Gratitude Doesn’t Solve Everything
- Nov 18, 2025
- 3 min read
By Tanmeet Sethi, MD
“Go to his bed every night after he’s fallen asleep and say, ‘Thank you’ for him and for this life.”
The instructions were infuriating, quite frankly. My three-year-old middle son had been given a diagnosis for a degenerative and fatal neuromuscular condition, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, like an ALS in young boys. It would first deprive him of the capacity to walk before ravaging his heart and lung muscles. I was struggling with the diagnosis when my mentor gave me this advice.
But I was desperate. So, I did it. I went to his bed every night, said the words, and cried silently. It was hard, I won’t lie. But slowly but surely, something started to shift. I started to feel less tense in my body when I said the words. I started to stroke his hair as I uttered ‘Thank you.’ I started to slowly see the beauty again in being his mother. It took time, but my chemistry changed. Expressing gratitude for my son, for this life we had been given together was not giving up; it was allowing life to be what it was and for me to find a place in it again.
Gratitude doesn’t solve everything or mask reality. It is not the same as toxic positivity. I at first resisted it because it felt like that, like a platitude. My son was still dying, and I could not change that. But saying thank you for something means you start to allow it to have space in your life. Gratitude is about looking at life, instead of away, and finding the sliver of this moment worth fighting for.
It fundamentally changes your biochemistry. We know now through studies, that gratitude puts you in an awareness state in which you can see more clearly and make change. Gratitude acts as a messenger in your nervous system to decrease the resting state of your fear centers. It even improves heart failure. If there were a medication that could do all of this, we would be demanding the prescription.
People ask me regularly, especially after my TEDx talk on gratitude, how I could possibly be grateful in the face of the horrors of the world today. That it feels impossible and often, offensive to do so. My answer? Firstly, gratitude is not a ‘should.’ If you do practice, it’s because you deserve to feel better and more capable of working towards change.
Secondly, in my opinion, gratitude takes back your power after the world has taken it away. We know from studies such as one done on survivors of the World Trade Center, that gratitude can help assign new meaning to challenging tragedies in your brain, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Emotional pain often strips you of one of the most important sources of joy--the search for meaning. In the communities I have worked with after disasters like school shootings and devastating natural disasters, I have seen this as well. They use the same exercise from the studies, gratitude recasting, to look back on the experience with gratitude for who they are now, not for the suffering--this is an important distinction. They then are often able to redeem the experience of surviving as powerful growth.
And lastly, I answer that I never have gratitude for injustice or evil in the world. Only for my capacity to see and feel it fully. It means I have not lost my humanity. Gratitude is not a way to escape the pain, suffering or injustices of this brutal world. Gratitude instead reminds us of the indestructible goodness that remains, despite all of that.
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