Ending the Year with Gratitude

It’s the end of the year, so as is my annual tradition, I sat down this weekend to pen the top ten things at work I am grateful for, before sharing with my faculty. It definitely wasn’t the year I thought it would be. It has been so, so much harder. It has been difficult to witness the deprioritization of public health and the harm this has caused to patients both now and well into the future. Doing science has gotten harder and encouraging young people to follow this path even harder.

So it may seem a little counterintuitive, but as this year comes to a close, I’ve decided that now more than ever I must prioritize gratitude. Not so much as a trait, but rather as a daily practice.

There’s a lot of incredible research around the concept of gratitude. One of the most influential findings in modern psychology came from a deceptively simple experiment. Participants were asked to spend a few minutes each week writing down a handful of things they were grateful for and why those things mattered. Another group wrote about frustrations and hassles. A third group wrote about neutral events.

The results were striking. The gratitude group did not just report feeling happier. They slept better. They exercised more. They had fewer physical complaints. They showed up to their lives with more energy and engagement. But nothing about their circumstances had changed. Their workloads stayed heavy. Their stressors did not disappear. Their lives were not made easier.

What changed was how they experienced the same reality. Gratitude did not eliminate difficulty. It expanded capacity.

This past year has been hard. It has been marked by uncertainty, shifting ground, and long stretches of waiting without clarity. But gratitude is not denial or pretending things are fine when they are not. It is not a refusal to acknowledge loss, fatigue, or disappointment. This year has been filled with all of those things for so many.

For me, gratitude instead is a conscious decision to widen the frame and allow more than one truth to exist at the same time.

When we focus exclusively on threat, failure, and uncertainty, our brains stay locked in a defensive posture. This can be adaptive in the short term, but it is exhausting over time. The daily practice of gratitude helps to remind us that not everything is broken. There are still sources of strength, connection, and meaning available. Good things are still happening.

This is why gratitude has been shown to improve productivity and performance. Not because grateful people care less, but because they are not cognitively consumed by what is wrong. They retain bandwidth and can see options again.

I think the same is true for relationships and leadership. Teams in which appreciation is expressed openly are more engaged and more willing to contribute. People are more likely to speak up, to take risks, to stay. It creates a sense of community.

There is also a growing body of evidence linking gratitude to better sleep, lower stress levels, and improved physical health. Again, not because stress disappears, but because it is processed differently. The body recovers more effectively when the mind is not constantly braced for impact.

For every person and every organization, gratitude will look a little different. What matters is not the specific form it takes, but whether it moves from being an occasional feeling to a shared practice. Gratitude has the greatest impact when it is made visible, collective rather than private, and part of how people experience their work and one another.

To make this more concrete, I personally did two things at work this year to foster gratitude in the workplace.

The first, thanks to a very talented and hardworking individual in my group, was the creation of a gratitude hub on our internal website. Think of it as a kind of Facebook for gratitude. Anyone can create a public or private post to thank someone else for kindness, collaboration, or going the extra mile. For years, I had watched these exchanges happen behind the scenes in emails I was cc’d on. By making gratitude public and shared, we can shift it from something that happens in isolation to something the entire community can witness, participate in, and feel.

The second thing I just finished working on this week, and have not yet shared with the group, was an exercise in collective recognition. I asked everyone to submit the names of three people they work with who lift them up, along with why. I used that information to create a positive energy map for the entire group. The experience was eye-opening. It revealed a set of unsung heroes who are doing an enormous amount of emotional and connective work that sustains the organization. These are leaders without titles, people who are supporting others in ways that I had not fully recognized (which I will rectify!).

These initiatives are my gratitude in practice. We must pay attention to where energy, care, and support are actually coming from and name the people and the work.

Gratitude will not erase the hard parts of this year. But it can change how heavy all of it feels. One of the hardest parts of leadership is holding duality. Seeing clearly what is not working while still protecting what is. Naming loss without losing momentum. I think gratitude helps with that.

As we move into the upcoming year, I am trying to treat gratitude not as an emotion, but as a discipline. A daily practice of directing attention toward what strengthens us rather than what drains us. Toward people who carry others and work that still matters.

The real power of gratitude is its ability to help us stay connected to purpose and each other. It helps to remind us that the future is not built only by fixing what is broken, but by sustaining what is good.

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