Giving Thanks When It's Hard
A clear, grounded way to meet Thanksgiving when political strain and information overload are shaping your days.
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Dear friends
It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, a day built around gratitude, but it’s understandable if you’re approaching it with a heavy heart this year. Maybe you’ll spend it with people you love, or maybe you’ll be navigating distance, disagreements, or relationships that now hold more tension than ease. All of this is happening at a time shaped by political pressure and a pace of events that leaves none of us feeling settled. So I want to give you a way of meeting Thanksgiving that feels kind, steady, and genuinely supportive.
Before the day begins, it seems this may be the right moment to offer something that doesn’t demand more from your, but instead gives your mind and body a little room to breathe.
We often speak about gratitude as if it were a shortcut to serenity — a simple way to feel calmer, more centred, more optimistic. But when you’re living through such a time of political instability, relentless information flow, and ongoing strain on your nervous system, gratitude isn’t easy. It may not even feel accessible to you. When the world feels volatile and the pace of events keeps outstripping your capacity to process them, gratitude can feel like one more thing you’re supposed to muster, at a time when your capacity is already stretched too thin.
And yet, gratitude can quietly help you find your footing again.
Gratitude works differently when you’re already close to your limits. It’s not about performance — you can’t force the feeling, especially when you feel stressed or overwhelmed — so gratitude becomes about gently shifting the spotlight of your attention.
When your mind is strained — when working memory is overloaded, when your nervous system is bracing, when everything just feels too fast — your attention tends to narrow-in on threat, tension, and uncertainty. Gratitude widens that field just a fraction, giving your nervous system a brief moment to recognise that not everything is unstable. It doesn’t replace being vigilant, it doesn’t ask you to ignore the pressures you’re living under, and it doesn’t erase the difficult things you’ve witnessed. But it does make room for something else to exist alongside them.
That matters. It creates a tiny pocket of space and hope — exactly what you need when you’re under prolonged pressure.
When you understand gratitude as a way of gently shifting the spotlight of your attention, it stops being a task and becomes something that can actually support you.
It’s worth pausing to look at what gratitude actually is, here — how it works, what it draws on, and why it has such a real effect on your nervous system. And why it’s a practice you can reliably lean on, even when everything around you is unsteady.
What Gratitude Really Is
Robert Emmons — widely regarded as the leading scholar on gratitude — describes gratitude as “a sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life.” His work emphasises two movements at the heart of the experience.
The first is recognising that there is something good in your life, even if it is small or easily overlooked. The second is acknowledging that this good thing didn’t arise solely from your own effort — that something or someone contributed to it.
This isn’t naïve, and it doesn’t ask you to feign being grateful for difficult things. It simply broadens the frame. Gratitude is the honest recognition that alongside the strain, there are still moments where life hands you something steady, supportive, or quietly nourishing — and that you didn’t create those moments entirely on your own.
Gratitude can be outward-facing, expressed to someone else, but it can also be inward and private: noticing the warmth of your home, the steadiness of a routine, the presence of someone who cares for you, or the simple relief of having made it through another day.
That small shift in attention does something important inside your body.
Why Gratitude Affects Us So Deeply
A growing field of research has shown that gratitude is not just a feeling, but a physiological cue. It helps reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, supports your recovery after stress, improves your sleep, and strengthens your capacity for connection.
It doesn’t do this by magically making circumstances easier. It does it by changing the way your nervous system interprets the world. When you notice something that genuinely supports you — something that doesn’t require you to always be on alert — your body eases a little. Even a small shift like that gives your nervous system a brief chance to rest. And when you do it repeatedly, your baseline stress level begin to drop, helping you cope more effectively with whatever comes next.
The Physiology: Gratitude, the Vagus Nerve, and HRV
The physical effects of gratitude can be seen most clearly through its relationship with the vagus nerve and heart-rate variability.
The vagus nerve plays a central role in how your body shifts between sympathetic activation and the parasympathetic state. When its signalling is functioning well, your nervous system can adjust more smoothly: tension reduces, your heart rate and breathing become steadier, and it becomes easier for you to rest and recover after strain.
One of the most direct ways to see this is through heart-rate variability (HRV) — the tiny, measurable differences in time between one heartbeat and the next. Contrary to what we’ve come to believe, a healthy heart does not beat at strict, identical intervals; those small variations show that the autonomic nervous system can increase or decrease its output as needed. Higher HRV indicates more flexibility in your nervous system, and a greater capacity to cope with pressure. When HRV is low, your nervous system has less capacity to shift its state, and your feel it in the form of tension, fatigue, and reduced resilience.
Practicing gratitude gently increases vagal activity, and in turn raises HRV. Even a brief moment of appreciation is enough to create a shift. The feeling itself doesn’t need to be intense, it simply needs to be real. When it is, you become better able to steady yourself, think more clearly, and respond with care, instead of reacting impulsively.
