvious things—your health, your house, your family. Because those are the only ones your nervous system feels are safe to acknowledge. They don’t trigger internal conflict.
But try writing “I’m grateful for my partner” when deep down you’re feeling resentful or unseen, and your body knows you’re lying. It doesn’t land because it’s not congruent with your lived, felt experience.
The point of this post isn’t for you to stop your gratitude practice, it’s to expand it.
To start being grateful for the things that aren’t easy or obvious. To find more proof to back up the words. To start feeling the gratitude in your body not just your mind.
To help you not just list what you’re grateful for, but to understand why and how you might be unknowingly compromising the very things you claim to value.
“I’m grateful for my lungs and my ability to breathe.” But you’re also hitting your vape all day. There’s a disconnect.
“I’m grateful for being single because I get to focus on me.” Yet your mind is consumed chasing someone to validate you.
“I’m grateful for the company I built.” But you’re stressed and complaining about it all day long.
There’s something missing. And it’s not that you’re not grateful enough…
Gratitude alone is not going to change behavior.
Just saying you’re grateful for something doesn’t mean you actually, fully, truly feel grateful for it. Yeah, there’s probably an aspect you do feel grateful for but there’s often a deeper wound underneath that the gratitude doesn’t touch.
It skips over the resentment, the disappointment, the part of you that’s still hurt or let down. And when that part doesn’t feel seen, the gratitude doesn’t land. It becomes a mask. A script. Something you say instead of something you feel.
Because most of the time, we’re not using gratitude to get honest, we’re using it to cope. To cover up what we actually feel. We’re reaching for something that sounds good, hoping it’ll make us feel better.
And this is exactly why affirmations don’t work for most people. They become spiritual bypassing tools that are layering surface-level positivity over emotions that actually need to be felt, processed, and healed.
Being grateful for your lungs is beautiful. Truly. Our bodies are miraculous, and recognizing that is powerful. It’s not that you don’t mean the gratitude. But there’s often something deeper that’s still unresolved. Something your gratitude list alone isn’t touching.
Maybe, deep down, you feel like you’re not allowed to take up space. Maybe there’s a belief that your presence, your needs, or your voice isn’t valuable. And so you vape. Or self-sabotage. Or disconnect. That’s what we need to explore. That’s where the real work begins.
Gratitude is great but it’s not a substitute for self-inquiry. It’s not a shortcut around the truth. These are beautiful practices when done right. But most of the time, they’re missing the raw, messy, underlying stuff that actually shifts us. Not the checklist. Not the words. The meaning behind them.
The problem isn’t gratitude. We love gratitude. That’s the goal. But getting to true gratitude, the kind that shifts your life from the inside out, takes effort. It takes honesty. It takes uncovering what’s really going on beneath the surface and being willing to see what you’ve been missing.
The way most of us practice gratitude likely started with a headline: “Gratitude improves mental health.” So people started pushing it. Keep a journal. Write down three things. Focus on the good. This is why tools like The 5 Minute Journal gained popularity, it made gratitude simple and accessible.
But no one stopped to ask why it works or why it often doesn’t. Hell I even added it to the journal I made years ago in the same surface level list way, following what everyone else was doing.
But I have come to realize that without the deeper understanding, gratitude becomes just another self-help checkbox. Another thing that looks good on paper but doesn’t touch the nervous system. Doesn’t shift behavior. Doesn’t move emotion. Doesn’t change patterns.
What gets in the way isn’t the practice itself. It’s the disconnect between what you’re saying and what you’re actually feeling. It’s the emotional residue from unprocessed pain. It’s the subconscious resistance. The part of you that doesn’t believe what you’re writing because it’s still grieving what you haven’t healed.
That’s the missing piece. We don’t need more gratitude lists. We need more gratitude that’s honest. More gratitude that allows duality. More gratitude that says, “This is hard and I can still find meaning here.”
Like when you write: “I’m grateful for my job.”
And maybe you do feel into it a little bit. You note that it pays the bills, gives you stability, lets you eat, live, survive. All valid. But deep down… You hate your job. You dread Mondays. You feel unfulfilled and out of alignment.
So now that gratitude feels forced. It doesn’t land in your body. It doesn’t anchor in your nervous system. It feels like a lie you’re trying to make feel true. It feels like a should. And we all know “should” is just…could with shame.
I “should” be grateful I have a job. I “should” feel lucky. But that kind of gratitude isn’t rooted in appreciation, it’s rooted in guilt. That if you aren’t grateful for it that somehow makes you bad or an ungrateful little brat.
It’s like when we were kids and someone said, “Be grateful you got Christmas presents, some kids didn’t.” Like was that supposed to spark appreciation? Or just guilt?
That version of gratitude doesn’t open your heart. It closes it. It makes you shrink your desires. It tells you to settle. It teaches you to override your truth in favor of what sounds "grateful."
And maybe you do feel a flicker of thankfulness in the moment for your job but then a meeting gets dropped on your calendar, your boss micromanages you, or you feel that familiar pit in your stomach and the gratitude flies right out the window.
