I have been grappling with gratitude for a while. Last month I wrote a blog about it. Only to realise, shortly afterwards, that I probably wasn’t seeing the whole picture (yet). Because while I was practicing gratitude myself, internally reflecting on what I appreciate and what is going well, I was overlooking something fairly obvious: like any human being, I also need gratitude from the system around me.

At first glance, this almost feels like committing a small philosophical heresy. In many yoga and Buddhist traditions, the ideal practitioner acts for the sake of the action itself, not for the fruits of reward. A true yogi expresses gratitude but remains unattached to whether it is reciprocated, because the practice lies in the act of doing good itself, not in the response it receives.

And in many ways, that idea makes total sense. It is probably wise not to make your inner state completely dependent on other people’s approval. To focus on what you can control - your own behaviour and intentions - and let go of what you cannot control: other people’s behaviour and responses. But the more I looked into it, the more I realised that this idea is actually more nuanced, or at least, incomplete.

Because neither yoga philosophy nor Buddhist ethics is purely individualistic. Both traditions repeatedly emphasize the importance of kindness, reciprocity, and appreciation within relationships. In early Buddhist teachings, recognizing and repaying kindness is considered a rare and valuable human quality. And in yoga philosophy, practices like ahimsa (non-harming) and santosha (contentment) are not merely inward states but ways of relating to the world with care, humility, and appreciation. In other words, these traditions do not ignore the relational dimension of gratitude. They recognize that human life is deeply interdependent.

Psychological science points in the same direction. Humans are deeply wired to care about the appreciation of others, if only for the simple reason that cooperation has always been our most important survival strategy. Our nervous systems evolved in social environments where signals of recognition, belonging, and appreciation shaped whether cooperation was possible. Moreover, our nervous systems scan for signs of approval and rejection, for being cast out of the group, was the worst possible scenario (and sure to result in death). Humans are completely interdependent. Signs of gratitude are not just for comfort, they signal that we matter to others, and thus, our place in the group is safe and secure.

Why Gratitude Is More Than an Individual Practice

However, when gratitude is translated into modern self-development practices, something interesting tends to happen: many gratitude interventions emphasize internal reflection. So even though gratitude itself is fundamentally relational, popular gratitude practices often focus on the individual. The typical advice is familiar: keep a gratitude journal, write down three things you are grateful for every evening, or consciously shift your attention toward what is going well in your life. Meditation apps offer guided reflections where you visualize things you appreciate, or thank something bigger than you for the good things in your day.

These practices can be valuable. They train attention and help counter the brain’s natural tendency to focus on problems and threats. There is also solid evidence that gratitude exercises can increase life satisfaction and positive emotions and can reduce symptoms of anxiety or depression (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Wood et al., 2010). So the idea itself is not controversial. But the more I thought about it, the more I started wondering whether this individual(istic) framing might miss something important.

Because just like no amount of self-love fully compensates for not feeling loved by other humans, no amount of individual gratitude practice can compensate for not being appreciated by others.

I originally trained in social psychology, and one of the first things you learn in that field is that human behaviour rarely makes sense when you study individuals in isolation. People exist inside systems. Families, friendships, workplaces, all of these are systems. And the patterns that emerge within those systems strongly shape how people think, feel, and behave. From that perspective, gratitude becomes more interesting when we stop thinking about it purely as an internal emotional state and start thinking about it as something that moves through relationships.

What happens when gratitude is expressed between people?

What happens when appreciation becomes part of the culture of a group?

And what happens when we start looking at gratitude not just as an individual coping strategy, but as something that can influence the dynamics of a system?

How Gratitude Signals Psychological and Physiological Safety

One of the reasons these questions matter is that stress itself is often framed too narrowly. When people talk about stress management, the focus is usually on individual strategies. Breathing exercises, meditation, journaling, therapy, sleep routines, exercise. And all of these things are valuable and often necessary. But if you are living in a system where you chronically feel unsafe - at work, or even at home - you cannot breathe, journal, or meditate yourself out of that feeling. I really want to emphasize this because being in the self help sphere, this can be a pitfall: we focus obsesively on fixing ourselves and feel guilty or broken if we can't. We all need safety, and self help is useful, but it is not enough.

