Every November, the gratitude lists start appearing. Social media fills with prompts, journals, and well-meaning reminders to "count your blessings," which is beautiful!! BUT, if you're a mother running on empty and you're carrying the invisible weight of mental load, wrestling with birth trauma, or simply trying to survive another day of postpartum depletion, those gratitude challenges can feel like salt in an open wound.
One more thing you're failing at. One more way you're coming up short.
Let me tell you something that might change everything: Your nervous system is overwhelmed, and your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to protect you.
The Ancient Wisdom in a Modern Word
The etymology of gratitude reveals something profound. The word comes from the Latin gratus, meaning thankful, pleasing, beloved. It shares its root with the word grace.
Read that again. Gratitude and grace are linguistic siblings.
This tells us something essential about the nature of true thankfulness: Gratitude isn't an achievement you earn through discipline or willpower. It's a receiving. It's a grace.
Something opens within us, softens, and something that was closed becomes available again. This opening is where real healing happens. Not just in your mind, but in your body, in your nervous system, and in your relationship with the God.
Why This Isn't About Positive Thinking
Gratitude isn't just a mindset shift or a perspective adjustment; it's pure neurobiology. When you experience genuine thankfulness, even for something as small as warm water on your hands or sunlight through a window, your brain initiates a powerful chemical cascade.
Dopamine floods your system, reigniting motivation and hope. Oxytocin follows, the bonding hormone that signals safety and connection. Together, these neurotransmitters they make you feel better and they fundamentally shift your physiology.
Cortisol drops. Your vagus nerve activates, signaling to your entire body that it's safe to rest and digest. Inflammation decreases at the cellular level.
This is biochemistry. This is why gratitude stands as one of the most powerful tools we have for healing women's hormones and restoring emotional stability after the massive physiological disruption of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.
Why You Can't Force Gratitude When Your Body Doesn't Feel Safe
When you're trapped in survival mode, or your nervous system is dysregulated from chronic sleep deprivation, or your hormones are in freefall from postpartum depletion, or your body is still processing trauma it never had time to heal, gratitude doesn't work the way it's supposed to!
It's not that you're doing it wrong. It's that your biology is actively blocking access to those feel-good neurochemicals. Your brain has assessed the threat level of your environment (exhaustion, depletion, overwhelm) and made an executive decision: Now is not the time for gratitude. Now is the time for survival.
No amount of journaling can override that protective mechanism and this is why so many mothers feel like failures when gratitude practices fall flat. They're trying to access a neurological pathway that's temporarily closed for their own protection.
Real gratitude work must begin at the physiological level. You can't think your way into feeling grateful when your body is screaming that you're not safe.
After years of working with depleted mothers, I have seen time and time again that you cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot journal your way out of hormonal chaos. You cannot gratitude-list your way out of survival mode.
What you need is someone who understands that your exhaustion, your inability to feel grateful, your emotional overwhelm and understands that these aren't character flaws. They're biological realities that require a physiological solution.
I've walked this road myself. I've experienced the bone-deep depletion that makes every gratitude prompt feel like mockery. I've done the deep work of nervous system regulation, hormonal restoration, and somatic healing.
This is not surface-level mindset work. This is the deep, restorative healing of your nervous system, your identity, and your spirit. This is about rebuilding your body's capacity to feel safe, to receive grace, and to access gratitude naturally, not as a discipline you force, but as a gift that becomes available when your system is ready.
When Gratitude Becomes Embodied, Everything Shifts
When your nervous system learns to recognize safety again, when your hormones begin to stabilize, when gratitude stops being a task and becomes a natural response to a regulated body -everything changes!
Your patience with your children deepens. Your sleep begins to restore. Your home atmosphere softens. Your faith feels more alive, more real, more accessible. Not because your circumstances have magically improved, but because you've become stronger, steadier, and more grounded in your own body.
You're no longer white-knuckling your way through motherhood, running on fumes and willpower. You're mothering from a place of calm, presence, and embodied strength.
This is why I created Restored By Grace and if you've been feeling the pull to step into this kind of deep, transformative healing, I'd love to chat with you.
My Black Friday offerings open this week, and it's the most accessible opportunity to work with me all year. This is your chance to invest in the kind of nervous system healing and hormonal restoration that changes not just how you feel, but who you become.
Gratitude opens the door. Grace does the rest.
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