Gratitude Practice During Perimenopause: Why It Helps and How to Make It Stick

It's Not About Pretending Everything Is Fine

If someone tells you to 'just be grateful' when you're sleep-deprived, anxious, and sweating through your third shirt of the day, that's not helpful. That's dismissal wearing a positive face.

Gratitude practice, done properly, is something different. It doesn't ask you to deny what's hard. It asks you to deliberately expand your attention to include what's also present alongside the hard stuff. That's a meaningful distinction, and it's one backed by a substantial body of research.

What Research Says About Gratitude and Wellbeing

Positive psychology researchers, particularly Robert Emmons at the University of California Davis, have conducted extensive studies on gratitude. They found that people who regularly practise gratitude report higher levels of positive emotion, better sleep, more compassion toward others, and lower rates of depression and anxiety.

For perimenopausal women, who are navigating unpredictable hormone fluctuations that directly affect brain chemistry, this is relevant. Oestrogen affects serotonin and dopamine pathways. When those are disrupted, your brain's baseline negativity bias becomes even stronger. You're more likely to ruminate, more likely to notice threats, more likely to interpret neutral events as negative.

Gratitude practice works partly by deliberately counteracting this negativity bias. It trains the brain to scan the environment for good, not just bad, over time shifting what your nervous system reaches for first.

Why Generic Gratitude Lists Often Fail

Most people try gratitude once or twice, write 'family, health, coffee' and feel nothing. Then they assume it doesn't work for them.

The problem is usually specificity. Vague gratitude doesn't activate the same neural response as concrete, vivid gratitude. Researchers have found that the most effective gratitude practice involves writing about specific events, not abstract categories, and including the emotional detail of why something mattered.

'I'm grateful for my health' produces less response than 'I'm grateful for the walk I took this morning, the way the cold air felt, and the fact that my knees held up for forty minutes.' The sensory and emotional specificity is what creates the shift.

Practical Ways to Build a Gratitude Practice

You don't need to meditate for an hour or buy a special journal. Here are approaches with good evidence and low friction:

The 'three good things' practice: each evening, write down three specific things that went well today, no matter how small, and briefly note why each happened or what it meant to you. Research by Martin Seligman and colleagues found that this simple practice significantly improved wellbeing over a month, and effects lasted beyond the intervention period.

Gratitude letters: once a week, write a brief letter to someone who has made a difference to you. You don't have to send it. The act of writing it produces most of the benefit.

Morning anchoring: before reaching for your phone, name three things you're looking forward to or appreciating today. This primes your attention toward possibility rather than threat before the day's demands take over.

During difficult symptoms: when a hot flash hits or anxiety surges, some women find it helpful to name what is also true right now. 'This is uncomfortable. My breath is here. The chair is solid. The sun is coming through the window.' This isn't toxic positivity. It's nervous system anchoring alongside the discomfort.

Tracking Your Mood Alongside Your Practice

Like any habit, gratitude practice works best when you can see whether it's making a difference. Logging your mood and symptoms daily in PeriPlan means you have real data over weeks and months, not just a feeling that things are or aren't improving.

You might notice that days when you stick to the practice correlate with slightly steadier mood scores. Or you might discover that sleep quality matters more for you than gratitude practice. Both are useful findings that help you direct your energy wisely.

When Gratitude Isn't Enough

Gratitude practice is a genuine tool. It is not a treatment for clinical depression, severe anxiety, or perimenopause symptoms that significantly interfere with your life. If your mental health is substantially impacted, please talk to your GP or a therapist.

For many women, gratitude practice works best alongside other support: movement, good sleep habits, social connection, and, where appropriate, hormone therapy or talking therapy. It's one thread in a stronger fabric, not the whole cloth.

Being grateful and also struggling is not a contradiction. Holding both is, in fact, exactly what this practice is for.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider about your specific situation.