Toxic gratitude is what’s behind your burnout and quiet resentment

Be grateful, they said. There’s so much to be grateful for, they said. It’s the key to happiness, they said.

But they never said that gratitude has a dark side.

No one talks about what happens when it’s easier to shrink your feelings than admit something hurts. Or when you smile through a job that drains you or a relationship that numbs you, because…well, at least you’re not alone, starving, or sick.

There’s a name for this. It’s called toxic gratitude, the kind that looks like wisdom on the outside. But inside, it’s emotional self-abandonment.

The thing is, we get so busy being thankful, we forget to be honest with ourselves.

And that ends here.

What is toxic gratitude?

Toxic gratitude is when you use thankfulness to betray yourself. It’s the voice that whispers, “You should be grateful,” even when something feels wrong. Instead of honoring your discomfort, you override it with forced appreciation. That pattern can keep you feeling stuck in life, where you seem fine from the outside but are quietly drained from the inside.

“Toxic gratitude is either escaping the reality or manipulating other people or only focusing on the good thing without acknowledging reality,” explains Mel Robbins, a New York Times bestselling author and a trusted expert in personal growth, in one of her podcast episodes.

While it’s known to have its benefits, researchers now warn that gratitude, when paired with guilt or obligation, can trigger emotional suppression and shame.

So what feels noble on the surface, underneath, toxic gratitude is just another way we gaslight ourselves into staying small.

Where does toxic gratitude come from?

Toxic gratitude is when someone feels forced to be thankful, even in situations where they’re being hurt, mistreated, or unhappy. It’s stitched into your nervous system, usually from a young age.

Maybe you grew up hearing, “You should be grateful. You have food, clothes, and a roof over your head.” Or maybe your feelings were met with silence, scolding, or solutions instead of space. Somewhere along the way, you learned that comfort makes you selfish and pain makes you ungrateful.

Psychologists call this emotional invalidation. It teaches you to mistrust your inner signals and replace them with socially approved scripts.

So instead of feeling sadness or anger or saying, “This isn’t right for me,” you fast-forward to gratitude and say, “Other people have it harder.”

This kind of self-talk often signals emotional suppression, explains licensed therapist Jenna Nielsen, LCSW. She says, “Most of the time people use the word ‘should.’ [It] indicates a judgement which is not rooted in the facts.”

And once that internal voice gets trained to downplay pain, the outside world finishes the job.

You hear the messages that sound helpful but quietly wear you down. These include the quotes about hustling harder, the advice wrapped in forced gratitude, and the belief that you need a dramatic reason to feel unhappy.

Over time, you stop listening to the part of you that’s tired or hurting, convince yourself it’s not a big deal, and swallow your truth in the name of perspective. But silencing your pain with a smile isn’t resilience. When you use gratitude to avoid your pain, it’s spiritual bypassing in disguise.

And you don’t owe anyone that performance.

6 signs you’re caught in toxic gratitude

In the same podcast episode, Mel brings up toxic gratitude theory, which is the psychological idea that when you fake appreciation to avoid pain, you lose touch with your real feelings. And that keeps you stuck.

And she highlights six forms of it.

1. You only show the good and hide the mess

You can often see this on social media with the beach selfies, the #blessed captions, and the curated joy.

Unfortunately, behind the scenes, the same person vents nonstop about how unhappy they really are.

2. You shame others with “You should be grateful”

This one’s sneaky because it sounds like parenting wisdom.

For instance, if your kid complains about dinner, you say, “You should be grateful you have food.” Or if they cry after a loss? “You should be glad you made it this far.”

Forced appreciation should never be used to guilt someone into silence.

3. You use it to justify staying stuck

Here’s how this one might look: you might be grateful for their job, but you hate going to work. Or you say you’re grateful for the relationship you’re in, but it drains you.

Being thankful becomes a way to explain away your suffering. And the only thing you’re really doing is shaming yourself into settling.

4. You jump to gratitude to escape grief

Let’s say someone you care for passes away, and the first thing you say is, “At least they’re not suffering.” While that might be true, it skips over your heartbreak.

Gratitude becomes a life raft when you’re drowning in emotion. Instead of feeling the grief, you try to bypass it.

But the truth is, healthy processing starts with naming what hurts.

5. You force silver linings when people are in pain

It’s likely you have friends who’ve gone through something traumatic, like a disease or a life-changing loss (think: bankruptcy or divorce). Your instinct might be to say, “You’re going to beat it” or “You’ll bounce back.”

You don’t mean any harm. But what they really need is honesty, not sunshine.

A softer way to respond might be, “That sucks. You don’t deserve this. I’m here.” It’s more grounding than any polished platitude.

6. You downplay your own success

Do you work hard, push through tough times, and still say, “I’m just grateful to be here”?

That may sound humble, but it leaves out the truth: that you showed up, you did the work, and you made it happen.

Being grateful doesn’t need to erase that. It’s okay to say, “I earned this.”

The dangers of toxic gratitude, according to science

When gratitude is misused, the harm can be real. Here are a few science-backed ways it can quietly wear you down.

• Psychological and emotional risks. Regularly pushing down your true feelings has been linked to higher levels of depression, anxiety, and feeling less satisfied with life. People who do this often also say they feel lost, confused, or disconnected from what really matters to them.
• Cognitive consequences. Gratitude can sometimes create distorted thinking, especially when it’s used to justify behavior that doesn’t feel right. This can lead to guilt, lowered confidence, and staying in situations out of obligation rather than truth.
• Mind–body consequences. Repressing emotions can raise stress levels, weaken your immune response, worsen mental health, and even put your overall well-being at risk.
• Compromised emotional healing. Skipping the full experience of negative emotion, such as grief, can lead to delayed or prolonged grief reactions. Long-term outcomes include complicated grief, major depression, and social isolation.
• Compassion deficit. When emotional pain is masked with toxic positivity and gratitude, it often shows up as performance. This invalidates real feelings and quietly drives disconnection, even in close relationships.