Feeling seen, valued, and respected changes how safe you feel. You can see this clearly in research on psychological safety, a concept introduced by organizational researcher Amy Edmondson. Psychological safety describes environments in which people feel able to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, or share ideas without fear of humiliation or punishment (Edmondson, 1999).

Teams with high psychological safety tend to learn faster, collaborate more effectively, and adapt more easily to challenges. The interesting thing about psychological safety, is that it tends to emerge through small interpersonal signals that communicate respect, inclusion, and appreciation. Signals that say: (all of) You matter(s) here. And that feeling - that your contribution matters, also when you make mistakes - is very likely fuelled by the mutual expression of appreciation.

But the effects of interpersonal gratitude might not just be psychological. Gratitude may also shift physiological responses. Social connection and positive interpersonal signals appear to influence the regulation of the autonomic nervous system, which governs involuntary stress and relaxation responses and regulates processes such as heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, and body temperature.

Although there is currently no direct physiological research specifically examining the effects of receiving gratitude, converging evidence from social neuroscience and affective physiology suggests that positive interpersonal signals more broadly affect the nervous system. Safe social engagement is associated with increased parasympathetic activity - the branch of the nervous system responsible for states of calm, safety, and relaxation (Porges, 2007; Kok & Fredrickson, 2010).

Positive social interactions can also reduce physiological stress responses, including lower cortisol levels and reduced threat-related activity in brain regions such as the amygdala (Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). On the negative side: social rejection activates neural systems associated with physical pain and threat, suggesting that social evaluation signals strongly influence how safe the body perceives the environment to be (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003).

In other words, signals of social support and appreciation do not only feel good; they appear to shift the whole body toward a state of greater psychological and physiological safety, and presumably, resilience to stressful events.

How Gratitude Changes Group Dynamics

Research shows that gratitude isn’t just a private feeling. It’s a relationship-building signal. When you thank someone, you communicate that their effort mattered, which strengthens bonds (Algoe et al., 2008) and conveys appreciation and positive intent (Van Kleef, 2009). Experiments also show that people who receive gratitude become more willing to help others because they feel socially valued (Grant & Gino, 2010). In other words, moments of appreciation might ripple outward and shift an entire group dynamic.

Paradoxically, many groups drift the other way. Families, teams, and workplaces often focus on fixing problems, correcting mistakes, and optimizing performance. While useful, this constant improvement mode can create a negativity bias, where attention locks onto what is wrong. Under stress, attention narrows even further toward threat (Baumeister et al., 2001), and the overall sense of safety quietly erodes.

Relationship research points in a similar direction. The work of John and Julie Gottman, who studied couples over several decades, suggests that the stability of relationships depends less on the absence of conflict and more on the balance between positive and negative interactions. Their research famously suggests that healthy relationships tend to maintain roughly five positive interactions for every negative one during everyday life. These positive moments do not have to be dramatic. Often they are quite small: a moment of appreciation, a shared laugh, a kind word, a gesture of acknowledgment.

Over time, these small positive signals accumulate. Gottman sometimes describes this process as building an emotional bank account within the relationship. Each positive interaction functions as a kind of deposit. Conflict and frustration, which are inevitable in any relationship, function as withdrawals. When the account contains enough positive deposits, occasional withdrawals do not threaten the stability of the relationship. But when positive signals are rare, even small conflicts can destabilize the system.

Interpersonal gratitude does not change the objective reality of the problems we face. What it changes is the perceptual balance within the system. By recognizing effort and contribution, gratitude restores signals of appreciation that communicate safety and belonging, and it strengthens relationships and willingness to help others. When people feel valued and psychologically safe, they are far more willing to experiment, share ideas, help each other, and admit uncertainty.

