Why Feeling Grateful Can Be Difficult: How to Practice Gratitude (Do This First)

We've all heard the same gratitude tips a thousand times. Practice daily gratitude. Keep a gratitude journal. Name three things you're thankful for. Simple, right?

And yet, people don't actually stick with their gratitude practice. At least not consistently.

In this episode, I'm getting into why gratitude habits don't last, and it has nothing to do with willpower. There's a reason the usual advice doesn't work for most people—and once you understand what's actually happening, everything starts to make sense.

I share my own journey from chronic negativity to genuine gratitude, what was really blocking me, and what finally shifted. If gratitude exercises have felt forced or fake, if you've tried and quit more times than you can count—this one's for you.

→ Why your gratitude practice keeps failing (it's not you)
→ What's actually blocking you from feeling thankful
→ My personal story from negativity to genuine gratitude
→ What needs to happen before gratitude advice can work
→ Community members share their favorite ways to practice gratitude

Transcript

Practicing gratitude is supposed to be life changing, but how come most of us drop it after a week? There's a reason it doesn't stick. And no, it's not you being lazy. If you've struggled with consistently feeling grateful, then this episode is extra special, handcrafted just for you. So last week was Thanksgiving here in the US, and as a new podcaster, I kind of felt like I had to talk about gratitude. I mean, it is the obvious topic du jour, but I also didn't really want to, because, honestly, what else is there to say? 

We've all heard the same gratitude advice 1000 times, like, what Zoe says here:

Every morning, I will name three things that I am grateful for or that I'm thankful for. And like, it's just such a simple thing that you can do, even if you're super busy. If you could just take those like five seconds to just name those three things every day, it can really make an impact on your mental health, on your physical health, and it can really increase your happiness and your health. And it's just really important to include that, at least in my opinion.

What she's saying isn't wrong, right? If you did this every day, you would probably feel better about life. And I even have the five minute journal, which has you do this every morning and evening. So when I listened to Zoe, it was interesting, because no one I know does this, at least when they're being truthful, they don't really do this. 

It's kind of like taking vitamins, where we know it's a good idea, but so few of us actually do it. It's a weird thing, if you think about it, why does something that's so universally acknowledged as a good thing? Why is it we don't consciously practice gratitude on a daily basis? That's the question I'm exploring today.

You're listening to This Is How You Think the podcast that helps you remodel your mindset. I'm your host. Jule Kim, let's dive in 

So Zoe's advice about noticing three things, something like that, it's not that hard. It doesn't even take that much time. It's not like going to the gym, where most of us also don't exercise, because that takes some time and effort. And for me, it was only within the last three years that I've managed to make exercise a regular part of my daily routine.

But that 5-minute journal I have? Well, my friend Clarissa gave it to me back in 2017, and when I checked it for this episode, apparently I have filled it out a grand total of 16 times. Sorry, Clarissa.

Why is this? Why is it so hard to actually live an intentionally grateful life?

Maybe you’re different, but from what I've observed with everyone I know including myself — 99.9 percent of the time, whenever I see someone expressing gratitude, it only comes when something extra good happens, like we’re given something, or someone does something for us. 

We don't really express gratitude for the everyday things, the things we already have.

If you think about it, we don’t usually sit around saying, "Oh my gosh, I'm so grateful to have clean drinking water." You don’t normally hear that in the US. We also don't typically say, "I'm so grateful to have a clean, comfortable, warm bed to sleep in." 

Which is a little odd because clean water and a good bed are pretty important to quality of life, but we take them for granted as basic necessities that you’re supposed to have. You don’t even think about it, even though there are parts of the world that don’t have these things.

So I did a little bit of digging in my personal life with my family, friends, and my notes on clients I've worked with, and here's what I've found. 

Most people's internal space, especially emotionally, is already filled up with other stuff.

Especially these three things - I call them layers - 1) We have unprocessed emotions. 2) We're spewing judgment and blame, at ourselves and everyone else. And 3) we have our habits of where we put our attention.

Let me use myself as an example - I'll show you what I mean.

In episode one, I mentioned how many of the people who know me today are surprised when I say they probably wouldn't have liked me in my first 30 years of life because I was so incredibly negative. 

