Contrasting Emotions: The Transformative Power of Gratitude

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you're taking it slow, being kind to yourselves and hopefully making some time to soak in some gratitude as the bud of this fresh year in our lives starts unfurling.

This article is a companion to one I wrote a while ago on my theory of contrasting emotions, the notion that humans grow vertically from confronting life’s disorienting dilemmas, feeling their hardest feelings (the so-called ‘edge emotions’) and learning to intentionally access new feelings they can pour over their most painful ones not to make them go away, but to make them more bearable - to create an inner space where discomfort and growth can co-exist. Gratitude may well be one such ‘contrasting emotion’.

Also, PSA, check out the two workshops on intention setting for the New Year I’ll be hosting this January (for the 10th year in a row) - learn more and book your place here for the workshop in English (17th Jan) and here for the one in Romanian (10th of Jan).

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Like many others, I choose to pause and reflect at the threshold between a year past and one just beginning. I’ve written before about my practice of setting intentions (versus goals), but this year I’ve realised, as the pen was gliding across the pages of my journal, that there is one essential ingredient of my intention-setting ritual that turns it from a mental into a full-body exercise and is worth exploring more: gratitude.

Gratitude is a fascinating emotion and one I’ve got a particularly interesting history with. Growing up, I distinctly remember this sense of ‘thankfulness’ for all the big and small things in my life, one that’s never left me and has carried me through some of the darkest valleys and sunniest peaks over the years. For a long time, gratitude lived inside of me alongside optimism, so much so that I could not quite tell them apart.

I seem to have been born with plentiful reservoirs of both, so much so that my sunny disposition may have been ‘too much’ a times. In fact, one of my oldest friends once told me (only half-joking) that I was “disgustingly optimistic” because of my (annoying) Pollyanish tendency to always look on the bright side of things, trusting that, however gloomy things might have looked, there was always some good in it, and there would always be a way out.

In time (after much heartbreak and much therapy), I discovered that irrepressible optimism has a dark side and can become armour that fuels denial and prevents you from experiencing the full gamut of life’s trials and being transformed (rather than crushed) by them. As I’ve later learnt from vertical development research, we grow from our most confusing, most painful moments, from those ‘disorienting dilemmas’ that break us down and tear us apart with gut-wrenching ‘edge emotions’. But there is a twist to this messy growth journey: pain is not enough.

What if the antidote to the hardest emotions we experience during growth isn’t to push through them, but to hold them alongside something else entirely?

In my research on leaders’ vertical development, I discovered that the leaders who transformed weren’t the ones who muscled through their edge emotions - those painful feelings of confusion, fear, inadequacy and disorientation that arise when our world stops making sense. The ones who grew were the ones who found ways to stay present with those feelings long enough for something new to emerge. And they did this, in large part, by cultivating what I came to call contrasting emotions, emotions that don’t eliminate the pain of growth but somehow make it possible to remain in the fire without being consumed.

Curiosity was the first of these I identified in my study. It seemed to work almost like an alchemical ingredient, helping temper the dread of not knowing and making room for the thrill of discovery to live alongside it. But, as I continued exploring what helps humans stay at their developmental edge, I became increasingly curious (sic!) what other emotions might act as a ‘contrasting emotion’, helping us find our way through the disequilibrium of life’s hardest moments?

Enter gratitude.

As I’ve grown into my middle years, I've found I’ve become less optimistic. I am acutely aware of life’s transience, and over the last few years in particular, I’ve grown painfully aware of the huge mess our world is in as the metacrisis meets the polycrisis. My inner Pollyanna is often wrecked with existential anxiety, worrying about everything - the rise of extremism, wars, climate change, the self-destructive phenomenon of democracies choosing autocrats to lead them, my and my loved ones’ health, my child’s future in a world reshaped by AI. But as I’ve let myself feel all of my anxiety, accept it’s an intrinsic part of being alive, I’ve also discovered the full breadth and depth of gratitude not so much as an antidote, but as a trusted companion, a conduit for accessing joy in a messy world. And, as I’ve dug deeper into the science of gratitude, I realised there was so much to this emotion I’d never known.

The science of gratitude

The word gets thrown around a lot, often in ways that make it sound like a pleasant but seemingly superficial practice. Keep a gratitude journal (I have done that, and found it incredibly impactful, by the way!). Count your blessings. Be thankful. These can be seen as the stuff of wellness culture, making it easy to dismiss gratitude as lightweight self-help fluff.

