When My Life Got Small
Fifteen years ago when I left my career as a BigLaw litigator, my pain had grown very large while my life had grown very small. I knew intellectually that there was much in my life that I “should” feel grateful for, but the good things felt as if they never fully sank in and instead rolled right off me like water off a duck’s back. I also began to notice a pattern: every time things started to get a little better, I found some way to undo it. I never did it on purpose. It was a quiet, unconscious self-sabotage, as though some part of me didn't trust good things and needed to bring me back to what was familiar.
Even once I started to see the pattern, I wasn’t ready to do anything about it. What were my options? Try something cringe like a gratitude practice? No, thank you. In my mind I already knew exactly where that would lead, which was to bring the kind of pressure I put on myself in every other area of my life to feeling grateful for all the things I “should” feel grateful for. I knew that would only make me feel worse.
However, as things continued to get worse and I grew increasingly desperate, that desperation became a kind of gift in the form of a willingness to try almost anything to get out of pain. I began a formal mindfulness practice, and not long after attended a workshop with the former publishing executive turned author and mindfulness teacher, Phillip Moffitt. During a Q&A, one student asked him if he was only going to do one mindfulness practice, what it would be. Without hesitation, he answered gratitude. He went on to explain that in his view, gratitude is the best bang for your buck in mindfulness practice because it’s the most easily cultivated and requires the least amount of sacrifice for the most gained in return. He also said that its benefits were especially potent for people who are wired to be especially focused on spotting and solving problems, people just like me.
This explanation spoke directly to my bargain-hunting, life-hack-loving heart and at the start of 2012, I committed to practicing gratitude every day for a year. It felt challenging and unnatural to start. My mind had become very good at spotting what needed to be fixed and ruminating on it, and it took practice to start widening the aperture of my attention to taking in what else was happening in my experience. It also took practice to approach practicing gratitude from a place of doing something kind for myself vs. guilt, shame, or pressure. Over the course of the days, weeks, and months, though, this became the practice that has changed my life more than any other and I want to explain how.
What the Research Says Gratitude Does
When I started this practice, I didn't have a single study to point to, only a teacher whose judgment I trusted and a lot of desperation. In the years since, the research has given me plenty of reasons to be glad I stuck with it.
In one of the earliest randomized studies, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough (2003) asked people to keep weekly or daily records of what they were grateful for and compared them with people who recorded hassles or neutral events. The people counting their blessings reported higher well-being, and the benefit that showed up most reliably was more positive emotion [1]. A 2023 meta-analysis of 64 randomized trials pointed the same direction, finding that gratitude interventions were associated with more gratitude, better mental health, and more positive mood and emotions [2].
Ernst Bohlmeijer, a psychologist at the University of Twente who studies gratitude, asked 217 adults who were doing okay but not exactly thriving to practice gratitude five days a week for six weeks, with a different exercise each week: writing down three good things, imagining life without something good [3], writing a gratitude letter, reflecting on a lifetime of things to be grateful for, and setting a grateful mood for the day. When he checked in again after six weeks and six months, he found strong effects, especially on how grateful people felt as an ongoing mood. They also got better at noticing simple pleasures and felt a greater sense of abundance, as though they had everything they needed. He concluded that people seemed to change in a sustained way [4].
The brain research is early, but it points in an encouraging direction. Glenn Fox and colleagues (2015) asked people to imagine receiving help in stories drawn from Holocaust survivors' testimony, and how grateful people felt tracked with activity in the anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, regions involved in social cognition and value judgments [5]. In a study of people entering therapy for depression or anxiety, Prathik Kini and colleagues (2016) found that those who wrote gratitude letters showed greater medial prefrontal sensitivity to gratitude three months later than those who received therapy alone [6]. Together, these studies suggest that gratitude is a trainable skill with a lasting footprint in the brain, not simply a mood we either have or don't.
The body seems to benefit as well. In a study of 186 people with early-stage heart failure, Paul Mills and colleagues (2015) found that those who reported more gratitude also reported better sleep and mood and had lower levels of inflammatory biomarkers. Among patients who kept a gratitude journal for eight weeks, inflammatory markers dropped and heart rate variability, a marker of lower cardiac risk, increased [7].
