Gratitude has been domesticated. Turned into something tidy and marketable. A journal prompt, a morning ritual, a pastel-coloured reminder to “look on the bright side.” It’s now treated as a soft skill. A wellness habit. A behavioural nudge we’re encouraged to adopt because research tells us it’s good for us. It improves mood. Lowers stress. Builds resilience. All true.
But this framing misses something essential. It treats gratitude as an intervention rather than a way of seeing. A technique you add to your life, rather than a perspective that reshapes how you live it.
Because when you listen to people who have lived through loss, ambition, illness, and reinvention, gratitude doesn’t sound like a habit. It sounds like a reckoning. Something learned slowly, often painfully, through experience rather than intention.
After years of conversations on the Bountifull Podcast, one thing is clear: the people who speak about gratitude with the most depth didn’t learn it from a quote. They learned it from living. Not when things were easy. But when they weren’t.
Psychologist Paula Williams, who studies awe, never even uses the word gratitude. She talks instead about moments that pull us out of ourselves. “When you experience awe,” she says, “it pulls you out of yourself… If you can connect to something bigger than yourself, you’re able to downregulate your stress and see the world differently”. What she’s pointing to is subtle but profound. Gratitude doesn’t always come from positive thinking. Sometimes it comes from perspective. From scale. From standing in front of something vast enough to loosen your grip on your own problems. In those moments, the nervous system settles. The ego quiets. Gratitude isn’t summoned. It arrives.
What Paula describes at an individual level, Rick Leskowitz sees play out collectively. In his work with the Boston Red Sox baseball team, he found that appreciation doesn’t just feel good – it changes performance. “Something about feeling appreciative puts your biofield in sync with everybody else,” he explains. “If players appreciate each other, they perform at a better level”. Gratitude here isn’t sentimental. It’s functional. It changes how people relate, which changes what they’re capable of together. It’s not an inner mood. It’s a collective state.
For others, it’s less about expansion and more about restraint. About catching yourself before life slips past unnoticed. Professional Rally Driver Hayden Paddon speaks about it through regret. “Probably the one regret is that I didn’t enjoy that time as much as what I should have,” he admits. He isn’t talking about failure. He’s talking about presence. About what happens when ambition narrows your attention so much that you miss the very thing you once dreamed of. His story holds an uncomfortable truth: you can be living your dream and still fail to notice it. Gratitude, in his worldview, isn’t automatic. It requires consciousness, especially when life is loud and fast and demanding. And yet, he also recognises that difficulty sharpens appreciation. Without contrast, we lose texture. We stop noticing what matters.
Ty Walker takes a more deliberate approach. Running a trout hatchery means long days, unpredictable outcomes, constant responsibility. It would be easy to feel trapped by it. Instead, he reframes. “I don’t have to. I get to,” he says. “No one’s making me do this. I’m choosing this”. That small linguistic shift changes everything. Gratitude becomes agency. It turns obligation into ownership. Ty doesn’t deny the grind – he just refuses to let it turn him bitter. Gratitude, for him, is not a feeling he waits for. It’s a posture he practises.
Kristin Francis, a psychiatrist who works daily with mental illness, grounds this in science. “We know that gratitude helps decrease cortisol,” she explains, “which impacts your immune system and metabolism”. But what makes her perspective powerful isn’t just the data. It’s her insistence that gratitude must be accessible. Not another self-improvement task we fail at, but something behavioural. Smile at someone on a walk. Notice one thing that’s working. Speak to yourself the way you would a friend. These are small actions, but they interrupt negative loops. They change the emotional weather of a day. Gratitude here isn’t spiritual. It’s practical.
Alia Bojilova challenges one of our most entrenched cultural myths: that happiness scales with success. Growing up in post-communist Bulgaria with very little materially, she remembers her childhood as abundant. “Creativity, making do with very little and abundant joy,” she says. She later found it “shocking” to realise that openness and generosity weren’t correlated with how much people had. People in war-affected regions sometimes showed more humanity than those in high-pressure corporate environments. Her gratitude is rooted in essentials. “Have food, have shelter, you’re done.” It’s confronting. It asks what we actually mean by enough. For Alia, gratitude is attention — a deliberate choice about how you see the world.
Alia’s story lands close to home for me. I learned gratitude through loss – losing my dad just after my eighteenth birthday, and then several close friends and family members in a relatively small space of time. When you’ve watched people give up on life, voluntarily or otherwise, something shifts. You stop assuming you have time. You stop postponing the life you keep telling yourself you’ll live “one day.” Gratitude stops being abstract. It becomes a decision. A quiet refusal to sleepwalk through your own existence.
Health did the same. After knee surgeries ended a dance career I thought defined my future, being able to move again feels anything but neutral. Movement is a gift. So is having an active mind. So is simply being here. I know other people aren’t this lucky. That awareness changes how you live. It makes you choose presence over autopilot. It makes you less willing to waste days. Loss has a way of sharpening what matters – not in a sentimental way, but in a clarifying one. It drives me to live fully, on my own terms, because I’ve seen what it looks like when you don’t, or can’t.
Some expressions of gratitude are quieter. Oscar Winner Sir Richard Taylor used to call his mum every night on the drive home. Ten minutes. No agenda. Just love. Not symbolic. Lived. His gratitude shows up in repetition, in small rituals that say: you matter. Artist Lynne Sandri swims in the ocean because she feels lucky to live where she does. “If I’m not using it, that’s my problem,” she says. Gratitude, for her, is physical. You don’t admire the world from a distance. You get in it. You feel it.
In different ways, they’re all anchoring themselves in ordinary rituals. Travel influencer Scott Eddy, who spends most of his life on the road, watches the sunrise. Not for aesthetics, but for alignment. “It’s impossible to have a bad day if you start your day like that,” he says. It’s a way of beginning awake. Present. Oriented to possibility.
But gratitude doesn’t stop at the edges of our own lives. Professor Dirk Philipsen takes gratitude even further outward. “I need a thriving commons. I need a thriving community,” he says. He points to electricity, clean water, infrastructure – the invisible systems that quietly hold our lives together. Gratitude, in his view, isn’t personal. It’s relational. When you truly see how supported you are, responsibility follows. Care follows. You stop believing you are self-made.
What emerges across all these stories is a very different definition of gratitude. It isn’t forced positivity. It isn’t aesthetic rituals. It isn’t spiritual bypassing. It is attention. Choice. Responsibility. Presence. It doesn’t make life easier. It makes us more awake inside it.
And that may be its real power. Gratitude doesn’t anaesthetise us to the world—it sharpens us to it. It teaches us to notice support instead of assuming independence. To stop postponing joy. To hold grief without surrendering to it. To recognise that we are not self-made, but held—by people, by systems, by moments we rarely pause to name.
Perhaps the most radical thing about gratitude is this: it asks us to stay. To stay with our lives as they are, not as we wish they were. To stop scrolling past the ordinary. To recognise that being here—awake, breathing, choosing—is not neutral. It is remarkable.
Not because life is perfect.
But because it’s happening.