The Mel Robbins Podcast
Try This Today: How to Use Gratitude to Feel Happier & Improve Your Relationships
27 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the surprising power of gratitude?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Today, you and I are talking about a word that is so overused, it barely means anything anymore. The word, gratitude. Gratitude. And before you roll your eyes, I used to do the same. I just want you to hear me out because I want to approach the idea of gratitude from a very different angle.
Not your corny, just be thankful for everything kind of episode, because there's no way I'm going to tell you to ignore the madness that is happening in the world and probably even in your own life. Because peace isn't about ignoring the madness. It's about finding stillness and power within the chaos. And that's what gratitude is.
Whether you realize it or not, the madness in the world is rewiring your mind and your body for negativity. Gratitude is how you fight back. Gratitude is what you need to rewire your mind. Because when you practice gratitude as an intentional mindset, you are teaching your mind to spot what's okay right now.
to spot the goodness, to spot the things that are going well, to lift yourself up so that you don't get gaslit by the negativity. It's not just a feel-good thing. It's about intentionally changing the settings in your mind. Gratitude is going to help you calm down faster when you get upset. It will help you think clearer. It will help you get better sleep.
It will help you see that what you have is enough, which brings you even more. It trains your mind to focus on what's going right. Because where you point your attention, that's exactly where your emotions and your actions go. Gratitude is an act of defiance in a world that's trying to gaslight you into thinking you have no power and that there's nothing in the world that's good.
It's simply not true. And so we're going to talk about it as an intentional act of changing the settings in your mind. And then I'm going to give you three very simple tools, ways that you can retrain your mind for gratitude, backed by research, and it will immediately help you put it into action, and you're going to feel more present and more grounded. And I'd It's not just going to be me.
I'm bringing in some heavy hitters. Dr. Tara Swart Bieber, who's one of our most popular guests of all time and a senior lecturer at MIT. She has a medical degree from Oxford. You're also going to hear from Dr. Aditi Noorakar, another fan favorite who's a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. She was the medical director of Harvard Beth Israel's Deaconess Hospital's Integrative Medicine Program.
And look, I said right up front, I was skeptical about the whole gratitude thing. But got to say, the science is going to prove me and you wrong. And if you're still feeling a little skeptical, like, come on, Mel, gratitude, give me a break. Just stay with me. Because after this break, we're going to change that forever.
This is not about forcing yourself to smile or pretend that everything's fine. I'm talking three practical tools that will shift your mind and body from the inside out. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It's always such an honor to be together and to spend this time with you.
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Chapter 2: How can gratitude help shift your mindset?
Dr. Aditi Narukar is a medical doctor, researcher, and world-renowned expert in stress and public health.
She's a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and was the medical director of Harvard Beth Israel's Deaconess's Hospital's Integrative Medicine Program, where she practiced and developed this enormous clinical practice in stress management, using evidence-based integrative approaches to help her patients feel better.
She's also one of the 57 world-renowned experts that I spoke to and that is featured in the Let Them Theory book. I love her research on resetting your stress response. And she spoke on this show about how powerful intentional gratitude journaling can be for your brain. Check this out.
The reason gratitude is so important from a scientific perspective is because when you are doing a gratitude, daily gratitude practice, it takes 60 seconds. you are rewiring your brain because what you are doing, it's a scientific, again, a fancy scientific name called cognitive reframing, what you focus on grows.
So Rick Hansen talks about this idea of when you're going through stress, he's a psychologist in California, negative experiences become sticky in the brain like Velcro. You hold onto them because it's a feeling of survival and self-preservation. And so when you start practicing gratitude on an everyday basis, it's cognitive reframing. What you focus on grows. So you shift your perspective.
So even if negative and positive are happening at the same rate, good and bad things are happening in your life at the same rate, when you are feeling a sense of stress, you are focused primarily on the negative because you are thinking danger, danger, danger, right? Red alert. And so how do you decrease that stickiness of negative experiences in your brain when you're feeling a sense of stress?
By practicing gratitude. So the negative experiences may happen, but it slides off. How does it happen? Through gratitude. So you write down those things every single day. And studies have demonstrated that 30, 60, and 90 days, there's improved mood, decreased stress and burnout, better sleep. There are so many benefits to what everyday gratitude practice.
It also silences your inner critic because it dials down the volume of the amygdala in the background.
So you're ready for tool number one, because I think I've convinced you. World, get out of my brain. It's time to lock in the gratitude settings because I am tired of feeling negative. I call this the unsent letter. And basically what it is, is it's a letter that you are going to sit down and write to someone else that is not a love letter. It's a gratitude letter.
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Chapter 3: What are the three practical gratitude tools to try?
