Ep 122 - Grateful in the Void

You know gratitude is supposed to be powerful. You know it rewires your brain. You know you should be doing it. So why does it feel like a lie when you try it during transition?

In this episode, we break down why gratitude practices fall flat when your nervous system is in crisis mode—and what you actually need to pair with gratitude to make it stick. We explore the difference between gratitude and bypassing, why forcing positivity can create shame on top of struggle, and how to honor what's hard without staying stuck there.

If you've felt guilty for not being able to feel grateful during a difficult season, this conversation is for you. Because gratitude isn't the first step. Acknowledgment is. Stabilization is. And once those are in place, gratitude becomes a tool that actually works—not to deny reality, but to expand your perception of it.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's one of the most underestimated practices that exists. In just five minutes a day of focusing on what you're thankful for, it's like a booster shot. It increases overall long-term happiness by 10%. It's been shown to lead to better sleep, better mood, and even cardiovascular and neurological benefits, and helps shift your mind out of toxic patterns and focus on future goals. We all know this. We know that we should have a gratefulness practice, and we may try. But in times of great transition or great stress, when our nervous systems are in crisis mode, gratitude often just feels like a lie that we tell ourselves. Hi, this is Jordana. I'm the CEO of the Recon Network and host of the In Brief podcast. And today we're talking about gratitude. Why gratitude practices fall flat during big transition or a lot of chaos, while they feel hollow when your system is overloaded and what you actually need to pair with it to make it stick. This is in brief. Let's get to it. Be grateful for what you have. Being thankful rewires your brain. If you just focus on what's good, everything else will fall into place. Gratitude is the antidote to depression, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. And you may have heard of all of these things, and all of it is true. Gratitude, the process of being thankful, is very powerful. But there's a small problem with this narrative too, especially during times of great transition. It assumes that you're in a place where your nervous system can actually access it. And many people in transition aren't. Think of gratitude as a lens, a way of orienting our attention toward what we're working toward instead of what isn't. When your system is stable enough to use that lens, it's very powerful. It shifts perspective, it rewires your brain to notice the good stuff, creates a feedback loop where you start looking for more things to be grateful for. And over time, that genuinely changes how you move through the world. But that only works if your system is stable enough to access that lens. And during transition, most people's systems aren't. They're too busy scanning for threats. And when you try to force gratitude practice on a system that's in threat mode, it doesn't necessarily rewire your brain toward positivity. Instead, it might make you feel guilty for not being able to feel grateful. And guilt on top of crisis is just more load. This is where gratitude starts to feel heavy because you're not just dealing with the transition anymore. You're also dealing with the shame of not being able to feel thankful about it. You have a stack of things to be truly thankful for, a job, people who care about you, and you can still feel like you're drowning. And that gap between what you logically know you should be grateful for and what you actually feel feels humiliating and debilitating and makes everything feel worse. So, first let's break down the reality. You can be grateful and struggling at the same time. What's actually missing from gratitude-only approaches is acknowledgement. You can't jump straight into gratitude without first acknowledging what may be hard. Let your system register that something has changed and that that change is real and that that change might not be fun. When you skip the acknowledgement and go straight to gratitude, you're bypassing grief. We talked about this in the last episode and how bypass grief doesn't just disappear, it just goes underground. But your nervous system needs safety before it can relax. And gratitude on its own doesn't create safety. Telling someone in chaos to be grateful is a lot like asking someone who's drowning to think positive thoughts. It's not the positive thinking that's bad, it's that the drowning is the problem. And this isn't to say you can't be grateful before you are physically, mentally, and emotionally in a better place. Quite the opposite, in fact. It only means that if building a practice or a habit of gratefulness is one of your goals, don't stress yourself out even more trying to force it. And then when you're ready, here's how to start building a practice of thankfulness that actually has the potential to change your entire life. First, acknowledge where you are, name what's hard and write it down or say it out loud. This transition is difficult. I didn't choose this, but I'm allowed to feel the weight of it. It may feel negative in the moment, but it's not the opposite of gratitude. It's the foundation for it. The second thing you're going to do is stabilize. Do the things that make your system feel safe. Build routine, protect sleep, create predictability. It's practical work, but it matters more than any other practice until it's in place. Third, give yourself permission to feel mixed emotions. You can be grateful and sad or hopeful and scared. Holding both at the same time isn't contradiction. It's human and it's honest. So wherever you are right now, remember, you don't have to be grateful right now. You don't have to find the silver lining or focus on what's good when what's hard is taking up all of the space in your mind and in your chest. That's because when the conditions are right, you won't have to force it. It will just show up. Not specifically as a practice or a five-minute journaling exercise. You will have to create those or work at those, but more as a quiet shift in how you move through ordinary moments. You'll start to notice the little things, the coffee, the phone call, the tough things you push through in a hard season. And eventually, gratitude becomes less of a tool and more of a reflex. And that version of it, the unforced, honest kind, is the one that actually changes things. Not because you worked harder at being positive, but because you did the hard work first and became positive in the process.

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