I'm a brain surgeon, and I'm gonna tell you the truth: You can’t be anxious and grateful at the same time. Your brain literally can’t run both. Now, you might feel like you can do both at once. What’s actually happening is your brain is toggling between them so fast it feels simultaneous, like a flicker that looks like it’s just on. But it’s still sampling one state at a time, and whichever one it lands on more often wins the moment. My wife heard me say the first part and pushed back. “Okay, I believe you. But when I’m scared, or hurting, how do I actually get from anxious to grateful? Just deciding to be grateful doesn’t work.” Lisa's pushback to this neuroscience fact I've been teaching for years made me realize that I needed to provide a more tactical solution instead of a simple sound bite like, "Just be grateful and you'll feel less anxious." I needed to step up, drop the clichés, and give her- and you- some strategy, because she’s right. Almost every influencer and self-help guru on the Internet who talks about gratitude skips that exact question. And all of us, including me, need to know what to do when we're feeling so anxious that we can't seem to move in our own lives. Here’s what’s actually happening in your brain: Anxiety and gratitude are two hands reaching for the same switch in your brain. Whichever one grabs it first is the one that runs the show. So gratitude isn’t a mood you wait to feel your way into. It’s a deliberate redirect you force, on purpose, while the fear is still standing right there in the room with you. You don’t wait for the fear to leave before you’re allowed to be thankful. You reach past it. That’s exactly what the Bible prophet Habakkuk did. His crops failed, his food ran out, everything he counted on was gone. And in the middle of that, he said, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord.” Not because the fear was gone. Because he reached past it on purpose. (See Habakkuk 3:17-18) That’s self-brain surgery, and it's not easy. It's hard and holy work. But it's a lot easier than staring into future knowing anxiety is always lurking and you don't know what to do about it. Save this for the next time your mind starts spinning. Share it with a friend who need it. Follow me for daily connections between neuroscience and scripture to help transform your life. And click the link in my bio if you want to know more about my New York Times bestseller, The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery.
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