We’re shrinking our desires because we think we should just be thankful. We’re tolerating dysfunction because someone else “has it worse.” We’re bypassing real emotions in the name of positivity.
And that’s not healing. That’s self-abandonment dressed up as mindfulness.
And that right there is what toxic positivity does. That’s what most affirmations are. You trying to convince yourself something is okay… when it’s not. You can’t lie to yourself and expect it to heal. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t stick. Your body knows. Your subconscious knows.
We need proof. We need evidence. We need neutrality not forced positivity.
Gratitude, when misused, teaches you to override your truth. It tells you to be thankful instead of being honest. It teaches you to “look on the bright side” instead of actually feeling what’s real.
It says:
“Well, at least you have a house.”
“At least you can walk.”
“At least you’re not as bad off as someone else.”
But none of that fixes the ache in your chest. None of that heals the misalignment in your life. None of that brings you closer to the truth of what’s going on inside you.
When we only give thanks for the obvious stuff, the things we already feel good about, what we know we’re fortunate to have, gratitude doesn’t create the shift we think it does.
Because it doesn’t stretch us. It doesn’t change our perception of what’s hard. It doesn’t transmute pain into wisdom. And that’s the whole point.
We’re not getting to the root. We’re not going deeper to actually shift behavior. We’re not seeing clearly what we could be grateful for because we’ve been taught to only label the good stuff as worthy of our appreciation.
But real gratitude is about seeing meaning in the mess.
The kind where you can look at your life, the pain, the detours, the dark nights and say: “It wasn’t easy. But I wouldn’t change it.”
Not because it was fun. Not because it didn’t hurt. But because like in the movie The Butterfly Effect, you realize that changing one moment would’ve changed everything.
And the version of you reading this right now has made you who you are because of all of it.
And if you’re not there yet, it’s okay. That’s the work. That’s the forgiveness process. That’s the reframe.
It’s learning to see the good in the things you’ve labeled as bad. It’s being (as morbid as it may sound) grateful for your trauma. Because I wouldn’t be doing this work, helping people change their lives, if my dad hadn’t died. If I hadn’t gone through the ringer myself. If I hadn’t struggled with control. If I wasn’t shaped by my family dynamics and pain.
When you’re truly grateful, you’re not trying to rewrite the past. You’re not trying to resist what happened. You’re not trying to fix it or hide it. You’ve accepted it. You love it.
And what I want to make clear is this: Two things can be true at once.
The brain is built to hold multiple truths at one time. You can feel grateful and heartbroken. You can love where you are and want something different. You can be proud of how far you’ve come and know there is still so much more to do.
Gratitude doesn’t mean settling. It means seeing that discomfort might actually be part of the path, not a detour from it. Gratitude isn’t the end point. It’s the shift in perspective that reminds us we’re already on the way.
That’s the real purpose of gratitude is not to erase your pain, but to widen the lens. To remind you that life is not either/or. It’s both/and.
You can struggle and still be safe. You can feel stuck and still be growing. You can be unsure and still be on your way. It means strengthening your ability to see clearly even when things feel messy. Even when the outcome is still unknown.
The moments we actually need gratitude are the ones where it feels impossible:
When we’re spiraling.
When we’re panicked.
When we’re heartbroken.
When we’re overwhelmed.
When our business is failing.
“Just write down three things you’re grateful for” doesn’t land when you just got dumped. It doesn’t calm your nervous system when you’re afraid you can’t pay rent.
It doesn’t shift the loop when your body is full of charge and your mind is in survival.
Because real gratitude isn’t a band-aid. It’s not a checklist. It’s not a highlight reel of what’s going right. It’s not about pretending things are fine when they’re not.
Gratitude, in its truest form, is a tool for transmutation.
This is the part no one talks about…gratitude for the hard things. The failure. The heartbreak. The trauma. The burnout. The unexpected detour.
Gratitude for the bad doesn’t erase the pain. It gives it meaning. It integrates it. It helps you alchemize your experiences instead of being defined by them.
It’s not about bypassing what’s hard, it’s about meeting what’s hard with a different lens. Not a fake one. A deeper one.
Gratitude isn’t just about being thankful that you have something. It’s about being grateful for the full picture.
Not just that you have a partner but also for what the relationship is teaching you. Not just remembering the good moments but seeing what those moments opened in you, and what they were trying to show you.
Real gratitude is neutral. Gratitude isn’t just about focusing on the good. It’s about seeing the whole picture without collapsing into one side of the story.
It includes the shadows and the light. It allows you to look at the thing that broke you and realize what it gave you. Maybe it taught you strength. Maybe it revealed truth. Maybe it showed you who you never want to be again.
Neutrality is the ability to observe what’s happening without labeling it as good or bad, right or wrong. It says, “This is what is,” without immediately assigning meaning to it.
It’s not apathy. It’s not indifference. It’s presence without the emotional tug-of-war.
This is where most people get tripped up: We think gratitude means pretending things are all good. We think neutrality means detaching from emotion. But neutrality isn’t numbing. It’s feeling both sides and choosing not to spiral into either.
