Be Grateful to Everyone

What an Ancient Slogan Can Teach Us About Why Gratitude Practices Actually Work (Or Don't)

There’s an old Buddhist slogan that says: “Be grateful to everyone.”

When I first encountered this teaching years ago, I thought, “Yeah, sure. Easy to say when you’re sitting on a meditation cushion in a monastery. Try being grateful to the guy who just cut you off in traffic.”

Now, decades later, I still think that response was pretty reasonable. Gratitude has become another trending item on the never-ending self-optimization to-do list. Journal about three things you’re grateful for every morning. Send gratitude texts. Keep a gratitude jar. Gratitude has become the next set of $100 yoga pants; It’s everywhere, from Instagram influencers to corporate wellness programs.

But does any of it actually work? And more importantly, why would being grateful to the jerk who cut you off in traffic do anything except make you feel like you’re gaslighting yourself?

Let’s dig into what’s actually happening in your brain when you practice gratitude, and why the current culture might be missing the point.

Is Gratitude Good for Us?

Let’s start with the good news. There has been an explosion of research on gratitude over the past decade. In short, gratitude works. Studies consistently show that gratitude practices can increase wellbeing, improve relationships, and even boost physical health. For example, a meta-analysis of 27 studies found that gratitude interventions led to significant improvements in wellbeing. As an example, one study found that keeping a gratitude journal increased happiness levels for months afterward. Granted, there are still way too many of these studies being done with college students, making them hard to generalize to IRL, but the signal seems solid enough.

If this is true, why do so many people start gratitude journals and then abandon them after a week?

The answer lies in understanding how our brains actually learn. Specifically, this relates to how reward-based learning drives behavior change. Remember that our brains are essentially survival machines, wired through evolution to seek rewards and avoid threats. Every time you do something and get a reward, your brain strengthens that neural pathway. Do it enough times, and it becomes automatic. A habit.

This is how we learn everything from finding food to checking our phones when we’re bored. Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple, elegant, and evolutionarily ancient.

So why can’t we simply form a habit of being grateful?

Gratitude Lists: Potential or Problem?

Most gratitude practices ask you to think about what you’re grateful for. Make a list. Reflect on the good things in your life. And there’s nothing wrong with this as an exercise, except that it’s operating at the wrong level.

When you sit down and think, “Okay, I should be grateful for my health, my family, my job,” you’re engaging your prefrontal cortex, the thinking, reasoning part of your brain. You’re creating a cognitive framework. Two things are often at play here: 1) We saw on our newsfeed that some new science study showed that gratitude was good for us, so we put it on our to-do list as yet another thing to do; and, 2) The “shoulds” come in. I should do this, I should do that. As the joke goes, “we should all over ourselves.”

Doing something that we think should be good for us makes our to-do list longer (which usually adds to our anxiety instead of alleviating it). And we get stuck in our heads. We might even throw in some good, old-fashioned self-judgment when we wonder what’s wrong with ourselves when we can’t do something as simple as going to bed every night thinking of three things that we’re grateful for.

You can probably see how these don’t make a magic formula for creating a gratitude habit.

To make or break a habit, there’s a specific brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) that is critical for assigning reward value to different behaviors and experiences.

The OFC doesn’t care about your carefully reasoned list of things you should be grateful for. It cares about how things actually feel in your direct experience. It’s taking in sensory information, integrating it with your emotional state, and assigning a reward value: more of this or less of this?

This is why you can intellectually know you should be grateful for your health or your friends or whatever, while simultaneously taking it completely for granted. Your thinking brain knows it’s important, but your OFC, the part that actually drives behavior, hasn’t registered the reward value. That comes from your body; your direct embodied experience.

Notice how a part of your brain helps you get out of your head. I love irony.

What Makes Gratitude Actually Rewarding?

Ready for this? In a study that my lab conducted, we asked hundreds of people to rank their preference for different mental states. The results were remarkably consistent: people strongly preferred states like feeling kind, curious, and connected over feeling anxious, fearful, and angry.

