Rewiring The Brain With Gentle Gratitude

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We explore gratitude as a practice of attention, not a forced feeling, and show how to hold it alongside stress, grief, and complexity. Science, story, and simple tools help you build resilience without pressure or toxic positivity.

• what gratitude is and what it is not
• how attention reshapes neural pathways
• why stress makes gratitude feel out of reach
• micro-noticing to find calm in seconds
• empathy-based gratitude that honors effort
• being-held gratitude through people, pets, and music
• holding grief and gratitude at the same time
• making gratitude “sticky” with sensory detail and meaning
• gentle prompts to notice two things today

Chapters

• 6:36 Host Background And Lived Approach
• 8:59 Defining Gratitude As Attention
• 11:15 Coexisting Joy And Difficulty
• 14:03 Reflective Questions To Notice Ease
• 16:06 A Story Of Being Held
• 18:13 Stress, Survival, And Compassionate Gratitude
• 20:42 Micro Noticing And Empathy-Based Tools
• 24:57 Bittersweet Gratitude And Memory
• 27:14 Make Gratitude Sticky And Daily
• 28:22 Recap And Listener Appreciation
• 29:58 Resources, Questions, And Closing

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome to Couch Time with Cat, your safe place for real conversation and a gentle check-in. KWVH presents Couch Time with Cat. Hi friends, and welcome to Couch Time with Cat, Mental Wellness with a Friendly Voice. I'm Cat, therapist, bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and endurance athlete. But most of all, I'm a wife, mama, and someone who deeply believes that people are good and healing is possible. Here in the Hill Country of Wimberley, Texas, I've built my life and practice around one purpose to make mental wellness feel accessible, compassionate, and real. This show is for those moments when life feels heavy, when you're craving clarity, or when you just need to hear, you're not alone. Each week we'll explore the terrain of mental wellness through stories, reflections, research, and tools you can bring into everyday life. Think of it as a conversation between friends, rooted in science, guided by heart, and grounded in the belief that healing does not have to feel clinical. It can feel like sitting on a couch with someone who gets it. So whether you're driving, walking, cooking, or simply catching your breath, you're welcome here. This is your space to feel seen, supported, and reminded of your own strength. I'm so glad you're here. Let's dive in. What if gratitude isn't something we find but rediscover? Like an old friend you forgot was waiting for you. What if gratitude looks different when life feels heavy? Grief feels close, or hope feels distant. You're listening to Couch Time with Cat. Hi, I'm Cat, and today we're talking about the power of gratitude, even when it feels out of reach. Imagine this for a moment. It's quiet, late winter afternoon, you're sitting on your back porch with a warm mug of tea cupped in your hands, your dog is curled beside you, and the world is still. There's no grand epiphany, no flood of joy, but something in you softens just enough to feel present again. That's what today's show is really about. How gratitude is not always a feeling that we can will into existence, but a way of coming back to what matters moment by moment. Before we get deeper into the heart of this topic, let's talk about what science tells us about gratitude in a way that feels real and meaningful, not just kind of clinical or cold. Research in positive psychology has shown that gratitude isn't just a nice idea, it literally rewires the brain. Regularly paying attention to what we appreciate strengthens neural pathways associated with positive emotion, connection, and resilience. In one influential study, they studied people who kept a gratitude journal, consistently writing things that they were thankful for. And the studied showed that they reported greater optimism and fewer physical symptoms of illness just after a few weeks. They slept better, felt more alive, and experienced more joy in daily life. But here's the nuance: science doesn't tell us just to be grateful, you know. Oh, God, sometimes it feels like so much pressure. Be grateful, take a breath, be mindful, do a perfect. Like it feels like the pressure to be optimally running in these ways sometimes gets us further away from what we're actually trying to accomplish, which is a sense of peace, a sense of grounding, a sense of contentment. So if at any time in this show I am saying things and you are getting stressed out and you're you're starting to kind of tap into that antsy feeling, like, why is everybody pressuring me to do it well? I want you to just take a deep breath and remind yourself, I'm here with Cat. Hi, I'm here with you. And these are just suggestions. These are just ideas that we're contemplating and we're being really creative about. And you can take what works