Does Gratitude Make You Complacent? Why I Worried It Would

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-21 · 7 min read

I worried that getting good at appreciating what I had would take my foot off the gas. The research says the opposite: grateful people make more progress on their goals, not less.

Does gratitude make you complacent? I spent the best part of a year quietly worried that it might. I run my own consultancy, I built a gratitude journalling app, and for a while I held both of those facts slightly apart from each other — because somewhere in my head was the suspicion that if I got too good at appreciating what I already had, I would stop pushing for more. Hunger gets things built, the logic goes. Contentment gets things shelved.

I want to take that worry seriously rather than wave it away, because I think it is the single most common objection to gratitude practice among ambitious people — more common than the toxic positivity concern, more common than plain scepticism. And having now looked properly at the research and lived with a daily practice for a couple of years, my honest answer is: no, gratitude does not make you complacent. If anything, the evidence points the other way. But the worry is worth unpacking, because it rests on an assumption about how motivation works that turns out to be wrong in an interesting way.

Why do people think gratitude kills ambition?

The fear has a respectable pedigree. A lot of high achievers run on dissatisfaction. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is the engine; close the gap emotionally — by deciding that what you have is enough — and the engine cuts out. On this model, gratitude and drive sit on opposite ends of a single dial. Turn one up, the other goes down.

I believed a version of this for years without ever saying it out loud. My version was scruffier: if I let myself feel pleased about the consultancy, I would take my foot off the gas, a competitor would not, and eighteen months later I would be wondering what happened. Dissatisfaction felt like diligence. Being hard to please felt like a professional asset.

Notice what the model assumes, though: that appreciation and aspiration are the same mental act pointed in different directions, so you can only do one at a time. That is the bit the research undermines.

What does the research actually say?

The most useful study here is one of the oldest in the field. In 2003, Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough ran the experiment that more or less launched gratitude research: one group listed things they were grateful for, one listed hassles, one listed neutral events. The famous result is that the gratitude group felt better. The result almost nobody quotes is that the gratitude group also made more progress towards their personal goals — academic, health and relationship goals they had named at the start — over the following two months. The people practising contentment out-executed the people who were not. That is roughly the opposite of what the complacency theory predicts.

Then there is the patience work. David DeSteno and colleagues published a study in 2014 with the wonderful title Gratitude: A Tool for Reducing Economic Impatience. They induced gratitude in participants and then offered them a classic choice: a smaller amount of money now, or a larger amount later. Grateful participants held out for the larger, later reward significantly more often — with real money at stake — and the effect was specific to gratitude, not to feeling generally cheerful. A follow-up in 2016 found the same pattern in daily life: people with higher everyday gratitude discounted the future less.

Sit with that for a second, because it reframes the whole question. Ambition is mostly patience. Building anything worthwhile — a business, a skill, a body of work — is a long series of choices to forgo the small reward now for the larger one later. The research suggests grateful people are better at exactly that trade. Gratitude does not switch the engine off. It appears to stop the engine demanding a payout every five minutes.

Is gratitude the same as settling?

No, and the confusion comes from treating them as one thing. Settling is a decision about the future: this is as good as it gets, so I will stop trying. Gratitude is an appraisal of the present: this, here, is good, and I noticed it. You can do the second without the first. Most nights my journal entry is something small — a client call that went better than expected, a decent coffee, my daughter finding something hilarious that objectively was not. At no point does writing that down commit me to abandoning my plans for the business.

There is also a sharper way to put it. The alternative strategy — deferring all satisfaction until the goal is hit — has a known failure mode, and it is not a rare one. Psychologists call it hedonic adaptation: you hit the target, feel good for a fortnight, recalibrate, and the new position becomes the unremarkable baseline. If you cannot appreciate anything before the finish line, you will not appreciate much after it either, because the line moves. I know this one from the inside. I have hit revenue targets that felt life-changing when I set them and administrative by the time I reached them. Dissatisfaction as a fuel source works, but it is a fuel that burns the vehicle.

Can you be grateful and still want more?

This is the question underneath the question, and the answer is that wanting more from appreciation feels completely different from wanting more from deficit — and works better.

Deficit-driven ambition says: what I have is not enough, therefore I must move. Appreciation-driven ambition says: what I have is real and I can see it clearly, and I want to build on it. The first is running from something; the second is building on top of something. The practical difference showed up for me in decision quality. When I was running on deficit, I said yes to work I should have declined, because empty pipeline felt like emergency. Once I had a clearer running inventory of what was actually going well — which is all a gratitude journal really is — I got noticeably better at declining bad-fit work and waiting for the right kind. That is DeSteno's finding playing out in miniature: appreciation buys patience, and patience is what good strategy is made of.

This is also why I built the weekly review in Kansha the way I did. Each of the five areas I track has a floor — the minimum I will not drop below — and a win, the stretch I am aiming at. Every week I mark both. It is a small structural trick, but it forces appreciation and aspiration into the same view, which is exactly where they belong. You look at what held up this week and what you are reaching for next, in one sitting. Two years in, I have never once finished that review feeling less inclined to push. Usually it is the opposite: seeing what is actually working is what makes the next stretch feel worth attempting.

How do you practise gratitude without going soft?

If the worry is still nagging at you, a few things that keep the practice sharp rather than sedative:

Write the because. Not just what was good, but why it mattered. A client renewed because the work held up under scrutiny is an entry that points forward — it tells you what to do more of. Bare lists drift towards wallpaper; reasons stay useful.

Keep your goals in the same room. Do not quarantine gratitude from ambition. Review what went well and what you are building towards in the same session, the way the Five Fs review forces me to. Kept apart, they can feel like rival philosophies. Together, one feeds the other.

Let it inform strategy, not replace it. A pattern in what you keep being grateful for is data. Mine kept surfacing deep work with a small number of clients and almost never surfaced the busier, shallower engagements. That was not a mood; that was my journal telling me what the business should look like. I restructured around it. Complacent people do not restructure.

Be honest on the bad weeks. Gratitude practice fails when it becomes performance. If the week was rough, one true small thing beats five brave-sounding ones. The practice only works on ambition if it stays an accurate record, because accurate records are what good decisions come from.

So does gratitude make you complacent?

The fear says appreciation and drive compete for the same space. The evidence — two decades of it now, plus my own thoroughly unscientific sample of one — says they do not. Grateful people in the studies made more progress on their goals and held out longer for bigger rewards. In my own working life, the journal did not blunt the ambition; it took the panic out of it. I still want the business to grow. I still set uncomfortable targets. I have simply stopped needing to feel deprived to act, which — whisper it — was never actually the productive part.

If you are the ambitious sort who has been avoiding gratitude practice on the grounds that hunger is your edge, I would gently suggest the hunger was never the edge. The patience was. And it turns out you can train that whilst still enjoying the coffee.