Here’s the important part: these preferences weren’t just intellectual. When we asked people to describe how these states felt in their bodies, they consistently reported that positive states felt more open and expansive, while negative states felt more closed and contracted.

This maps directly onto neuroscience research showing that different mental states correlate with distinct patterns of brain activation. When people are in states of craving or self-referential thinking (like rumination or worry), we see increased activation in self-referential network regions, including the posterior cingulate cortex. When people shift into states of meditation, open awareness, or curiosity, that same region quiets down.

And here’s the kicker: people consistently report that the open, aware states feel better. They’re more rewarding at a felt, embodied level, not just as an idea in their heads.

So it’s possible, even likely, that people get stuck at the superficial “make a list” level, way up in their heads. Not much action can happen in that brain of ours when it can’t feel a thing. To wit, it doesn’t even have sensory neurons!

And this would also suggest that to form a gratitude habit we have come to our senses so to speak, by listening to what our body tells us. Yes, we have to feel the results of being grateful. That’s where the action is.

From the Head into the Body

When you shift from thinking about gratitude to being curious about what you experience from being grateful, something changes. Instead of trying to convince yourself that you should be grateful for things, you’re investigating what it’s like to appreciate something directly. You’re noticing the results of gratitude as a behavior. Remember, reward-based learning gets its name because behaviors that are rewarding get reinforced.

What does gratitude actually feel like in your body? Where do you feel it? How does it compare to thinking that we should be grateful?

And when you do this, you might notice something that shouldn’t be surprising at all: genuine appreciation feels good. Not in a “this will be good for me” way, but in a direct, embodied way.

It feels open rather than contracted. Expansive rather than tight. Connected rather than isolated.

And remember, through all of this exploration, your OFC is taking notes. When you directly experience the reward value of appreciation versus the intellectual exercise or “shoulding,” you’re not trying to convince yourself of anything. You’re just seeing clearly what’s actually more rewarding.

This is where gratitude can become a true habit:

Trigger: heading off to sleep.

Behavior: think of three things for which you are grateful.

Result: warm, expanded glow of gratitude.

Practicing Gratitude

So, what does this actually look like in practice?

Start with something simple. Your next meal, for example.

Instead of thinking about how you should be grateful for food, get curious. What does it actually feel like to appreciate this meal? The taste, the texture, the fact that you’re not hungry right now?

Notice where you feel that appreciation in your body. Does it feel open or closed? Expanded or contracted?

Now, contrast that feeling with the feeling of eating while scrolling through your phone, barely tasting the food. Or eating while ruminating about something that happened earlier. What’s the felt difference?

You’re not trying to force yourself to feel grateful. You’re investigating what gratitude actually feels like compared to its absence. You’re collecting data.

And here’s a bonus: when you’re genuinely appreciating something, you’re also present to it. You’re actually tasting your food instead of lost in thought. You’re actually feeling into the connection that you have with another person instead of being disconnected while, for example, scrolling on your phone or eating in a hurry while answering emails.

Those gratitude data points are also actionable: once you notice what it feels like to be grateful, you can supercharge it by acting on it. If you’re grateful for a friend or family member, tell them (even a text will do). If you appreciate your team at work, go get coffee for everyone. Expressing your gratitude through action marries it with generosity, no matter how small the act. [See my previous article on generosity to learn about the three different types of generosity]

Ready to level up?

Level 1 and Level 2 Gratitude

So far, I’ve been describing what we’ll call Level 1 gratitude. Level 1 gratitude is pretty straightforward: you appreciate the good things in your life. Your health, your relationships, your morning coffee. This is what most gratitude journals focus on. And it’s a fine starting point. Start where you can, which is with the stuff that is relatively easy. It helps you get a feel for gratitude, and for it to start taking shape in your life. Because it feels good, you can more easily form a habit of gratitude.

What about Level 2 gratitude?

Back to that slogan: “Be grateful to everyone.”

The slogan isn’t suggesting you should be grateful that someone cut you off in traffic. That would be absurd.