When you’re neutral, you can see the pain and the purpose. You can feel the fear and still move forward. You can notice the negative without letting it define you.
Neutrality helps your nervous system stay regulated. It keeps you from over-identifying with the high or the low. And from that space, gratitude becomes more honest. More embodied. More true.
Because when you’re neutral, you don’t have to force yourself to be grateful, you can simply notice what’s there. That’s real freedom. That’s real gratitude.
Gratitude is like unconditional love. It doesn’t wait for the perfect moment, it finds the thread, even in the messy middle. It’s about seeing the darker parts and choosing to love them even more because of what they reveal. Gratitude isn’t conditional.
Gratitude for the breakup that cracked you open. That made you see your patterns.
Your part in why it ended. That forced you to stop settling and finally recognize your worth. To realize you were outsourcing your happiness to being in a relationship. To see that maybe… you’ve never really been alone. To notice that you’re replaying the same dynamic you watched growing up. That you walked away too soon or stayed too long. That there’s work to do, and it starts with you.
But if you’re not doing the deeper work and you’re just saying “I’m grateful for the breakup” at the surface level, you’re missing it. You’re bypassing the meaning. You’re skipping over the lesson. You’re writing it on a checklist but not feeling it in your body. And that’s the difference between forced gratitude and the kind that truly shifts you.
Gratitude for the burnout that forced you to finally rest. That exposed the belief that your worth was tied to productivity. That made you realize you’ve been operating from fear, not alignment.
Gratitude for the financial struggle that made you redefine what you truly value. That made you learn about money not just how to make it, but how to respect it. That strengthened your relationship and made it more honest than it’s ever been. That showed you your patterns with spending, saving, avoidance. That uncovered the beliefs you didn’t even know you had. Because this, this is how you build real wealth. Not just in dollars, but in self-trust.
Gratitude for the moment that humbled you. That slowed you down. That revealed what you couldn’t see before, because you weren’t still enough to notice.
This is the kind of gratitude that doesn’t live on a journal page. It lives in your cells. It’s integrated. It’s embodied. And once it’s there, you don’t have to remind yourself to be grateful. You just are.
Not because it felt good. But because it taught you something invaluable.
Most people aren’t taking the lesson and that is what’s keeping them stuck. They’re not seeing all sides. They’re not zooming out to look at the bigger picture. You don’t have to wait for hindsight.
Something hard happens, and instead of sitting with it, we rush to close the loop:
“What’s meant for you won’t miss you.”
“I dodged a bullet.”
“Thank God that’s over.”
But how does that actually help you grow? How does that expand you?
It doesn’t. It just pushes the pain to the side. So the pattern has to repeat because you never stopped to look at what it was trying to teach you.
You say you’re grateful that employee quit because they were toxic…but if you don’t look at what it revealed, if you don’t see the hole in the company, the misalignment, the leadership gap, it’s going to keep happening.
Gratitude comes after the lesson. Because then you see how it worked for you. You see what it came to reveal. You see what it was there to show you.
That’s the kind of gratitude that changes you. That heals you. That frees you. Because fighting what is only keeps you stuck in it.
Gratitude, at its deepest level, isn’t just about celebrating what’s going right. It’s about reclaiming your power in what feels wrong. It’s about seeing through the discomfort, not past it.
And sometimes…the most powerful thing you can be grateful for is the very thing you thought was ruining you.
I want the version of gratitude that cracks you open. That changes how you see everything. That becomes a portal to the next version of you, not a feel-good detour that keeps you repeating old loops.
With love & gratitude,
Stephanie
Own it × Shift it × Become it.
For Paid Subscribers:
Gratitude isn’t a feel-good exercise. It’s a power tool.
Use it to reclaim your triggers. To rewrite your story. To collapse old loops. To choose differently.
This is how we actually heal. Not by ignoring the pain. But by loving it. By learning from it. By becoming someone new because of it. By seeing it from a new perspective.
How to Integrate a New Gratitude Practice:
Let’s take a personal example.
Most gratitude practices would have told me: “Be grateful for your mom. You’re lucky to have a parent who’s still here, who loves you, who supports you.”
And that’s true. I am grateful that I have a mom who loves and supports me. But if I stop there, I’m missing the entire emotional landscape that lived underneath that surface-level truth.
Because the truth was when I was with my mom, my behavior didn’t always reflect that gratitude. I used to try and change her. Control her. Fix her. A part of me still wished she was different. A part of me still blamed her.
When we were together, I get pulled back into an old role. I became the “parent.” I held the tension. I argued. I micromanaged. I took on the emotional labor and then resented her for it. It used to activate the oldest parts of me. The patterns I thought I left behind. The wounds I swore I had already healed.
And this is why “just be grateful” doesn’t work. This is why reminding yourself “at least she’s still here” doesn’t shift the charge in your body. Because real healing doesn’t come from bypassing what hurts. It comes from meeting it. Feeling it. Learning from it.
Here’s the 9 step process on how you actually work through it:
Step 1: Let it out.