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How Gratitude Reduces Stress & Builds Resilience
Discover how gratitude shifts your brain’s stress response, helping you navigate challenges with greater emotional balance.
Gavin Kemp
February 23, 2025
In partnership with
Welcome Back to Week 3 of Gratitude Rewired!
We are continuing our six-week journey into how gratitude physically reshapes your brain for positivity, resilience, and well-being. Each week features a practical journaling method and experiments to assist you in applying these insights in real life.
Week 1: The Brain on Gratitude (Past Issue)
Week 2: How Gratitude Rewires Neural Pathways (Past Issue)
Week 3: Gratitude & Stress – Lowering Anxiety & Boosting Resilience (You are here)
Week 4: Gratitude’s Impact on Sleep & Physical Health
Week 5: Strengthening Relationships with Gratitude
Week 6: Making Gratitude a Permanent Habit
This week, we explore how gratitude can be a powerful antidote to stress, shifting your brain from survival to a place of balance and emotional strength.
How Gratitude Counteracts Stress & Anxiety
Hello friends,
When stress hits, your brain activates the amygdala, triggering the fight-or-flight response. While this is useful for survival, chronic stress keeps your body in a constant state of tension, leading to anxiety, fatigue, and burnout.
Practising gratitude helps to interrupt this stress cycle by activating the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation.
Gratitude Lowers Cortisol: Studies show that gratitude reduces cortisol (the stress hormone), helping you feel calmer and more in control.
Strengthens Emotional Resilience: By shifting focus from problems to appreciation, gratitude rewires the brain to handle challenges more effectively.
Activates the Relaxation Response: When you express gratitude, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, lowering heart rate and blood pressure.
Over time, gratitude creates a buffer against stress, allowing you to face difficulties with greater clarity and composure.
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Gratitude Journaling Method: The Stress Reframe Exercise
This method helps you shift stressful situations into opportunities for growth and appreciation.
Identify a Current Stressor: Write down something causing tension or worry.
List the Hidden Positives: Look for small aspects of this situation that might lead to growth, learning, or new perspectives.
Reframe with Gratitude: Turn the stressor into a statement of appreciation. For example, instead of saying, “Work is overwhelming,” say, “I’m grateful for opportunities that challenge me to grow.”
Breathe & Reflect: Take a moment to notice how this reframe shifts your emotional state.
Example Entry:
Stressor: "I feel overwhelmed with work deadlines."
Hidden Positives:
This workload means I’m trusted with important projects.
Completing these tasks will enhance my skills and experience.
I have supportive colleagues I can ask for help.
Reframed with Gratitude: "I’m grateful for opportunities that challenge me to grow and improve my time management skills."
By practising this regularly, your brain learns to focus on possibilities rather than stress, reducing anxiety over time.
The Gratitude Experiment: Stress Buffer Challenge
For the next seven days, try this quick daily challenge to experience how gratitude protects against stress:
Morning Grounding: Start your day with one thing you’re grateful for about yourself.
Midday Check-In: When stress arises, pause and find one silver lining in the situation.
Evening Reflection: Write down one stressful moment from the day and reframe it with gratitude.
Track how you feel by the end of the week—are you handling stress differently?
What to Expect From Your Brain
After one week of gratitude-focused stress reduction, you may notice:
Less emotional reactivity to stressful situations.
A shift in perspective—challenges feel less overwhelming.
More moments of calm as your brain adapts to a gratitude-first approach.
These changes reinforce resilience, training your brain to process stress more healthily.
Gratitude Gem
"Gratitude doesn’t eliminate stress—it transforms how you carry it."
Call to Action: Use Gratitude to Reduce Stress
This week, commit to reducing stress with gratitude by:
Practicing the Stress Reframe Exercise – Find hidden positives in daily stressors.
Completing the Stress Buffer Challenge – Train your brain to shift focus in real-time.
Sharing gratitude with others – Express appreciation to lighten emotional tension.
If you find these methods helpful, stay tuned for Unbound Gratitude’s upcoming Gratitude Kits. These kits are designed to help you build stress resilience through guided gratitude exercises.
Neuroscience Fact of the Week
Did you happen to know? Studies show that just 5 minutes of daily gratitude journaling can reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression by shifting brain activity away from the stress response.
Sign-Off
Next week, we’ll explore how gratitude improves sleep and physical health. Get ready for powerful insights into the mind-body connection!
“Gratitude Is A Practice, Not A Performance.”
I hope you have a great week.
Gavin
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