Here’s what I think it may be pointing to. It’s not about convincing yourself that everything is wonderful or that difficult people aren’t actually difficult. It’s about recognizing that every interaction, every situation, pleasant or unpleasant, is an opportunity to see your mind more clearly.

Be grateful to everyone is pointing to something that can be subtle or not-so-subtle: can you be grateful for the opportunity to notice your reaction? To see how quickly anger arises? To practice working with a difficult emotion in real time?

The person who cuts you off in traffic shows you how quickly anger arises. The friend who disappoints you shows you what your expectations are and where you’re attached to things being a certain way. Someone else’s success that triggers comparison shows you the habit loop of jealousy or envy.

Without these triggers, how would you ever see these patterns? How would you learn to work with them? How would you learn about your own mind, and have the opportunity to train it?

This isn’t about being grateful that bad things happen. Bad things are going to happen regardless of your gratitude practice. It’s about being grateful that you have the capacity to wake up in the middle of your habitual reactions and choose something different.

This capacity—the ability to be aware, to get curious, to meet your experience with openness instead of reactivity—this is the real practice.

Yes, how could we learn about ourselves, about how we interact with others, and about how we meet the world without seeing our reactivity clearly? Level 2 gratitude helps us lean into unpleasant experiences and situations so that we can learn and grow. [See my previous articles on Growth Mindset and The F**king Growth Opportunity for more on this.]

At first, Level 2 gratitude can feel really challenging. We’re going against our basic instincts to move away from the unpleasant places, because our brains read this as danger. But, when we lean in a few times and see that this is our growth zone, not our danger zone, it gets easier. Seeing the unrewarding results of our habitual reactions help us to let go of them. More importantly, growth feels good, so focusing on that result can help reinforce the fact that growing pains may be painful at first, but are indications of growth.

So, see if you can shift from shoulding (I should be grateful, I should practice gratitude) to getting into the habit of practicing Level 1 gratitude: notice how good it feels to be grateful for something. Once you get the hang of it, see if you can level up: open to the F**king Growth Opportunity that comes when you are grateful to everyone, no matter how mean or nice they are.

When you welcome the honk or bow to that person who cut you off in traffic, truly thanking them for being your teacher, that’s next level. And truly something to be grateful for.

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and professor at Brown University. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. He co-founded MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction.

If you are struggling with anxiety, Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program brings together his research and clinical experience to help people build effective skills to reduce anxiety and cultivate calm (www.goingbeyondanxiety.com).

Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES

Brewer, J. A., & Garrison, K. A. (2014). The posterior cingulate cortex as a plausible mechanistic target of meditation: Findings from neuroimaging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1307(1), 19-27. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12246

Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254-20259. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108

Dickens, L. R. (2017). Using gratitude to promote positive change: A series of meta-analyses investigating the effectiveness of gratitude interventions. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 39(4), 193-208. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2017.1323638

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://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377

Garrison, K. A., Zeffiro, T. A., Scheinost, D., Constable, R. T., & Brewer, J. A. (2015). Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 15(3), 712-720. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-015-0358-3

Kringelbach, M. L. (2005). The human orbitofrontal cortex: Linking reward to hedonic experience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6(9), 691-702. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1747

Kringelbach, M. L., & Rolls, E. T. (2004). The functional neuroanatomy of the human orbitofrontal cortex: Evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology. Progress in Neurobiology, 72(5), 341-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2004.03.006

Malouff, J. M., & Meynadier, J. (2023). The effect of expressed gratitude interventions on psychological wellbeing: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled studies. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 8, 941-960. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-023-00086-6

O’Doherty, J., Kringelbach, M. L., Rolls, E. T., Hornak, J., & Andrews, C. (2001). Abstract reward and punishment representations in the human orbitofrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 4(1), 95-102. https://doi.org/10.1038/82959

Portocarrero, F. F., Gonzalez, K., & Ekema-Agbaw, M. (2023). The effects of gratitude interventions: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Einstein (São Paulo), 18, eRW4888. https://doi.org/10.31744/einstein_journal/2020RW4888