In that sense, interpersonal gratitude does not replace problem solving. It creates the relational climate in which cooperation, growth, learning, and innovation become possible.

A Simple Daily Gratitude Practice for Families and Teams

How Small Expressions of Gratitude Can Change Relationship Dynamics

What fascinates me about gratitude is how small the initial action can be, and how big the system shift can be when it becomes part of a culture. Small signals of acknowledgment may seem minor, but they travel through systems in ways that are surprisingly powerful. Let me give you an example. When we became a family instead of just a romantic duo, all of a sudden, my partner and I had to run a family business together. With fewer time, less sleep, more tasks, more stress, more negative interactions, and less positives in the romantic bank account.

Where previously, we could go boulder together any night of the week, or go on a 3 week hike, nowadays, we need to find other ways to connect and honestly, both of us feel like the other person doesn’t see half of how much we work our asses off every day.

So alongside this personal gratitude contemplation of mine, I decided to create a culture shift in my own home. At dinner, we now have what we call a family moment (in Dutch: Familie Overleg). It started as an idea I adopted from my good friend and colleague dr. Hannah Berkers: with just sharing as a family what we wanted to do. But over the last 2 months, this morphed into a daily practice that helps all of us express feelings, needs, and appreciation. This is how it goes:

At dinner, we go around the table and we do 3 things:

1. Ask each other how we feel - gives everyone the freedom and practice to sink in their body and feel what is going on, and express feelings to others without fear of rejection, and also helps us to understand from which emotional perspective we need to understand each other in that moment.
2. Ask each other what we want or need - gives everyone the freedom and practice to learn how to take time to feel our nervous systems, freely express needs, and gives us the opportunity to find a middle way / compromise so everyone feels met.
3. Share something we are grateful for or appreciate about the other person, AND explain why it is so meaningful to us - makes all of us feel valued, appreciated and seen in our efforts and contributions to the team.

This takes maybe 10 minutes max, and it always invites calm, connection, smiles, and curiosity. Even just witnessing our 3-year old saying: “Daddy, how are you feeling?” Or: “I think I am feeling calm right now but at the daycare I was feeling angry and sad”, or: “Daddy made a very nice dinner… Mummy, you are very good at listening”, just makes my heart melt. But seriously, doing this together completely changed the energy at the table and the rest of the evening, and it makes all of us feel included, safe, and like we are part of a team.

Instead of finishing dinner discussing what needs to be done, our daughter feeling ignored and stressed, and us feeling like we’re behind on everything, we end the day feeling connected, listened to, calm, safe, and appreciated. And because we are already sitting together eating anyway, it doesn’t add extra time or pressure. It's not an added to do. It's just a fun way to share dinner. It just changes what we talk about, and it changes how we feel (about each other), without changing ANY of our external circumstances. I cannot tell you how much of an energetic shift these simple 10 minutes make in our evening.

So, here are some questions for you to ponder over:

1. Whom would you want to do this with (family, friend, coworker?)
2. What is a natural moment to do it so it won’t take up extra time, and can be done regularly?
3. How can you make it as easy and simple as possible to take the first step (for example, we started with just one question: namely: what do you want right now?)

References

Algoe, S. B., Haidt, J., & Gable, S. L. (2008). Beyond reciprocity: Gratitude and relationships in everyday life. Emotion, 8(3), 425–429.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, (4), 323–370.

Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? Science, 302(5643), 290–292.

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389.

Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. (2010). A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(6), 946–955.

Gottman, J. M., & Gottman, J. S. (2015). 10 Lessons to Transform Your Marriage. Harmony Books.

Van Kleef, G. A. (2009). How emotions regulate social life: The emotions-as-social-information model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3), 184–188.

Kok, B. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2010). Upward spirals of the heart: Autonomic flexibility, positive emotions, and social connectedness. Biological Psychology, 85(3), 432–436.

Porges, S. W. (2007). The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 116–143.

Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890–905.