for you and leave the rest. There is no pressure. So back to the nuance that science doesn't just tell us to be grateful, it shows that attention, what we notice and how often we return to it, shapes our experience. So it's about neural cultivation, not this like forced sense of cheer. What we're doing is we're training our brain to notice good things, things that we're grateful for. And that's why gratitude practice can feel so tender for so many of us. Our nervous systems are activated by stress, grief, exhaustion. And we can't just, you know, flip it into grateful mode. It's not like putting on a new, fresh pair of socks. That's not what it is. What we're actually doing is we're knitting a new pair of socks. We're knitting these experiences and this new way of thinking into our neural pathway. And it's gonna take time. But when we get there, the level of coziness is going to be through the roof. This is where science meets soul, where resiliency isn't just about being positive all the time, but about training our awareness to see more than just what hurts. If we haven't met before, hi, my name is Cat, and my full name, as my parents call me, is Catya Hernandez Holland. I'm a therapist, a coach, an author, a TEDx speaker, an endurance athlete. I'm a million things. I also love bacon and egg tacos. I love vanilla ice cream. I'm a mom. So I have I contain multitudes just like you. And I'm the host, I'm the grateful host of this show, Couch Time with Cat. I'm a Wimberly business owner. And for over a decade, I've supported people around the world working through anxiety, grief, trauma, burnout relationships, and the deep, tender work of becoming more whole. So I've been in this space for quite a while. Gratitude is something I've brought up hundreds of times with clients, and it's really a practice that I practice in my life, and not as a prescription, but as a something that we want to fold in, an ingredient, like kind of like a staple. You know, when you open your pantry, there are some things you always have. You always have salt, pepper, rice, maybe some beans. You know, we always have these staples on hand. Gratitude, I try to encourage my clients, and absolutely I try to keep it in my life, is a staple in my life. I've learned that gratitude isn't about perfection, it's about truth-telling with your inner world. And sometimes the truth is, I don't feel grateful right now. You know, it's not always going to be rainbows and lollipops, and that's okay. Today we're going to explore how gratitude works when it feels effortless, like when it's a warm day and we've got a snow cone in our hand and our kids are happy and healthy, and we think, wow, like we're just washed over with this sense of gratitude. But we're also going to talk about gratitude during really difficult times and when it feels completely impossible to feel grateful for something or for any, even any little thing while something really difficult is happening in our lives. What is gratitude? Gratitude is not a forced positive attitude. Gratitude is not ignoring real pain. And gratitude is certainly not pretending like everything is fine when it isn't. Have you all seen those memes out there? There's like a dumpster on fire, and the person is standing in front of the dumpster and they're saying, it's fine, it's fine, everything's fine. Sometimes, you know, you've heard that saying, like, it feels like you're rearranging chairs on the Titanic. It's like, you know, everything's going to hell in a handbasket, but I'm gonna buy a new throw pillow and my life's going to be better for it. Gratitude is a practice of attention, noticing what is alive in the moment, no matter how small. As Maya Angelou once said, this is a wonderful day. I've never seen this one before. So gratitude is a practice of awareness and it's also a lens with which you approach your day. That's the essence, really. Gratitude is kind of keeping a sense of awe and wonder with you all the time. Not letting the little things pass you by, not taking, listener, as I'm talking, I am looking outside this window here, and I am so grateful that the view that I get to have while I record the show is this gorgeous creek. And most of the creek, the trees are bare because it's winter, and yet they're still green, but you know, really close to my recording window. There is this gorgeous green moss, and it's so bright. And my eye keeps getting drawn toward it because it's so bright. And I think that that's what gratitude is. I see so many trees in front of me and they're bare and they're gray. But my eye didn't go to the bare and gray. My eye went to the bright green. So that's where I am right now in my environment. That's what I can see. I want to invite you to look around. Where are you right now? Are you in your car? Are you weed eating? Are you in the ice cream shop? Are you walking to the bus stop? Where are you? And what's one small detail that you can notice in your environment right