#46. Neuroscience: How Gratitude Rewires Your Brain

Gratitude is more than a feeling-it's a practice, a perspective, and a powerful spiritual force. In this heart opening episode we explore the sacred layers of gratitude=from appreciating what's visible to trusting the unseen miracles still unfolding. We reflect on the power of light in darkness, the courage to believe before proof appears, and how faith becomes a bridge between where you are and the miracles ahead. This episode is for anyone feeling discouraged, or longing to reconnect with hope, trust, and meaning. Whether you are on a spiritual path, a personal growth journey, navigating grief, parenting challenges, or simply craving deeper meaning-this episode will gently guide you back to hope, trust, light, and divine timing. 

This is for listeners searching for a gratitude practice, faith in hard times, spiritual healing, holiday meaning,  emotional resilience, and trusting diving timing. 

fatih and trust, spiritual growth, miracle mindset, transformation, emotional healing, holiday reflection, trust the process, mindset coaching, gratitude, meditation, parenting support, healing journey, awakening, inspired living, resilience, light in darkness, manifestation through faith

Miracles multiply where gratitude lives. 

Thank you for joining me!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Purpose
• 0:55 Why Gratitude Changes The Brain
• 3:51 Present Gratitude In Daily Life
• 5:20 Future Gratitude And Faith
• 8:20 The Hanukkah Light And Trust
• 11:20 Forgiveness Gratitude And Healing
• 14:25 The Archer: Aim With Intention

Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes, but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers, and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said, When you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change, and that is exactly what this podcast is about. Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose, and passion. Each week, I'm going to bring you 30-minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies, and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in. Hit subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. This is the time of year where we're focused on a lot because of the holidays. Some of us are focused on gratitude all the time, and lately neuroscience supports that, that when we have a practice of living in gratitude or what I like to call deep appreciation, that it's actually good for our brains. I wanted to talk about the layers of gratitude today and just how this all fits together with the season, how each one requires a different kind of courage in us. Because what if gratitude isn't just something we feel? What if it's layered? What if it's something that we travel to, past, present, future? And that's what this episode is about today. Gratitude literally rewires the brain for healing, for hope, for manifestation. Neuroscience tells us that the prefrontal cortex, which is clarity and decision making, gets activated when we're feeling thankful for something. And the dopamine and serotonin systems, which are motivation and peace, those were the emotions, that gets activated when we're feeling grateful. And it also lowers our cortisol hormones or stress hormones. So gratitude isn't just woo spiritual fluff, it's actually part of your biological regulation. Your nervous system literally shifts out of survival and into safety when you're feeling thankful. And some of you might notice if you're around somebody who's in a funk and you give them something, they very often won't even receive it. They won't say thank you. And they'll take it, but I mean they don't fully receive it. One of the things I coach people about is receiving praise because that's one thing that confident people do. Then when they get a compliment or they get praise, they actually receive it rather than shake it off. And they are very grateful. Just pay attention to that because that's all part of part of how we're working on things. So present gratitude is the most common. Present gratitude is what most people think of. And it's obviously just saying thank you for what's obvious, like having a roof over your head, having food on the table, people we love, the good that feels easy to name in our lives. And that does matter deeply. I don't mean to minimize that at all. Present moment gratitude really requires awareness. And the more aware people get, the more aware they are of how they're feeling and how grateful they are feeling. They can, and sometimes it takes us losing something for a while, like somebody has a cold for a while and they're just grateful they can breathe out of their nose again. You know, if you don't have electricity, if you have a power outage, you're really glad when they get that going again. And sometimes it's just in those quiet moments that we're grateful in the morning. We're grateful for our breath, we're grateful for that first cup of coffee or tea in the morning, we're grateful when somebody sends a little heart to us out of nowhere on a text just that they're thinking of us. We're grateful even just for one little small win in our lives. And that that type of gratitude is usually what we associate it with when I say I'm appreciating things and I feel grateful. And that's also pretty easy because it just requires awareness. A different kind of gratitude I was thinking of because it's future gratitude. And I thought about this because it's actually time for Hanukkah next week, I think, or uh close. And the Hanukkah story mirrors faith in and having gratitude and faith for things that haven't come yet, and that's future gratitude. It's like you're grateful before the miracle shows up. You're grateful for what exists now, you appreciate what exists right now, and are really excited that it's going to expand and get even better. And this is the manifestation part of gratitude that we were talking about. So in Hanukkah, if you don't know the story, their temple was completely destroyed. It was a war about religious freedom, and the temples were destroyed, everything was wiped out, everything was a mess. The people that came in when the war was over, they searched through the rubble and they didn't want to go home. They decided that they wanted to symbolically light the light. And in Jewish synagogues, there's the eternal light, they call it. I'm pretty sure now it's probably powered by electricity, but back in the day it was powered by oil. When they searched the temple, they found that there was just enough oil left over a jar for one day. But I love what they did with this. They didn't hoard it. They didn't say, Well, we only have enough for one day, we're just gonna light a little bit at a time, or you know, let's just bring it home for our own homes so that we have oil. They went ahead and spent it. They said, let's do it. And they didn't give up. This is the the purpose of it. When they lit that flame, I and the oil actually ended up burning for eight days. They showed faith, and it that was a huge act of faith. Faith in future gratitude, faith in that they would be taken care of. And this is what we are being asked to do right now. We're being asked to light the flame and trust the outcome, even when the supply might not look possible or probable. We can still have faith and trust. That type of gratitude, being grateful for what you have and the expansion that you're looking for, is a little bit different and it does require faith. The third type of gratitude is actually forgiveness gratitude. And it could also be wisdom. It's past, it's gratitude for something that happened in the past. Because sometimes the hardest gratitude is not for what went right in your life, it's actually when things didn't go right. I know I had somebody who was very grateful last year that she was put into, she was starting a new school, new middle school, and she was put into lunch with none of her friends from elementary school. She was feeling pretty traumatized about this. I know we throw that word around a lot, but you know, when you're 12, it does feel traumatic. And so we talked about that for a while. We talked about there's got to be some kind of reason. Let's look for the opportunity. You're with the people you're supposed to be with. And sure enough, not even the end of the semester, I think by Thanksgiving break, she said to me she was really grateful because she still had her old friends from elementary school, but she made she was almost forced to make new friends and have lunch with some people who she didn't know because it hadn't worked out the way she planned. So being grateful for when things don't go the way we plan, and seeing that gratitude, seeing the moment, seeing what happened for us and by us and through us as opposed to to us is really important. Sometimes this requires forgiveness, and that's a tough one. Sometimes you have to forgive somebody if they've hurt you in a way that just kind of cracked you wide open or broke your heart, and then better things came, or you learned something about yourself that you needed to clear up. They're pointing the way, hey, you've still got some work to do. Um, that's a hard gratitude. But we know that when we forgive, the amagdala, our fear center, calms down. The vagus nerve actually activates healing, and your blood pressure gets lower, and your immune markers improve. So forgiveness, we say it sounds cliche. Forgiveness is not for the other person, it's for you. It actually is for you. Forgiveness is forgiving to somebody else, but you give it to yourself, you reap the benefits when you forgive. You do it because you love yourself. It's an act of self-love, and it's for your own nervous system, your own peace, and your own future when you forgive. So it doesn't mean we're justifying the pain. It's just this is more advanced gratitude, and this is pretty sacred work. This is seeing the universe or God at work even when it's not evident in our face. So when we think about these things, um, this is the month of Sagittarius, which I also wanted to mention, and that's the archer. And I think that it's not coincidental at all that that's the constellation in the sky that people tie this to, because we're coming up at the end of the year, and it's the symbolism of the archer pulling back the bow, like refining the aim, releasing the arrow into the unknown. And what's so beautiful about archery, and I I've only done it a few times in my life, I loved it, and I just didn't do it after that. You don't actually just release the bow and shoot it anywhere, which is why we don't give those things to little kids. You don't obsess over every obstacle that might be in the way either, but you take stock and you have to feel the direction of what feels right and then aim carefully. And your aim in this case, theoretically speaking, would be your intention, and then trust the trajectory of the arrow. So when we talk about intention for 2026, I really, really like reframing it this way because it is so important to pull back and be mindful. So don't aim at things, aim at feelings, aim at the emotion that you want from that. When I was coaching somebody this week and I asked him, he's a senior in high school, and I said, Where do you think you want to shoot your arrow for next year, calendar year, not school year? And he said, good grades right off the bat, definitely good grades. And I said, Well, I'm gonna push on that a little bit because I don't know whether it's actually good grades or whether they're gonna symbolize something to you. And so I asked him, What's the feeling that you have when you get good grades? And he said, I feel successful. I think I'm gonna just rename that success. And I was like, Okay, but if you don't get good grades, then you're not successful. I'm not sure about that. You're successful with your grades. Let's play with that a little bit more and think why. What how could you go a little bit deeper? And finally, we unraveled it, and actually, what he's looking for is the belief in himself, the belief that he can be confident in his abilities when he really applies himself and makes up his mind and aims carefully that he's gonna get a positive result, he's gonna get close to the result that he wants or better. So when you're thinking about next year, and we'll talk more about this in the podcast, this future-based type of gratitude is really, really important because it helps us as manifestors. You could be asking yourself, what's what feeling do I want in 2026 to grow for me? What's the emotion? Peace, trust, confidence, stability, satisfaction, purpose, love. There's all kinds of options there. Connection. I would just think carefully, really pull back when you aim that arrow. So gratitude is not one thing, it's a relationship with time, it's a relationship with your past, very often through forgiveness or having the insight to see the wisdom. It's your relationship with the present through awareness and appreciation of what you have in that moment. And it's appreciation or gratitude for the future, like seeing the hope, seeing the possibility, and appreciating that. Here are a couple of journal prompts for you if you wanted to try this week. Um, what am I grateful for right now that at one time I was only praying for? What's one hardship from my past that shaped me into being the person I am today? And what does my heart really want to feel in 2026? If I fully trusted, what would I let go of today and not bring into next year? And where in my life am I being asked to light that flame even with just one jar of oil? Maybe you're low on money, but there's a present you really want to get somebody. Maybe you feel like you're time poor and somebody needs some volunteer work. It's about having faith that when you take the first step, the universe will provide for you. You can try these affirmations because they're very powerful. I have people that write them all different places and they are working. Um, I'm grateful for the good that's unfolding in my life. I'm grateful for the delight in my day. I am grateful for the love and the flow and the energy in my day. I forgive. I trust. I honor what's becoming. I am always held by something greater than any fear. If you liked this episode, I would really appreciate it if you downloaded it and shared it with somebody. And if you messaged me, I would be very, very grateful. And I am going to take this moment to thank each and every one of you for listening because I appreciate you for taking your time every week to listen to this podcast. I know there's many places that your energy could go, so I'm hoping that this is something that helps you to up your vibe or help somebody else that might be going through something stay with their own soul expansion and transform their lives into being the best person that they can be and becoming who they came here to be. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you like this episode, please let me know. Stop by at social media on Instagram or my Facebook page, just count me in and please leave a comment. If there's anybody that you think could benefit from this episode, please forward it to them. And I look forward to seeing you next time. We're all in this together.