But the research tells a different story. When psychologists examine gratitude at close range, what they find is an emotion with a very particular structure and function that sets it apart from most other positive feelings we experience.

Gratitude belongs to a special category of self-transcendent emotions, a family that includes awe and compassion. Unlike hedonic positive emotions such as joy or excitement, which are largely self-focused and centre on our own pleasure, self-transcendent emotions evolved to solve a different kind of problem altogether. They emerged to help us take care of each other, cooperate, and coordinate in groups. They turn our attention outward, toward others and toward something larger than ourselves.

This distinction matters a lot. When I feel joy, my attention is largely on my own experience. When I feel gratitude, my attention is on someone else, on what they have done, on who they are, on the relationship between us. Gratitude seems to be a glue that binds us to one another.

Sara Algoe, whose work has shaped much of how we now understand this emotion, developed what she calls the “find, remind, and bind” theory of gratitude. The idea is elegant: gratitude evolved to help us detect and hold onto high-quality relationship partners. When someone does something that truly benefits us, especially when it costs them something, and when it signals that they understand and care about our needs, we feel grateful. That feeling serves three functions. It helps us find responsive people who might make good long-term partners in life. It reminds us to keep those relationships alive and not take them for granted. And it binds us to those people by motivating us to nurture and maintain the connection.

This reframes gratitude from something passive into something active. It is more than a pleasant feeling we experience when we receive something good from others; it is a sophisticated social-cognitive system that helps us build and maintain relationships most likely to support our flourishing.

Gratitude versus Optimism

As it turns out, I was not alone in conflating gratitude and optimism. These two emotions are often lumped together as “positive psychology” constructs that make people happier. And they do share some common ground. But they are fundamentally different emotions, and understanding that difference matters.

Research directly comparing the two has identified several key distinctions:

Temporal orientation. Gratitude orients us to the present and recent past, to what has already happened, to benefits already received. Optimism orients us to the future, to positive expectations about what’s coming. Gratitude is inherently retrospective; optimism is inherently prospective.

Social focus. Gratitude orients us toward others and what they have done for us. Optimism orients us toward ourselves and our confidence in our own ability to navigate what comes. Gratitude is fundamentally relational; optimism is fundamentally agentic.

What they buffer. A large daily-life study found that gratitude was a stronger predictor of feeling appreciation toward others and finding pleasure when reflecting on the best parts of the day. Optimism, by contrast, was a stronger predictor of sleep quality, lower stress, and rating the worst parts of the day as less unpleasant. In other words, gratitude helps us savour the good, while optimism helps us buffer against the bad.

Gratitude versus Indebtedness

Growing up in Eastern Europe, at the historical junction between communism and post-communism, I was taught to avoid ever being in someone’s debt. During the last (and darkest) decade of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship in Romania, people survived by trading favours. Those in a position to have access to food (in the late 80s, food was rationed, and people often went hungry) would trade that privilege for others. A barter system would be in place - my father, a doctor, would often get paid for his services in live chickens or boxes of vegetables from his patients who worked on farms. If the exchange was mutual, that was fine, but being in someone’s debt was considered dangerous. In a climate of generalised distrust and fear, any misstep (like criticising the regime) could be reported to the authorities; nobody wanted anyone to hold any power over them. So people would customarily repay any favour with a gift or a counter-favour. Interestingly, such a culture where indebtedness is avoided at all cost leaves less room for gratitude.

One of the most important findings in the research, and one that genuinely surprised me, is that gratitude and indebtedness are not the same thing. They aren’t even close relatives and, in fact, run counter to each other.

When someone does something for us, and we feel we “owe” them. But that is not the same as being grateful. As researchers have shown, indebtedness arises when we feel we must repay what we’ve received. It’s essentially a negative feeling, driven by obligation and the discomfort of being in someone’s debt. Gratitude, by contrast, arises when we perceive that someone has acted toward us with genuine care and responsiveness, just because they could and wanted to, not because they are waiting for something in return. It’s a positive feeling, and it motivates a sense of proximity, warmth, and a desire to continue the relationship.

Interestingly, studies show that when someone does something for us with an expectation of return, our feelings of indebtedness increase, but our gratitude actually decreases. The expectation of exchange kills gratitude. What evokes gratitude is the perception that someone has acted for our benefit without strings attached, that they have been genuinely responsive to who we are and what we need.

