Ep. 75 3 Ways to Practice Gratitude Without Pretending Everything Is Fine

Hey friend,

Have you ever tried to be grateful… while your life feels like a full-blown dumpster fire?

Your hormones are off.

Your energy is trash.

Your relationships feel strained.

Your weight hasn’t budged in months.

And someone says, “Just be thankful!”

… and you want to throw a pumpkin-spice-scented candle at their head.

In this week’s episode, we’re getting real about something you can control—even when everything around you feels wildly out of control:

👉 How to practice gratitude in the middle of crappy circumstances.

And I’m breaking down what most women have never been taught:

Your thoughts—not your circumstances—create your feelings.

🎧 Listen to the full episode:

How to Stay Thankful (Even When Life Feels Like a Dumpster Fire)

Inside the episode, I break it all down:

• Why forcing gratitude doesn’t work (and what actually does)
• How your brain is creating extra suffering without you realizing it
• How the Thought Model can shift your emotional state—on purpose
• Why acceptance is the doorway to emotional safety and hormone balance
• How to stay anchored in hope, even when nothing is changing fast enough

You’ll learn how to stop pretending everything is fine…

and instead build real resilience, real gratitude, and real emotional grounding—even in the mess.

Your body isn’t failing you.

Your life isn’t off track.

And gratitude isn’t about bypassing your struggles.

It’s about learning to support yourself through them.

Let’s learn how to do that together.

In health,

Tracy Erin

Transcript

0:00

Have you ever tried to be grateful when your life looks nothing like you hoped it would? When your hormones are outta whack, you're exhausted. Your pants are tight. You are one annoying comment away from completely losing your mind. Yeah, same. Well, today we're talking about real gratitude being the week of Thanksgiving. I know it feels a little bit cliche, but hang with me. This is the kind that actually works when your circumstances feel super crappy.

Speaker: 0:39

Welcome to the Balance Hormone Solution Podcast. If you're a woman 35 plus feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight, and wondering where your libido went, this is for you. I am Tracy Aaron, a functional medicine practitioner who helps women balance their hormones naturally. Without prescriptions, guesswork, or trending Nonsense.'cause here's the truth, your symptoms aren't random. They're signals. And if you know how to listen, you can fix the root cause and start feeling like yourself again. If you're ready for real solutions, let's get to it.