Well, part of it came from serious trauma.

So around two years ago, I found out that my dad and I were held up at gunpoint when I was three. I don't remember it, and my parents never brought it up to me again until I recently asked about this other time when I was 8, and they were like, do you mean when you were 3? And I was like, what? What happened when I was 3?? What the heck?!!

And maybe they didn't want to further traumatize me, but this is classic. Not talking about stuff is kind of the Asian way. Back then, nobody knew that even if a person doesn't consciously remember something, that the body always does. So that's when a LOT of stuff started to make sense to me, all of a sudden. Imagine that.

There was also the time when I was 8. I will spare you the details, but my dad was shot in our convenience store and I was sleeping in the back when it happened. Maybe I'm fortunate that I didn't witness it myself. But who knows, maybe not, because I have imagined it like a thousand times. The brain wants to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, don't worry. My dad is still with us today, despite being shot in the head. He was incredibly lucky, and as far as the doctors could tell, he didn't have any brain damage. They said he was a walking miracle.

So there was that - which was pretty big, and then there was the daily reality.
My family — I'm not going to beat around the bush — it was straight up an abusive situation. And I'm not trying to say my family are bad people because at the end of the day, I know everyone was just trying to get by. But when you have a boiling pot under pressure, that pressure is going to come out in undesirable ways.

I was never taken to a therapist, never taken to anybody. This was the 80s. Nobody emphasized mental health. That was almost a laughable idea back then. So I was carrying an avalanche of unprocessed stuff just lurking inside of me with nowhere to go. That's the first layer — unprocessed emotion.

And all of that turned into judgment and blame. Most of my memories growing up — it wasn't a happy time. And it was weird because my friends at school were so happy-go-lucky. They had a certain lightness to them that I didn't have so I could tell they had a very different home life. They had family members they actually wanted to be around. But me, I was always afraid of getting beaten or yelled at. Life felt really terrible and super unfair, so I was super angry and blaming and judgey. 

That's the second layer — judgment and blame toward my friends, the world, and myself.

And that's when the habitual negativity developed. When you experience negative or scary or traumatic events, you start scanning for more negative things. You're constantly looking for threats about to appear on the horizon because you're trying to protect yourself. 

With everything that had happened to me, I felt like I was constantly on guard. I was fixated on the negative aspects of any situation, and it was like I was blind to the positive. This is the third layer — where you point your attention. I didn’t know that you get more of what you focus on.

So we have three layers feeding each other in a vicious cycle. This is what I mean by not having the emotional space. When your entire existence is consumed like this, you don't have the space inside of you to actually be grateful. Not in a meaningful way. And definitely not consistently.

Now here's the thing about gratitude. By nature, gratitude is in direct opposition to all of the undigested emotion, the judgment and blame, the habitual looking for the negativity.

For someone who is somewhere deep in the three layers like I was, trying to practice gratitude is like slapping a band-aid on a broken leg. You're layering gratitude on top of undigested pain. It doesn’t work.

This was me for a long time. I never really felt grateful because I was so trapped in negativity. I didn't break the negativity loop until after I started dating my husband.
We had been together around 3 months, and I still remember this one day - this was back when I was a gamer. We’d just lost a game of League of Legends. I was in a foul mood and I was being extra critical of the other players. And that’s when my husband turns to me and says, "I wish you weren't so negative."
It felt like a slap in the face. It hurt.

And you have to understand, my husband rarely criticizes anyone. He rarely complains. You really have to be over the top for him to say something like that. That’s why it shook me hard because I knew that him saying that meant it was serious.

That was when the first cracks of awareness appeared in my negativity loop.
The next big jump in awareness happened after I became a coach. That’s when I saw just how judgmental I was. Constantly. I had this inner voice with this internal commentary that never stopped. And it’s super sneaky because most of us never question any of the things we think.

We’re running around on default mode thinking all these things, and we think we’re right. We fall into judging and blaming as a coping mechanism for the bad things happening to us. The commentary is how we make sense of the world. But we do it in a way that's so filtered, so biased, so negative, but most of it is never true. We’re making stories up.