The trouble is that people like me, who have been raised to see any act of goodwill on someone’s part as having an ulterior motive, need to learn to assume that positive, selfless intent. We need to feel safe enough to feel grateful without feeling overly vulnerable.

Gratitude and the Body

If gratitude were just a nice feeling, it would still be worth cultivating. But the research reveals that gratitude actually changes our physiology in measurable ways.

An eight-week gratitude intervention in patients with asymptomatic heart failure reduced multiple inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, TNF-α, and interleukins. Grateful people show increased heart rate variability, a marker of cardiac resilience and parasympathetic activity. The practice of gratitude appears to lower heart rate and decrease diastolic blood pressure. These significant effects. Inflammation is implicated in everything from cardiovascular disease to depression, and the autonomic nervous system touches virtually every aspect of how we function. If my existential anxiety fuels my cortisol and inflammation, my gratitude helps lower it. As it turns out, contrasting emotions have contrasting correlates in our bodies, with measurable effects on our health.

There’s also emerging evidence that gratitude is associated with longevity. A study using data from over 49,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study found that those with the highest levels of gratitude had a 9% lower risk of death over four years compared to those with the lowest levels. The effect was strongest for cardiovascular mortality. This held even after controlling for social, demographic, lifestyle, and psychological variables, including optimism. While we cannot yet say that gratitude causes longer life, the association is robust enough to take seriously.

What might be happening? Gratitude seems to work through multiple pathways: reduced inflammation, improved sleep quality, greater emotional resilience, stronger social connections, and perhaps even healthier behaviour patterns.

The brain ‘on gratitude’ changes too. Research from Berkeley found that people who wrote gratitude letters showed mental health improvements, like shifting attention away from toxic emotions like resentment and envy, and they were more likely to express gratitude in turn, and these effects lasted for months after the study’s end. They also found that gratitude interventions helped enhance the positive impact of counselling.

Gratitude and Relationships

I ended the year watching fireworks by the beach, in the pouring rain, with my husband and my daughter, and my most poignant feeling was one of deep gratitude. For these people I love. For this small miracle of being together, in a country that adopted us seven years ago and which became home. For the smile I exchanged with another mother waiting in a line for doughnuts, both of us soaked through, both of us holding our respective girls’ hands, both girls chatting away, oblivious to the rain. We silently bonded over our children’s joy and the small miracles of motherhood while the smell of fresh doughnuts tickled our noses. I later felt overcome with gratitude again, dancing in the rain with my girl while a song that was cool when I was her age blasted out of the speakers.

Some of the most compelling research on gratitude focuses on what it does to our closest relationships.

Studies show that couples who regularly express gratitude toward each other feel more positive about their partners and, intriguingly, also feel more comfortable expressing concerns about the relationship. Gratitude doesn’t just create warmth. It seems to create safety, the kind that allows for honest communication.

Expressing gratitude leads to more spontaneous physical affection, hand-holding, kissing, and the small embodied gestures of connection. It’s linked to improved sex lives. It’s also associated with more equitable perceptions of household labour, which is no small thing in the ongoing negotiations of domestic life.

But here’s a crucial nuance from Algoe’s research: the effectiveness of gratitude expressions depends significantly on how responsive the partner is perceived to be. When the person receiving the gratitude is seen as genuinely responsive, the well-being benefits are amplified. When the partner is perceived as low in responsiveness, gratitude can feel hollow or even backfire. When my husband hugs me and says, “I’m so grateful too,” that is gratitude well-received, and it amplifies the gratitude I feel, which in turn creates a virtuous cycle of connection.

Gratitude at Work

The workplace research tells a similar story. Managers who remember to say thank you to their teams see measurable differences in motivation and performance. In one study, fundraisers who heard a message of gratitude from the director made 50% more calls the following week than those who didn’t.

Longitudinal research shows that gratitude is positively related to both task performance and intrinsic motivation over time. Grateful employees are more likely to engage in what researchers call “organisational citizenship behaviours”, the things people do that aren’t technically their job but that make workplaces function: welcoming new colleagues, filling in for coworkers, going the extra mile. Gratitude and kindness seem to create a positive loop.

But again, context matters. Gratitude can backfire when it feels manipulative or inauthentic. The brain seems to know the difference between genuine appreciation and performative gratitude. That’s why just ticking the box of thanking your team while you feel anything by thankful doesn’t work. Neuroimaging studies show that authentic gratitude activates reward centres and emotional processing regions in ways that forced or obligatory expressions of thanks do not.