1:19

So welcome back to the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Aaron, your favorite perimenopause nurse who blends functional medicine with real life womanhood. And if you're tired of pretending that you're fine, quote unquote, while holding the entire world together, and this episode is for you today, we're talking about being thankful. In the midst of crappy circumstances and not fake gratitude, not good vibes, only not spiritual bypassing an acute card. I am talking about learning to think differently on purpose, especially when everything feels like a hot mess. And I wanna teach you how to use one of my favorite tools called the Thought Model. And I'm gonna do this in 10 minutes or less. Okay? So hang on. So I wanna be honest with you, because there's been many seasons of my life as I've raised five kids, been married for 25 years, where I felt like everything was collapsing at once. My health was a mess. Scales, refused to move no matter how much I was moving my body or how little I was eating, you feel like you're snapping at people all the time. And I remember multiple times just thinking, how am I supposed to be grateful in the midst of this? This is not how I thought things were gonna turn out. This is not what I'm working towards. This is not how I thought life was going to look. And that's when I realized something. That gratitude is not a feeling that just magically appears. It's a practice and it's birthed from the thoughts that we choose, so. In this, in lots of these moments, I start with a simple thought model to retrain my brain, and I promise you it works. It's not like you're pretending that life isn't hard, but you end up stop letting the circumstances define your emotional reality. This is gold my friends. It changes everything. And today I wanna teach it to you. Okay? So here's, here's number one. You don't have to be thankful for the circumstances, per se, to be thankful in them. So what do I mean by that? Well, when your hormones are chaos, your sleep starts to suck. Your genes are judging you, your relationships all the way around begin to drain you. You know what? Let's be honest. It is unrealistic to say, I am so grateful for this. No, I'm not talking about this like toxic positivity. Okay, I am talking about grounded adult hormone balanced. Um, this makes sense type of gratitude. Okay, so for example, this is how it works. Feelings follow the thoughts, not the circumstances. So for example, your circumstance might be, I'm still 20 pounds from where I want to be, but the feeling. The shame, the frustration, the hopelessness. It comes from the thought that you are attaching that neutral circumstance. When you stand on that scale in the morning, that number that you see is perfectly neutral. There's no value attached to it until we give it one. So here's the good news. You can choose a better thought without lying to yourself. Instead of being like, oh, my body is broken. See, nothing ever works, right? You can just choose a better thought and that better thought in this situation might be my body is healing. This is part of the process. Okay? And here's a clincher of all of this. Gratitude is a muscle. The weaker it feels the more it needs reps, not guilt, not shame. Right. So we need to exercise gratitude as if it's a bench press. We're gonna get stronger biceps by curling every single day. We're gonna get stronger, uh, quads and glutes by squatting every single day, right? Same thing. We grow in gratitude the more we exercise it, but I'm talking about gratitude that. We have that's genuine. And this type of gratitude begins with acceptance, not resistance. So most of your emotional suffering, believe this or not, okay? Just think about this for a second, right? Um, what do my kids like to say? Um, hear me out. Hear me out. Right? That's what they say. So most of your emotional suffering comes from fighting reality. Okay? Hear me out. So you're thinking this shouldn't be happening. I should be further along by now, or why is this still so hard? And all of that resistance, what it does on a cellular level, it keeps your nervous system in survival mode. Okay, so acceptance isn't giving up, it's just acknowledging, look, this is where I am today. And from here, healing is possible. See how that idea has so much more hope with it? So when you start stop fighting reality, you can create emotional safety.'cause you're now working in a truthful realm. You're working with what's real, so emotional safety on a cellular level. It tells your hormones, which are these chemical messengers, you can calm down. Now we've got this safe and under control. And acceptance of all of this turns your brain from that panic, oh no, this is never gonna happen to possibility. And that's where hope can come in. When you're not fighting the moment you can finally your support yourself through it. And I want you to think about the vibration, scale of emotions, fear. Has one of the lowest vibrations, whereas Joy, hope has the highest. So which one do you, on an energetic scale, which one do you wanna be vibrating at? More this low level of fear or this higher level of joy and hope, right? So gratitude becomes powerful when it is specific. And it's connected to hope, because hope is medicine, and gratitude is how you prescribe it to yourself. So when everything feels awful, your brain is gonna default to this threat mode. And that's how we can use gratitude to interrupt that pattern. And here's the thing, your brain is wired to find whatever it's taught to look for. So when you look for things that are going wrong, when you look for things that are falling apart, when you look for ways to be sad in your life, guess what you're gonna see, guess what you're gonna find? But when you look for things to be grateful for, when you look for things that are going well and right, your brain starts scanning for more of that, and with this simplicity wins. How do we start? Okay. Be grateful for little things, the sunrise, a quiet moment, a warm cup of coffee or tea in your hand. The enjoyment of a cool brisk walk, a warm shower, a laugh that erupted from your belly that you weren't expecting. This kind of stuff matters, and it stacks up. Gratitude ends up keeping us connected. To that woman we are becoming. So we can try something like this. I am grateful for the woman I am becoming, even if I am not her yet. So in the balance hormone solution, we go deep into this thought model, how this looks in our lives. We challenge ourselves with it on every single level because we don't wanna leave our minds behind where our bodies get better. In fact, doesn't work that way anyway. We heal together. Mind, body, spirit, mind, body, soul. Okay. So this thought model teaches us to look at our circumstances and to attach a better thought to them so that we can get better feelings. And guess what? We end up with better results in our lives. So start this three line daily gratitude practice for this week of Thanksgiving for the next seven days. This is your homework. Number one, a circumstance. It's neutral. Pick something that's hard for you right now. Okay. And number two, the old thought that might have gone along with it is the thought that has been making that circumstance harder or that outcome harder, that life harder. And the new thought then is a supportive thought that you wanna practice instead. Okay. For example, circumstance could be like, my weight hasn't changed in the last six weeks. The old thought would be, see, nothing works. Nothing is working. A new thought would look like my body is healing beneath the surface. And this is part of the process and this my friends, is how gratitude becomes transformation, not pressure. This is where we reside in that higher vibration of hope and not fear. So gratitude is not about pretending everything is fine, not about pretending that life is perfect. It's about finding power and presence in the middle of the imperfect, because your circumstances don't get to boss you around PS unless you let them. Your thoughts boss you around. But here's the good news. You get to choose those on purpose. So if you want more support just like this, how to regulate your hormones, call'em your nervous system, get outta survival mode. The balanced hormone solution is here for you. You don't have to do this alone. I'm here for you. Happy Thanksgiving. Have an amazing week with your family and friends near and far. I will see you on the next episode.

Speaker 3: 11:55

That's it for today's episode of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. If this resonated, don't just listen. Do something about it. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know another woman who's tired of feeling like a stranger in her own body. Send her this way for more support. Check out the show notes. I've got resources to help you get started. Just remember, your body isn't broken, you just need the right tools. See you next time.