now that you think, oh, that is so nice? Like, let me really take that in for just a moment. Let me not take that beautiful cloud for granted, or the pink sky, or the green moss, or the cozy blanket. What's one thing you can notice right now that feels good to you? Friends, a necessary truth about gratitude is that it doesn't erase suffering. It coexists with difficulty. We can miss someone that we love and be grateful for their memory. We can be struggling and notice the warmth of the blanket. In fact, gratitude often becomes most meaningful, not in moments of ease, but in moments when we feel held by life despite our challenges. Something that I'll talk about over and over is the power of and the power to hold what seems like two opposing truths at the same time. This is a necessary skill for us as we age when we can hold difficulty and joy in the same thought, in the same breath, in the same body, when when we can be aware of both and embrace them both, it really gives us a more accurate description of how we're feeling and what we're experiencing. So we're more likely to say, you know what? Man, this was a tough day, but man, this chicken taco is delicious. What we're really trying to avoid is washing our day in one word or feeling, or washing our life in one word or feeling. We don't want to pigeonhole our day or experience. We want to leave space for nuance, for variety. We want to leave space for something good to present. Here's some questions that you can hold in your mind today. You don't need to answer them out loud if that makes you feel uncomfortable, but just kind of keep them around. Maybe you want to write them down, maybe you just want to press pause and go grab a pen and paper so that you can write them down on a little post-it. Here we go. What small detail can you appreciate in this moment? What is something that surprised you with ease today? Oh, don't you love that word? Ease. My goodness, I love that word. So maybe it's I found a good parking spot. Maybe it's the restaurant that I'm trying to order pizza from picked up real quickly. Maybe it's my soda was extra cold. You know, whatever it is, they our life is filled with these small, tiny details. It doesn't have to be Prince Charming propose to me. These are not the things that build our life. What builds our life is this like tapestry of small, gorgeous experiences. And lastly, if gratitude were a gentle friend, so how might gratitude show up for you if you let it? If you let it in, would it open your eyes to the beauty around you? Would it help you sleep better at night? Would it help you appreciate your relationships more? Would it help you appreciate that your wife made you a cup of coffee this morning? A friend once shared with me a moment that really stayed in my heart. She told me about a stretch of time, months, where it was all kind of gray, just nothing felt particularly good. She's an executive and she was working really hard and being a mama, and she was tired and deadlines were piling up, and even the tools she would normally use, like meditation and journaling, just weren't landing. I mean, she was overwhelmed. So one evening she just sat on the couch with her hubby. No pressure to feel better, no gratitude challenge, just presence. Remember earlier when I said sometimes when we're tired and overwhelmed, this pressure to do more, be more optimized, even that can feel aggressive. We it can feel like a back off. I'm just trying to survive. Don't give me another to do thing on my list, right? Don't give me something else to do. We get that way. We get like crotchety when we and grumpy, when we don't have margin. And so she was feeling that. Like, I cannot, she's like, I cannot give more than I'm giving. I am plum out of energy. And she said when she sat down and just allowed herself to be, that she felt her shoulders drop and she kind of sunk into her hubby. And it just brought this sense of relief to her. And she said, nothing dramatic happened. He didn't say anything that like parted the Red Sea, but just that being and him noticing her needing that care and her allowing herself to be held emotionally and physically, that something shifted, and she kind of leaned into gratitude in that moment. Even gratitude to be held when things are really, really hard. So the hard part of her life didn't go away. She was still tired, but somebody saw her, noticed her, and held her. Gratitude is going to feel hard sometimes. When our nervous system is in stress mode, and I'm kind of like making um fists with my hands, when we're stressed, we're just always kind of on the defense. Our nervous system is biologically tuned to look for threats, not blessings. So that's our survival instinct. That's not failure. So when we're thinking like, think grateful thoughts, think grateful thoughts, like, why can't I just be grateful? When we approach gratitude with that kind of aggressive approach, posture, we're like, do it, do it, do it. It feels