Gratitude as a State versus a Trait

Researchers distinguish between gratitude as a temporary emotional state and gratitude as a stable personality trait, or disposition. State gratitude refers to the feeling of thankfulness and appreciation that arises in response to receiving a specific benefit - it's situational and time-limited. Trait or dispositional gratitude, by contrast, refers to a general orientation toward perceiving and appreciating the positive in life. This perhaps describes ‘disgustingly positive’ people like me, those with a stable tendency to notice and feel grateful for benefits across many circumstances.

McCullough and colleagues identified four facets of dispositional gratitude: intensity (how strongly grateful feelings are experienced), frequency (how often gratitude arises, even for small favors), span (the range of life circumstances prompting gratitude), and density (the number of people one feels grateful toward for a single outcome). Wood and colleagues' social-cognitive model showed that trait gratitude operates through "benefit appraisals" - dispositionally grateful people interpret the same situations more positively, seeing help as more valuable, more costly to provide, and more altruistically intended. In essence, a person with a grateful personality has a lower threshold for experiencing state gratitude - it’s easier for them to access this emotion in all sorts of big and small contexts.

Both forms of gratitude predict well-being, but the mechanisms may differ: trait gratitude shapes how we interpret the world, while state gratitude reflects our response to specific circumstances. The good news is gratitude can be a skill to practice and a muscle to strengthen.

Gratitude is not a Silver Bullet

I want to be careful here not to oversell gratitude. The research is genuinely promising, but it’s also messier than the wellness industry would have us believe.

Meta-analyses examining gratitude interventions have found that the effects, while real, are generally small to moderate and vary significantly across cultures. What works in one cultural context may not translate to another. In some collectivist cultures, gratitude interventions may actually be counterproductive.

Far from being a silver bullet, gratitude interventions can backfire. One study found that students with medium levels of gratitude showed increased aggression after a gratitude intervention, perhaps as a response to the perceived forced nature of the exercise. “Be grateful!” clearly doesn’t work. Research from Harvard with children and adolescents found that writing thank-you letters made the recipients happier but didn’t necessarily improve the writers’ own well-being. This suggests that gratitude as a developmental capacity may require a certain level of emotional maturity to yield benefits.

Why This Matters for Vertical Development

So what does any of this have to do with vertical development and the challenging emotions we encounter when we’re facing disorienting dilemmas?

I think gratitude functions (alongside curiosity) as what I’ve been calling a ‘contrasting emotion’, one that doesn’t eliminate the pain of edge emotions but makes it tolerable and allows us to fully experience discomfort without collapsing or fleeing.

Consider what gratitude actually does. It shifts attention outward, toward others and toward what we have received or toward what is good in our lives. It activates a sense of connection and safety in our relationships. It reduces inflammation and increases parasympathetic tone, calming the body’s stress response. It reminds us that we are not alone, that others have seen us and acted on our behalf. For me, it’s a constant reminder that life itself holds gifts I can be thankful for.

Now consider what happens when we’re at a developmental edge. We feel confused, frightened, perhaps ashamed of our confusion. We want to flee back to familiar ground. We feel isolated in our not-knowing.

Gratitude, in such moments, might function as an anchor. It won’t pull us away from the edge; instead, it will give us enough stability to stay there long enough to find a way to cross the chasm in front of us. When I can feel grateful even in the midst of struggle, grateful for the people who are supporting me, for the opportunity to grow, for what I already have, something shifts. The edge emotions don’t disappear. But they become bearable and make room for something new to emerge.

This differs from what optimism can do. Optimism might help me believe the struggle will pass, that things will work out, and that’s valuable. But gratitude connects me to others (to life itself) right now, in the present moment, reminding me that I am held even as I feel unmoored. Instead of just expecting a better future, it lets me recognise the support I already have.

This is speculative, of course. I haven’t conducted research on gratitude as a developmental catalyst. But I’m hoping this sparks some useful reflection for you and your own relationship with this rich emotion. Does it help you befriend discomfort? What’s your experience of being grateful? What impact has it made on your life?

If you’d like to join me in practising gratitude for the year just ended and setting our intentions for the new one, I’ll be hosting two playful workshops to consciously ‘dream up’ the new year, a tradition I started a decade ago and which continues every January. We’ll use tools from active imagination and ‘timeline therapy’ to identify and set our intentions visually and creatively. Learn more and book your place here for the workshop in English (17th Jan) and here for the one in Romanian (10th of Jan).

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