This weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada, and it’s a good opportunity to consider the things we’re grateful for. Instead of listing the things I’m personally grateful for, I want to talk about what gratitude does in our brains, and why we should be giving it more of our attention.
Let’s start with the problem gratitude is up against. Our brains don’t treat good and bad as equals.
“Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good.”
Roy Baumeister and colleagues, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good”1
That paper pulled together research on everything from daily events to relationships to how we learn, and the pattern held almost everywhere they looked. The authors said they could hardly find any exceptions.
From a survival point of view, this makes perfect sense. Missing a threat could kill you, while missing a pleasant moment costs you very little. So our brains have been tuned over a very long time to notice what’s wrong and to let what’s right fade into the background.
Fading into the background is the other half of the problem. The good things in our lives become normal very quickly. The furnace that comes on every time it’s cold, the friend who always picks up the phone, the body that gets us through the day without complaint. We stop noticing them precisely because they’re always there.
So what can we do about it?
A while back I wrote about why developers don’t see problems in code. The short version is that a part of our brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) decides which of the billions of bits of information coming in every second are important enough to reach our conscious awareness, and it re-tunes itself based on what we tell it matters. Buy a new car and suddenly you see that model everywhere. Those cars were always there; what changed is that your RAS now considers them important. The developers who couldn’t see the problems in the code had simply never trained themselves to look for them, and the fix was repetition.
Gratitude is the same mechanism pointed in the other direction. That post was about training ourselves to see the problems we’d stopped noticing. This one is about training ourselves to see the good things we’d stopped noticing. Every time we deliberately look for something to be grateful for, we’re telling our RAS that this category of thing matters, and over time it gets better at bringing those things to our attention.
At this point it would be great to say that gratitude will transform your life, but that isn’t what the research says.
A 2025 meta-analysis pulled together 145 papers covering nearly 25,000 people in 28 countries, and found that gratitude practices do improve well-being, by a small amount.2 Small and real is a perfectly respectable result. It’s also not the miracle that much of the wellness industry would have you believe.
What I find more interesting is a mega-study published this year, which tested six different gratitude practices on more than 10,000 people across 34 countries.3 All of them were compared against control tasks like writing about recent events. Writing and sending a gratitude text to someone produced the biggest improvement. Simply listing the things you’re grateful for produced the smallest.
Which is why I didn’t open with a list of my own.
The list keeps gratitude in our own heads. The text sends it to someone else, and it has to be about something specific, because “thanks for everything” isn’t much of a message. That means first noticing what they actually did, and then telling them.
One caution before you rush off: the mega-study measured how people felt right after the exercise, not weeks later. A single message won’t rewire anything. The RAS learns through repetition, whether it’s developers learning to see problems in code or us learning to see what’s going right.
So this week, put down the list. Pick one person, think about one specific thing they did, and tell them.
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Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad Is Stronger Than Good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370. ↩
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Choi, H., Cha, Y., McCullough, M. E., Coles, N. A., & Oishi, S. (2025). A meta-analysis of the effectiveness of gratitude interventions on well-being across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ↩
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Coles, N. A., Dang, A. V., Oishi, S., et al., & McCullough, M. E. (2026). A multinational megastudy of the effects of gratitude practices on subjective well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The six practices were a gratitude list, a gratitude letter, a gratitude text, Naikan-style reflection, mental subtraction, and a letter of gratitude to God or a divine figure. ↩