it's we're missing the forest for the trees. So when our mind is, when we're kind of critical of ourselves that we're not being grateful, our body's like, bro, this feels wrong right now. Like, I don't have time for this. I'm in survival mode. Like, gratitude in that moment is auxiliary to our body. Our body does not have time and space to be grateful because it's trying to survive. Gratitude practices assume a kind of emotional availability. So it isn't present in states of stress or trauma or overwhelm. Don't be critical of yourself, okay? I won't be critical of myself. You don't be critical of yourself. Deal, deal. So if you're listening and thinking, I know how gratitude is supposed to help, but it just doesn't stick. It's not that you're doing it wrong, it's that your body is protecting you. Your body is stressed out. So let's work with that. That's where compassionate gratitude can come in. So instead of pushing for an elevated emotion, like, oh my gosh, why can't I just be so grateful right now? We can start with just kind of a neutral noticing, something as simple as, I'm aware of my breath. This isn't gratitude like in a hallmark way, right? Like, I'm so grateful for you. How could I live without you? Why did I sound like a ghost just then? I'm not sure. So gratitude doesn't always have to be just this like saccharine version of happiness, but it's an acknowledgement of what you're experiencing. So we can start there. Let's take a moment right now and notice. Just notice your breath for a second. You don't have to try to change it, just sense it. Listener, I do this all day with clients in terms of let's notice, let's notice. So I do it, I don't know, a dozen times a day. And even right now, as I gave myself the cue to just notice that sense of awareness, turning inward, relaxed me. True words. True words. I feel much more relaxed now that I'm noticing my breath. That's the gratitude foundation. Attention without judgment. So we can start there. If we're not feeling hallmarky about our gratitude, we can just start with a sense of awareness. Here are three practical tools that you can use today, even when gratitude feels out of reach. Number one, micro-noticing. So we're not even going to go for the big things, we're gonna go for the small, tiny things. A warm breath, a light breeze, the color of your teamug, a song that played on KWVH unexpectedly that you love. These aren't big moments, but they're noticings. And noticing is the first step toward connection. So earlier I asked you to notice something in your environment that you're grateful for. Now I'm gonna ask you to notice a second thing that you're grateful for. Take a look around, let your eyeballs wander. Maybe it's the texture of the clothes that you're wearing, maybe it's the color of your nail polish, maybe it's the fact that you bought a new hammer and you love it. What is it around you that you can notice and be grateful for? Tool number two empathy based gratitude. Sometimes gratitude. Attitude shows up not in joy, but in acknowledging our own resilience. So instead of thinking, oh, I'm thankful everything is great, right? That's a little like mr mr, a little Pollyanna-ish. Maybe you can try to think, I'm grateful my heart is still trying, even when it hurts. I'm grateful I rolled out of bed, even though I wanted to stay in bed. I'm grateful I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for my kid, even though she was mean to me, and I wanted to be passive aggressive. How is your resilience showing up for you? I guarantee every single person listening to this show is resilient. I guarantee it. I've never met a person that I thought, wow, they just can't handle it. Never. Never. I am always blown away by the level of resilience in people that I meet. We go through a lot. We go through a lot out there. And you make it through and you make the best of it. So be proud of yourself. Compassion toward yourself. It reframes, it's not denial of struggle. Rather, you're saying, I am struggling and yet I'm making it. I'm struggling and this is how I'm showing up. I'm struggling and I'm hopeful. So the gratitude for is for the and fill in the blank. Okay. Remember the example we talked about earlier with my friend who was just having a hard time and she leaned into her husband. I want to bring that to you. So gratitude's always not going to feel happy. Sometimes it just feels you're going to feel held. So here is something special. Who or what makes you feel held, connected? Maybe it's a pet. You know, I have a little puppy. He's about seven months old. His name is Chip. And when I cuddle with Chip, oh my gosh. I am so it really relaxes me. I'm so grateful for him. He's about 15 pounds, and I just kind of pick him up like a baby and snuggle with him. Is that weird? You know, I feel held, so to speak, emotionally by my little seven-month-old puppy, but I'll say it, I do. So maybe there's a pet, maybe you have a pet in your home that does