Try this one thing every day to increase your baseline happiness

Okay, so one of the most important things to understand before we even talk about practicing gratitude is that your brain is not designed to make you happy, which seems strange because I feel like as children or even when you think about mental health, you think about the fact that your brain is where like happiness comes from or whatever it might be.

Like you think that that is... part of its role, but its primary job actually is to keep you alive.

And from an evolutionary perspective, that means that it is biased towards detecting threat and anticipating problems and remembering negative experiences more strongly than positive ones.

So it's not really trying to keep you happy every day.

It is trying to make sure that you are staying alive.

And so the issue is that in modern life, the majority of us are rarely dealing with consistent physical danger.

but our brains are actually constantly responding as if we are.

So you know the joke that's like, oh, my brain doesn't know the difference between getting an email and being chased by a bear.

Like that's literally what it is.

So chronic stress, comparison, information overload and uncertainty all activate the same neural systems that evolved to protect us from immediate threats.

like being chased by a bear.

And over time, this keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of vigilance because we want to stay alive, which actually lowers baseline mood, it increases cortisol levels, and it makes it harder for positive experiences to fully register.

So even when things are going well, the brain is often too busy scanning for what might actually go wrong next to even enjoy the things that are going well.

so practicing gratitude becomes very powerful in this context not because it makes life objectively better again i'm not just talking about like oh be grateful be grateful practicing gratitude every day like specifically writing down what you are grateful for because it intervenes in how the brain actually allocates attention from a neuroscience perspective gratitude works by engaging multiple brain regions involved in emotional regulation learning and reward processing the What this means is that when you practice gratitude, you actually activate the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious attention, perspective taking and regulating emotional responses.

At the same time, activity in the amygdala, which is the brain's threat detection center, tends to decrease.

This shift matters because the amygdala is what keeps the body in a state of stress readiness.

So why you constantly feel on edge or why you constantly feel like you are dealing with all of these different things.

And when gratitude redirects attention away from threat and towards evaluation and meaning and like looking at your life and seeing what you are grateful for, then the nervous system actually physically begins to downregulate.

Gratitude also stimulates the release of dopamine and serotonin, which are neurotransmitters that play a key role in motivation and mood stability and feelings of well-being.

Then dopamine reinforces the behaviour, which is why gratitude becomes easier with repetition, while serotonin contributes to a more stable emotional baseline rather than short bursts of positivity.

When I was reading about this, I was thinking how much, to me, this links back to the idea of, like, lucky girl syndrome.

If you start noticing the good things in your life, you start to do that as a habit.

But it has to be a habit.

It's not something that we naturally do all the time.

We are, as we've already talked about, we look for threats.