Be specific. And you can answer these questions to help you get started. What did they do? Why did it matter? How did it affect you? I'm going to say it again. What did they do? Why did it matter? How did it affect you? I love this so much because the people in your life, you're feeling just as beaten down and negative as you are.
And you're probably, because your mind is so programmed by the outside world and the stress that you're feeling, you're You don't notice all the good things. You just kind of pick up on the things that irritate you. It's so easy, isn't it, to get into this routine with people that you care about or you feel like roommates and you don't appreciate each other.
Gratitude and the unsent letter, it's how you find your way back to each other. I mean, I've been doing this for a couple weeks, like I said before. You know, in fact, I got to think about who this week's person is going to be. And I have the perfect person in mind. In fact, she's sitting in this room, our amazing senior producer, Amy.
She and I have produced this show together since we started it three years ago. She's probably going to kill me for saying this. But I want to write the unsent letter for Amy. In fact, I can just tell her because she's sitting here. And this is the greatest thing about these tools. You can make them their own. You could actually write the letter and send it.
You could be with somebody and you could share them this episode and in the text say, hey, I just want you to know I'm grateful for X, Y, and Z. And this episode made me think of you. I think you'll love listening to it. I'm just grateful for our friendship. Here's the thing that I am so grateful for. about Amy.
She's constantly, and she may not even realize this, she steps in behind the scenes right when everybody needs it most. We have this super collaborative process with all of our producers where they all work together and they're reviewing each other's work. Amy led that. You want to know what else Amy does? Amy texted me when my dad had back surgery. Amy's thinking about those kinds of things.
She's also really fun Amy is throwing a wear your pajamas to our house breakfast party. who does that? Amy, how does it make me feel? Like I have a really fun friend that makes life fun. And that's always thinking about how to make things better. I mean, she's the definition of a team player, the kind of person you need if you want to have a successful show and if you want to have fun in life.
And this is just who she is. And I've never forgotten it. And it may not always be front of mind, but being able to write it down helps you remember all the ways someone as important as Amy comes through for you. And it also helps you realize how important everyone is. Well, for me, just speaking for me who works on this show, that's why this is so powerful.
I mean, you can get so caught up in day-to-day life. You can get so busy. You can get so stressed out and life can feel like such a pressure cooker that you don't even see the beautiful people around you. And I'll tell you something, if you actually take the time to write a letter like that and send it to somebody, do you know how much that's going to help somebody else?
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Chapter 4: How does writing an unsent gratitude letter impact you?
And so here's what you're going to do. This is the tool, gratitude group text. You're just going to drop a little gratitude into any of your typical text chains. And if you really want to go and supersize this, just get two or three of your favorite people, and text them this episode and say, hey, I just listened to this. It's all about gratitude and rewiring your mind. I thought of you.
What if we started just a little group text chain and we just use this text chain to share one thing that you're grateful for? And we hold ourselves accountable to really being intentional about gratitude once a day, every single day. We can remind each other of this because this small habit makes gratitude visible. and contagious. And it reminds you of the goodness in the world.
It reminds you of what's going well. It reminds you that you have enough right now, even while you may be working on more. Okay, I know I threw a lot at you. Aren't you grateful? Aren't you grateful that I threw a lot at you? Of course you are, because I want you to find something that really works for you. So let me give you a quick recap. There are three tools.
The first tool, the unsent letter. You've got to try this one. Once a week, just write a one-page letter to somebody that you're grateful for. You don't even have to send it. Just write it. Remember, this comes from a study from Indiana University, and it showed that this sort of journaling can lead to reductions in depression and anxiety. It just makes you feel more connected to people.
And boy, will it lift somebody up if you choose to send it. The second tool is the three-minute night journal. Every night before bed, take three minutes and just write down three things that you're grateful for from that day.
This comes from a study from the University of California, San Diego, and it showed that this could lead to better sleep quality, lower inflammation, less stress in the body, and higher heart rate variability, which is a very, very positive, positive thing. When your heart rate variability is high, it means that your nervous system is flexible. That's about resilience.
It means it handles stress and it bounces back quickly. And, you know, if you want to try Dr. Tara's morning gratitude, loving those sheets and really kind of setting your mind on being present and grateful before the rest of the world comes in. That's another way that you can do this. So is scanning your day at the end of the day. It all is the same science and the same benefit.
And the third tool, gratitude group text. Just start dropping that into your text and watch the magic happen. If you want to supersize it, just grab one or two people. Tell them that you want to start being more intentional about being grateful, that you'd be grateful and you'd appreciate them if they could hold you accountable, that you can do this together once a day, every single day.
It's going to lift you up. It's going to lift them up. This study came from the School of Applied Psychology at Griffith University in Australia, and it shows that intentionally practicing gratitude and kindness can lead to lower depression levels and more positive emotions.
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