Can We Ever Be Too Thankful?
The other day I was sitting after Thanksgiving, healing from my hip surgery, and I thought to myself, Can you actually be too thankful? Maybe it was the stillness. Maybe it was the pain meds. Maybe it was the fact that for the first time in a while, life forced me to slow down enough to actually feel things again.
But the question stuck with me.
We talk so much about gratitude this time of year that it becomes almost like background noise. Yet in the quiet of recovery, when the house was finally still, I found myself honestly wondering:
Is there such a thing as being too thankful?
Here’s where I landed.
1. Gratitude doesn’t numb you. It wakes you up.
Some people worry that if they’re overly thankful, they’ll ignore the hard stuff. But real gratitude doesn’t erase pain. It sharpens your awareness of what’s good so you can face what’s hard.
It’s the same way I wrote about choosing to see what’s half full, not as a form of denial but as a practice of perspective and presence.
2. Science says gratitude rewires us. Literally.
Neuroscience shows that gratitude activates the parts of the brain tied to joy, empathy, emotional regulation, and connection. It lowers stress. Improves sleep. Strengthens relationships. And helps us recover from difficult experiences more quickly.
And like any muscle, the more we use it, the stronger it becomes.
3. Being thankful for everything doesn’t mean everything is good.
Some things in life are brutal. Some things break you open in ways you don’t recover from quickly, like loss, disappointment, or even lying on the couch unable to tie your own shoes after surgery.
You’re not asked to be thankful for the hard thing. But you can be thankful in it. Thankful for the people who showed up. Thankful for the lessons. Thankful for the chance to slow down when you didn’t choose to.
I’ve written before about how most people chase the wrong kind of rest—how we flop on the couch, binge a show, or go to bed early thinking that will solve our exhaustion, when really we’re missing deeper needs. Gratitude works the same way. It asks us to go deeper.
4. Gratitude can fill you, but it never overfills you.
A heart can overflow with gratitude, but it doesn’t spill into something unhealthy. Gratitude doesn’t crowd out sadness, frustration, or fear. It actually makes space for them.
It stretches our inner capacity so we can hold both the beauty and the brokenness of our lives without losing ourselves in either.
5. What happens when you start being thankful for everything?
People often describe feeling:
More grounded. Gratitude pulls you out of the swirl.
More aware. Suddenly the small stuff matters—the morning light, the quiet breath, the way healing happens one unglamorous day at a time.
More connected. Gratitude draws us closer to each other.
More human. It makes us present to our fragility and our strength at the same time.
And in a world that keeps telling us to hustle harder and complain louder, practicing gratitude, especially the deep, quiet kind, is one of the most rebellious things you can do.
So… can we be too thankful?
Sitting there in that post-Thanksgiving stillness, hip throbbing and heart strangely full, the answer for me was clear:
No. You can’t be too thankful. But you can pretend to be thankful as a way to avoid feeling or dealing. And that’s not gratitude at all.
True gratitude is honest. It’s grounded. It’s human.
It whispers: Life is messy. Life is beautiful. And both things can be true at the same time.
For more like this, or to preorder Being HumanKInd – check out the book site: https://behumankind.today/ng Kind, Being Still, Being Present, and Being Grateful. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share reflections on each of these “foundations” and how they can shape the way we live, lead, and love.