And the part that I find hilarious is that if we're going to make stories up, why don't we make up stuff that's positive? You know, use your power for good, not evil. But that's not what we do. We have an incredibly strong bias for the negative.

Now, if you're listening to all of this and you’re thinking, "what the heck do I do? How do I get out of this negative cycle? How do I bring more gratitude into my life?"

Here’s what I’ve found.

If you truly want to live a life where you feel deeply grateful, the first step is to process. Process your life and what has happened to you. Digest the pain you've been carrying — the fears, the uncertainties, the anger. Everything.

Think of this like food, but with your experiences. When people have poor digestion, food just sits in their stomach and starts to rot. That's what causes heartburn and acid reflux. Most of us are walking around with undigested experiences sitting in our body.

So the first step is to process. Digest your experiences.

Next is acceptance — to take your experiences in as they are, without resisting, without pushing away. To understand that something happened and see how it's affected you, without rejecting the fact that it's part of your life.

Once you get to acceptance, then you can release. Actually let go. And when you let go, that's when gratitude shows up. Because now you've finally created space to feel other things.

All those tips we hear about living a more grateful life, the advice isn't bad. It's just coming too soon - that’s not how people work. We all have a cycle we have to go through first with processing, acceptance, and release.

When we go through that cycle, that's when the resistance fades away and we're finally able to naturally feel grateful. We’re open to actually using those tips on gratitude, and actively leverage it to reshape or reframe our more difficult or negative feelings.

Now, just to let you know, clearing out the things lurking in your past — it takes time - it doesn’t happen overnight. For me it took decades because I didn’t know I was dragging this baggage around and I didn’t have the tools, which is why I’m sharing this with you so that it doesn’t take you decades as well. This is where working with a therapist or a coach can help you do this in a safe way.

Once you do start making progress, you also want to make sure you're developing a way of processing so that you’re not piling up on new unresolved stuff like some kind of hoarder.

So for example, here’s what I do: When something happens that I feel triggered by, I ask myself: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling this? What triggered it? And what do I want to do about it?

That's me processing in real time. This is how I make sure I don't create another negativity loop.

Ever since I worked on everything I’ve been sharing with you, it's been incredible. I have moments where I feel so grateful for everything. Every day I'm grateful for my husband. I'm grateful my parents are still alive. I'm grateful I get to do the work I do. Sometimes I can't believe this is my life.

And when I see other people experiencing something beautiful, it almost makes me want to cry because I'm so happy for them.

I was never able to access that before.

So create the space within yourself. Process, accept, release. Gratitude will flow.
And when you’re ready, here are some ways to intentionally feel grateful.

This first one is from Von, which I personally love, because I don’t do this enough so it’s a great reminder.

I focus on what I have versus what I don't have in life. And also like to look back at low points in my life and and those times I wished for everything that I have now. And when I do that, it puts things in a perspective, and I can't help but be grateful.

This next one is from Matt. If you are the person who doesn’t stop to smell the roses because you keep moving the goalposts on yourself, this one's for you.

For me, this has always been a challenge of the how do I celebrate the progress that I've made and the gains along the way, while still having a big vision and goals, it's always been something that's challenging for me, and what I've really what's what's helped me lately is this understanding of I'm measuring myself, not against the big, ambitious goal that kind of guides me and is the direction, but I'm measuring myself against the small personal growth steps and wins along the way.

And here's Lauren with a really simple practice to anchor gratitude with something tangible.

My favorite way to practice gratitude is through the lens of my camera. It helps me be more present with what's around me. It helps me frame the beauty that I see and just notice the little details that are often missed when I'm quickly moving from task A to task B, or destination a to destination B. And then once I've noticed what's all around me physically. It just creates this domino effect of gratitude, of what's beyond where I presently AM. And it just is a wonderful feeling.

And this last one is from me. This year my favorite way to consistently practice gratitude has been using Finch, which is this really cute self-care app. They’re not sponsoring this and I’m not affiliated with them, I just really love the app. I use it around 3 times a day, sometimes more because it’s fun creating outfits and decorating the room. The best part is I got my husband to use Finch too, so we check in together every evening. It’s been really nice.

That’s it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, share with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’d like to work with me to create space within, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear from you.

As always, I believe in you. See you next time.