That’s the thing with toxic gratitude—it narrows your perspective. You stop seeing the full picture and start filtering reality through a single lens of “what you should be thankful for.”

Jenna calls this an extreme view of gratitude, one that blocks out the facts. And when that happens, you’ll likely find yourself stuck in a version of the story that isn’t even true.

The difference between healthy vs. toxic gratitude

Most people don’t realize they’ve slipped from real gratitude into something performative or guilt-based. The line is subtle, but the emotional impact isn’t.

Here’s how to spot the difference:

How to practice real gratitude without the guilt

You can’t fake your way into gratitude. The shift from toxic to real begins when you make space for your actual emotions and learn how to hold them without flinching.

Gratitude is a beautiful example of long-term strategy over instant gratification.

— Kristina Mӓnd-Lakhiani, co-founder of Mindvalley and trainer of the From Awesome to Flawesome program

These three insights, pulled from experts who’ve studied emotional well-being for decades, can help you rebuild your relationship with gratefulness from the inside out.

1. Gratitude as a long-term strategy, not a quick fix

Kristina Mӓnd-Lakhiani, the co-founder of Mindvalley, calls gratitude one of the six practices that raise your “set point of happiness.” True, it doesn’t drown you in dopamine. But over time, it recalibrates your nervous system in profound ways.

“Gratitude is a beautiful example of long-term strategy over instant gratification,” she explains at her stage talk at Mindvalley University 2017. “It doesn’t make you feel euphoric… it just makes you feel a little bit better… But if you express gratitude on a daily basis for 30 days, your perception of your own happiness goes up 25%.”

That’s the brilliance of this feeling. It doesn’t need to knock you over the head with bliss to work; it’s quieter than that. It builds like muscle: slow, steady, and often unnoticed…until one day, your baseline feels different.

Learn more from Kristina:

2. Acknowledging negative emotions as essential

In the same stage talk, Kristina also warns against a growing epidemic in personal growth circles: the compulsive need to “stay positive” and sugarcoat sadness, disappointment, jealousy, or anger with faux-enlightened soundbites.

But gratitude isn’t a shortcut around discomfort. It’s what comes after you’re honest with yourself.

“You acknowledge that [the feeling] exists,” she says. “You give it a true and fair and honest name without spiritual bypassing.”

But emotional truth isn’t always easy. Many people deflect their pain with comparisons. They say, “I should just be grateful,” especially when others are struggling more.

According to Jenna, though, this is often a sign of self-invalidation. “Gratitude can absolutely be used to avoid or suppress feelings of grief, anger, and fear,” she says. “They try to avoid anger by trying to be grateful… which could make the emotions build up over time and become harmful.”

That quiet judgment trains you to hide your discomfort instead of meeting it. But when you face your emotions instead of bypassing them, gratitude finally has somewhere solid to land.

3. Gratitude is not a checklist; it’s a felt sense

Gratitude is not: health, check; roof over your head, check; food in the fridge, check. That’s thinking gratitude, not feeling it.

And as Srikumar Rao, the founder of The Rao Institute and trainer of Mindvalley’s The Quest for Personal Mastery program, puts it, “Gratitude is not a thinking thing. You actually have to feel gratitude.”

The problem is, most of us live in our heads. We try to logic our way into happiness. But you can’t spreadsheet your way to peace.

Real gratitude starts to rise when you stop intellectualizing and start experiencing. And you do that by connecting the dots, like noticing how each piece of your life fits together in ways you didn’t expect or how even your setbacks had hidden hands guiding them.

One Mindvalley member and student of Srikumar, Benie Bernadatte, says she “learned not to limit the challenges but to challenge the limits, as well as to be thankful for every challenge.” Over time, she grew thankful for each one because they built strength, shaped her character, and revealed parts of herself she never knew were there.

Srikumar suggests weaving those life threads into a story. Not just “I’m grateful for my home,” but “Because I have a home, I slept well, woke up clear-minded, and could show up fully for someone who needed me.” 

You make space for the feeling instead of forcing it. And when it comes, gratitude begins to shift from obligation to truth.

Embrace everyday magic

There’s a difference between spiritual effort and emotional exhaustion. One brings you home to yourself, while the other burns you out trying to escape.

If you’ve spent years doing the reading, journaling, and meditating but still feel tangled inside, you might just be ready for deeper tools.

Mindvalley’s free resources library exists for that exact moment. Inside, you’ll find…

• Downloadable guides,
• Expert-led classes,
• Self-assessments, and
• Immersive webinars designed to meet you where you are.

These tools are built to help you get clear, build self-trust, and feel safe in your own nervous system again. For some, that shift begins with something simple, like realizing how hard it is to express love to the people who matter most, or notice how a gratitude exercise brings up more than expected.

For others, it goes even deeper. Nelli Aedla, a student of Kristina Mӓnd-Lakhiani’s Mindvalley program, shares on Mindvalley Stories how the forgiveness meditation and gratitude practice helped her release years of emotional weight. She says:

Totally powerful with letting go of things I have been carrying with me for years.

And every tool in this library is taught by one of Mindvalley’s world-class teachers: Vishen, Kristina Mӓnd-Lakhiani, Jim Kwik, Jon & Missy Butcher, Marisa Peer, and more.

No matter where you’re standing right now, one thing’s for sure: come in with the mess, leave with something solid.

Welcome in.