Put together, the picture is of a practice that helps people feel more grateful, notice more of the good in their days, and feel better, that appears to leave a footprint in the brain, and that is linked with better sleep and lower inflammation, all for a few minutes a day. For a bargain hunter, that's hard to beat.
Why Good Things Slide Off an Overcontrolled Brain
There is a reason why feeling gratitude was so hard for me and for my clients. For people with an overcontrolled temperament, the problem often isn't a shortage of good things. It's that good things don't land. Overcontrol grows out of heightened threat sensitivity, diminished reward sensitivity, strong inhibitory control, and a superior eye for detail [8]. A brain tuned that way is quick to spot what might go wrong and slow to register what is going right. Pleasure gets discounted, braced against, or inspected for flaws, and a detail-focused mind is very good at finding the flaw.
That is the self-sabotage I noticed in myself and it is compounded when someone has spent years in pain or experienced trauma. Over time, our ability to feel positive emotions starts to atrophy such that positive emotions can even start to feel uncomfortable and maybe even dangerous to our nervous systems because they’re unfamiliar. When positive, expansive emotion is hard to tolerate, pulling back to something more familiar, even when that’s physical and emotional pain, can feel like the safer move.
Gratitude works with this temperament instead of against it. It is small, deliberate, and repeatable, so it suits a mind that likes structure. It asks the brain to take in what is good in tiny doses, again and again, until positive emotion starts to feel tolerable. You can think of it like graded exposure to positive feelings that helps reteach your nervous system that this is safe to feel.
Gratitude is also a social emotion, which matters because RO-DBT holds that the core problem of overcontrol is emotional loneliness, not emotion dysregulation [8]. This is where Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory comes in. Her work isn't specific to gratitude, but gratitude is one of the positive emotions her studies measure, and the theory helps explain why positive emotions matter so much for people who are lonely. Her central idea is that positive emotions like gratitude broaden our momentary thinking and attention, and that over time this broadening builds lasting personal resources, including social ones [9]. The research demonstrated that positive emotions actually widened people's scope of attention and the range of thoughts and actions they could imagine, while negative emotions narrowed them [10]. For a brain tuned toward threat, where attention tends to narrow to what might go wrong, that difference is significant.
The build part of the theory is where connection enters. In a randomized study of working adults, Fredrickson and colleagues taught participants practices that reliably generated positive emotions. Over the following weeks their daily positive emotions, including gratitude, rose gradually, and those gains were followed by growth in personal resources, greater life satisfaction, and fewer symptoms of depression [11]. Subsequent research found that as people's positive emotions increased, so did their sense of positive social connection. Fredrickson describes those everyday moments of connection as the engine of an upward spiral between positive emotions and health [12].
Gratitude also works on the social side from the other direction. Sara Algoe's find-remind-bind theory (2012) proposes that gratitude helps us find new relationships, reminds us of the people already in our lives, and binds us more closely to them [13].
This matters for overcontrol because RO-DBT conceptualizes emotional loneliness as the core problem, and that open expression is what helps others see us as trustworthy and draws them closer [8]. I think of it this way: a nervous system that can feel more gratitude and other positive emotions has more warmth available to express, and warmth that shows up in our faces, voices, and words is exactly the kind of social signal that invites connection [14].
And it matters so much for pain because Pain Reprocessing Therapy [15] isn’t only about calming an overactive alarm system. It's also about teaching the brain what safety feels like. In my work with my clients, cultivating positive emotional experience is essential rather than a nice extra. Joy, pleasure, awe, and connection give the nervous system direct experience that this moment is safe, and a nervous system that has spent years bracing against pain has very often been bracing against good feelings for just as long.
This is where gratitude comes in. It is a small, daily, low-pressure way to practice that same graded exposure to positive feeling, which is exactly the capacity that pain and overcontrol had taken from me.
Three Ways a Gratitude Practice Goes Sideways
The same pattern that kept me small can show up inside the practice itself. Here are three ways I've seen a gratitude practice quietly fail, and what to do instead.
1. You list what you think you should be grateful for. I would love to feel daily gratitude for things like clean running water and a place to sleep, because they truly are gifts. But most of the time, no matter how hard I try, I can't conjure gratitude for them. When I force it, I end up feeling ashamed that I can't, instead of feeling grateful. So I let myself off the hook. Whatever comes from "should" is not gratitude, and it isn't helpful. Write what you actually feel grateful for and if on any particular day nothing is coming to mind, know that the answer to that is trying to find more self-compassion and not self-judgment and pressure.
