Why Gratitude Is Harder Than It Sounds — And How Bilateral Stimulation Can Help

We live in a world that tells us focus on the positive and practice gratitude, but it’s not that easy.

For so many people — therapists and clients alike — gratitude practices can feel surface level. You go through the motions, you write the list, and you don’t feel much different.

If that's been your experience, I want to offer you something new to try and deepen a brain shift in this practice that is based in neuroscience.

The Brain Is Wired to Notice What's Wrong

Our nervous systems are ancient. Long before stress meant inbox anxiety or difficult client sessions, stress meant predators, famine, and physical danger. The humans who survived were the ones whose brains were tuned to notice and remember the threat — to scan for what could go wrong, remember what hurt, and stay alert to danger even in moments of relative calm.

This is what researchers call the negativity bias — our built-in tendency to register, encode, and remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones. A threat that goes unnoticed can kill you. A beautiful sunset that goes unnoticed does not. So the brain learned, over thousands of generations, to prioritize the negative.

The problem is that in modern life, this same wiring keeps us in a chronic low-grade state of threat detection — scanning our relationships, our work, and our bodies, for what might go wrong, while positive experiences slip through the filter almost unnoticed.

From a Polyvagal Theory perspective, this makes complete sense. When the nervous system is oriented toward threat — even subtly, even unconsciously — it remains in a state of sympathetic activation or dorsal vagal protection. The window of tolerance narrows. Connection, creativity, and the felt sense of safety become harder to access.

Gratitude, practiced intentionally, is one way to begin shifting that orientation. But for many people — especially those with trauma histories — simply telling the nervous system to focus on the positive isn't enough.

Why Traditional Gratitude Practices Often Fall Short

For people who have experienced trauma, the gap between cognitive awareness ("I know I have things to be grateful for") and felt experience ("I actually feel grateful") can be significant.

Somatic therapy and trauma-informed care have taught us that healing doesn't happen through the thinking mind alone. The body holds the story of our experiences — including the chronic vigilance, the bracing, the disconnection that trauma leaves behind. A purely cognitive gratitude practice like listing things in a journal, reciting affirmations, often stays only in the brain, never reaching the deeper layers of the nervous system and body.

To actually shift the nervous system's baseline, we need approaches that work with the body, not just the mind. This is where somatic tools become essential — and where bilateral stimulation offers something genuinely powerful.

What Is Bilateral Stimulation — and Why Does It Matter?

Bilateral stimulation refers to any rhythmic, alternating sensory input that moves from one side of the body to the other — tapping alternating arms or knees, following a moving visual stimulus with your eyes, or listening to tones that alternate from ear to ear.

Most people are familiar with bilateral stimulation as a component of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) — a well-researched, trauma-focused therapy that I use in my therapy practice. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain process and integrate distressing memories.

But bilateral stimulation isn't only for processing distress. Research and clinical practice have increasingly explored its use for installing positive experiences — helping the brain encode feelings of safety, connection, and wellbeing more deeply than it might through cognitive attention alone.

When we pair intentional focus on gratitude with bilateral stimulation, we give the nervous system a better chance of actually absorbing what we're orienting toward — encoding it not just as a thought, but as a felt, embodied experience.

The Practice: Gratitude Meets Bilateral Stimulation

In my recent YouTube video, I guide viewers through a simple gratitude practice that incorporates bilateral stimulation to deepen the experience and support genuine nervous system regulation.

The practice works like this:

• Begin by settling into the body — grounding, breathing, arriving in the present moment
• Bring to mind something you are genuinely grateful for — not what you think you should be grateful for, but something that carries even a small felt sense of warmth, ease, or appreciation
• As you hold that experience in awareness, engage bilateral stimulation — gentle alternating tapping, movement, or another bilateral input
• Stay with the felt sense of gratitude as it moves through the body, allowing it to deepen and expand rather than rushing past it

This approach is grounded in trauma-informed care principles: it is gentle, titrated, and respects the pace of the individual nervous system. It is also rooted in the somatic understanding that lasting change happens in the body, not just the mind.

For therapists, this practice can be adapted for use with clients in session — particularly those who are working on building positive affect tolerance, expanding their window of tolerance, or developing a more embodied relationship with states of safety and connection.

Balancing the Negativity Bias Over Time

This kind of practice is not a quick fix. The negativity bias is deeply wired, and for people with complex trauma histories, the path toward genuine felt safety and positive experience is often gradual and nonlinear.

But neuroscience offers us something hopeful: the brain is plastic. With repeated, intentional practice — especially practice that engages the body and the nervous system, not just the thinking mind — new neural pathways can be built and strengthened over time.

Every time we pause to notice something good, allow ourselves to feel it in the body, and let it land a little more deeply, we are doing the quiet, cumulative work of nervous system healing. We are gently teaching the brain that it is safe to rest here, even briefly. That the present moment can hold something worth staying for.

From a Polyvagal Theory perspective, this is the work of building ventral vagal capacity — the felt sense of safety, connection, and regulation that allows us to be present with ourselves and with others. And it is some of the most important work any of us — clinician or client — can do.

Bringing This Into Your Practice

Whether you are a therapist looking for somatic tools to support your clients in trauma recovery, or someone navigating your own healing journey, I invite you to try this practice and notice what shifts — not just in your thoughts, but in your body.

👉 [Watch the guided gratitude and bilateral stimulation practice here]

For Therapists and Helping Professionals

If this practice resonates with you clinically, you may be interested in going deeper into the science and application of somatic, trauma-informed approaches in your work.

My CE training series for therapists and helping professionals covers Polyvagal Theory in clinical practice, somatic tools for trauma recovery, trauma-informed care, and the ethics of embodied clinical work — all delivered in experiential, skills-based formats designed to give you tools you can use with clients immediately.

Current offerings include:

• Polyvagal Theory in Therapy
• The Trauma-Informed Body: A Somatic Guide
• Ethics of Trauma-Informed Care

And this fall, I am launching a brand new training series built as a scalable program for therapists ready to go deep into somatic practice and nervous system fluency. Announcements are coming soon — stay connected at www.BeccaOdomWellness.com and you can click here to join my newsletter to be the first to know when doors open for these fall trainings.

Becca Odom, LCSW, E-RYT 200 is a licensed clinical social worker, registered yoga teacher, and trauma specialist with over 15 years in the mental health field. She offers CE-accredited trainings for therapists and helping professionals in somatic therapy, trauma-informed care, and nervous system regulation.