This is why gratitude matters when you’re trying to stay engaged in a time of accelerating political pressure. It offers a doorway back to steadiness that does not depend on circumstances improving — only on where you place your attention. And it helps you hold onto the capacity to pay attention in the first place. When your nervous system never gets even brief relief, you can’t sustain clear attention for long. Gratitude provides that relief in a small, easily manageable way.
In the days ahead — throughout the holiday season and beyond — practicing gratitude can help you stay anchored when everything else feels unsettled. It’s not a solution to the pressures we’re navigating, but it is a simple way to keep yourself from being pulled under by them.
This is certainly true for me. Because of the constraints I live with, I’ve had to find ways to stay steady each day. Over time, practicing gratitude has completely changed what I focus on. I see small things to be grateful for throughout my day, and I’m sure this plays a big part in why I’m able to keep my balance even when things are hard. It doesn’t make living with chronic illness easy, but it does help me meet it as it is.
With all of that in mind, I want to share a practice that has supported me more than anything else. It’s simple, steadying, and easy to begin — even when you feel close to your limits.
If this post is useful, please feel free to share it with others who are finding things heavy-going at the moment.
Three Good Things
A gratitude practice that actually steadies your mind
This practice is one of the most well-researched ways for you to strengthen psychological resilience, reduce depressive symptoms, and widen your field of attention when life is dominated by pressure or uncertainty. What makes it particularly helpful is that it’s simple to to do, even when you feel worn down. You can begin where you are — you don’t need to feel calm or optimistic. The practice does the work for you.
How it works
Set yourself a timeframe — 14 to 30 days is a good starting point. Each night before bed, write down three things that went well during your day. They don’t need to be dramatic or impressive; they simply need to have been good in some small way. Many people find that the more ordinary the examples are, the more helpful the practice becomes.
After noting each good thing, add a brief line on why it happened or what your contribution was. This helps your mind register that these moments didn’t appear out of nowhere. It strengthens your ability to see what’s supporting you each day, even when the wider context of daily life is strained.
Try not to repeat anything you’ve written before. This encourages you to move your attention beyond the familiar things and to notice details you might usually overlook. That widening of your attention counterbalances your mind’s built-in negativity bias — the tendency of each one of us to fixate on what feels difficult, what’s weighing on you, or what you still needs finished.
An example
Good Thing #1: My meeting was less tense than I expected.
Why this happened/My contribution: I took five minutes beforehand to breathe and slow down, so I arrived calmer.
Good Thing #2: A friend messaged to check in.
Why this happened/My contribution: I was honest last week about finding things difficult.
Good Thing #3: I noticed the air felt milder when I stepped outside.
Why this happened/My contribution: I paused long enough to register it rather than rushing straight on.
Why writing it matters
You may feel tempted to run through the list in your head — please don’t. Research shows that writing it down has a much stronger effect. It slows your mind, anchors your attention, and helps your nervous system shift out of the constant forward-lean that comes with chronic stress.
What changes over time
Don’t be surprised if you don’t notice a sudden shift; most people don’t feel anything dramatic at first. What they notice is a quieter settling that builds over time, leading to a baseline that feels steadier. You’ll become more able to take in the small good moments as they happen, instead of only focusing on the things that cause stress or difficulty. That shift, though subtle, is what leads to less stress, better sleep, and a more reliable sense of emotional balance.
The shift may be small, but the impact accumulates. And as the research shows, that accumulation can have real psychological and physiological impact.
🌟 I’d love to hear one small thing from your week that has supported or uplifted you, however lightly. These tiny moments matter, and sharing them often helps others notice their own.
I’ve added one of mine in the comments to start us off!
Thanksgiving can hold many things at once: connection, tension, quiet, longing, relief. However the day unfolds, I hope there is some part of it that brings you peace, however small. May you have space to breathe, space to rest, and space to notice something that uplifts you.
With warmest wishes for a gentle and heartening Thanksgiving.
— Lori
© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025
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We’ve had some really cold, frosty mornings this week, which are always a bit of a hurdle for a body that reacts strongly to the cold. But I noticed something as I stood outside the other day: these mornings give us blue skies we just don’t get in summer. They're a deeper, clearer blue.
That colour does something for us. Blue light — the natural kind we get from the sky — helps regulate our circadian rhythms, support alertness, and lift our mood. Even a few minutes of looking up at a bright blue sky sends a signal through our eyes to our brains that strengthens our body’s daytime systems. It’s subtle, but it gives us a small lift just when the shorter days and long nights start to pull us down.
I’ve found myself thinking that perhaps this is one of those small things the Divine wove in on purpose — a quiet boost for us at this dark, difficult time of year. The deep blue of the sky, the sudden brightness on frozen mornings, the red berries on the holly tree catching the light… little markers of warmth and steadiness threaded through the colder, darker season.
I'm grateful to wake up every day....alive. Admittedly, for me at least, the sense of aliveness didn't really kick in until retirement a few years ago. My advice to folks is to look around, breath, say hello to strangers, look at the sky, the ocean. When I stay grounded in these basics, it's a good day.