2. You write the same things every day. If you're writing anything at all, kudos to you. It's hard to commit to a practice. But the whole point is that it forces you to pay closer attention and deliberately seek out the good, which counterbalances our brain's tendency to focus on the negative. The more closely I pay attention, the easier it is to connect with a sense of awe and wonder.
3. You give up when it's hard to find something to be grateful for. My practice got so much easier when I learned that it didn't matter at all whether I could find something. All that mattered was getting in the habit of asking, "Is there anything I can be grateful for in this moment?"
Notice that each fix is a way of loosening control: no shoulds, no pressure to be original, no requirement to succeed. For an overcontrolled mind, that loosening is the practice.
I want to come back now to that daily gratitude practice I started in January 2012. By the end of October, I had met the most wonderful man, Eli, who has since become my partner in all things, and his almost nine-year-old daughter, whose birthday happened to fall on Thanksgiving that year. In a true whirlwind, we fell in love, got engaged, got pregnant, and got married. On Thanksgiving Eve 2013, the three of us were cuddled on the couch watching a movie when my water broke. I gave birth to our son that Thanksgiving Day.
I can't prove the practice caused any of it. And of course in those years much pain and heartache have been part of my experience as well. Gratitude isn’t about shutting any of that out. It’s about growing our ability to love the life we get vs. holding the demand that we will be happy and grateful when life unfolds in a way that we imagine will make us happy. But those synchronicities left me certain that part of my purpose in this life is to cultivate gratitude.
If you’ve read this far, I want to practice a bit of gratitude right now. I want to thank each of you who take the time to read our newsletter each week. It feels vulnerable to put these things out and I know each of us appreciate so much each one of you that takes the time to read what we write. I created a practice of gratitude that’s specifically for overcontrolled minds and if you’d like to see it, I’m happy to send it along.
Why can't I feel grateful even when my life is going well?
What is overcontrol?
Does a gratitude practice actually work?
How does gratitude help with loneliness?
Can gratitude help with chronic pain?
How do I practice gratitude if I'm a perfectionist?
Beyond the insight.
Knowledge is the first step; integration is the work. If you're ready to move these concepts into your actual life, let's talk about a strategic path forward.
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Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12585811/
The effects of gratitude interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis. (2023). einstein (São Paulo), 21, eRW0371. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393216/
Greater Good Science Center. Mental subtraction of positive events. Greater Good in Action. https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/mental_subtraction_positive_events
Bohlmeijer, E., interviewed in "How to practice gratitude when you're not feeling grateful (encore)." (2024). The Science of Happiness, Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts/item/how_to_practice_gratitude_when_youre_not_feeling_grateful_encore
Fox, G. R., Kaplan, J., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (2015). Neural correlates of gratitude. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1491. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4588123/
Kini, P., et al. (2016). The effects of gratitude expression on neural activity. NeuroImage. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26746580/
Mills, P. J., Redwine, L., Wilson, K., et al. (2015). The role of gratitude in spiritual well-being in asymptomatic heart failure patients. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 2(1), 5–17.
Lynch, T. R., Hempel, R. J., & Dunkley, C. (2015). Radically open-dialectical behavior therapy for disorders of over-control: Signaling matters. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 69(2), 141–162. https://psychotherapy.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2015.69.2.141
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11315248/
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19(3), 313–332. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21852891/
Fredrickson, B. L., Cohn, M. A., Coffey, K. A., Pek, J., & Finkel, S. M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: Positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1045–1062.
Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., et al. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24(7), 1123–1132. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23649562/
Algoe, S. B. (2012). Find, remind, and bind: The functions of gratitude in everyday relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6(6), 455–469.
Williams, L. A., & Bartlett, M. Y. (2015). Warm thanks: Gratitude expression facilitates social affiliation in new relationships via perceived warmth. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000017
Ashar, Y. K., Gordon, A., Schubiner, H., et al. (2022). Effect of pain reprocessing therapy vs placebo and usual care for patients with chronic back pain: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Psychiatry, 79(1), 13–23.