the same for you. Or maybe it's a bestie. Maybe she knows just the way you love your coffee and she brings you a hot coffee to work. Or maybe it's your kiddo that brings you toast in bed on a Saturday morning. Or maybe it's a song that reminds you of that perfect day, right? Any of those things, all of those things matter. Something people don't talk about a lot is gratitude isn't always going to feel light and airy, right? So we've been talking about gratitude as a sense of noticing, gratitude as a sense of acceptance, awareness, gratitude as a sense of neutrality. You know, sometimes we need to start with that as a foundation. And sometimes it's even bittersweet, right? We're holding the juxtaposition of emotions like love and grief. And that can be tough. We might be grateful for a memory of someone who's passed on, and we're so grateful for them. And that comes with an ache. And that's not less valid. That doesn't make your gratitude less valid. I wear a pinky ring that I had made, a specific I specifically had it made after my mentor died, because he used to wear a pinky ring. And I wear it every day. And I think about him. And sometimes my heart aches when I remember I can't call him. And that grief is also coupled with just a deep sense of gratitude that God brought him to me. God brought me to him in my life when I was 19. So I had 25 years with this man being mentored by him and being his employee and being staff and being friends and just all these different roles. So the gratitude comes with a real heartache at the same time. So that's that doesn't make a ton of sense. But it does to me. In order to feel the gratitude, I also have to be willing to feel the grief of not having him here. And that's okay. That's okay. I'm willing to pay that price. There's a quote that I love from a Swedish theologian, and he says, For all that has been, thank you. And for all that shall be, yes. So gratitude doesn't erase the loss, but it makes space for more than one truth at a time. Grief and gratitude coexisting. I'd love for you to take a moment right now and reflect. Maybe even write down one or two things that you notice in the rest of your day. You've noticed two things so far in your environment. And just give yourself a little challenge. Write down two more things by the end of the day that you are grateful for and write down what they mean to you. Write down what they mean to you. Help it stick, help those neural pathways. My line of work, it's called making it sticky. So when we're trying to introduce a new thought, a new skill into our brains, we have to do it over and over and over. And the more sensory experiences that you can attach to those new neural pathways, the better, the more they're gonna stick. And the more kind of color and texture you can give your neural pathways, the better. So when you're looking for these two extra things by the end of the day, write down their meaning, write down the color, write down if you'd like to see more of them. Make it a thing. Make gratitude a staple in your life. Make it an ingredient in your life. You won't regret it. And if you have questions that you'd like me to answer anonymously on this show, you can call or text 956-249-7930, and I'll answer them on the air. So far today, we explored what gratitude genuinely is and what it isn't. Why it can feel hard, especially during stress or overwhelm, practical steps to begin noticing again, even when gratitude feels far away, and how to hold gratitude and grief together without judgment. Remember, gratitude isn't a destination. You're not gonna be perfect at it. That's okay. It's an orientation, it's a lens with which you train yourself to look at your life and the experiences that you have. It's a way of returning your awareness to the good over and over again. Thank you for spending this time with me. Listener, I am deeply, deeply grateful for you, for your presence, for your support. You helped make my dreams come true. And um I could cry. I could cry. I'm just so grateful for this opportunity and that you trust me with your time and that you give such a warm welcome to me and to the guests I have on the show. So thank you so much. I am grateful for you. Until next time, take good care of yourselves. Thank you for spending this time with me. If something from today's conversation resonated, or if you're in a season where support would help, visit me at gotttheahollam.com. That's c A T I A H O L M.com. You can also leave an anonymous question for the show by calling or texting 956-249-7930. I'd love to hear what's on your heart. If Couch Time with Cat has been meaningful to you, it would mean so much if you'd subscribe, rate, and leave a review. It helps others find us and it grows this community of care. And if you know someone who needs a little light right now, send them this episode. Remind them they're not alone. Until next time, be gentle with yourself. Keep showing up and know I'm right here with you.