How to Be Thankful When You Don’t Feel Thankful - The Atlantic

...Thankfulness has been strongly and consistently shown to raise human beings' happiness. It stimulates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, part of the brain's reward circuit. Gratitude can make us more resilient, and enhance relationships by strengthening romantic ties, bolstering friendships, and creating family bonds that endure during times of crisis. It may improve many health indicators, such as blood pressure and diet (Thanksgiving feasts notwithstanding).

Giving thanks also makes us better people. Approximately 2,000 years ago, Cicero wrote that gratitude "is not only the greatest, but is also the parent of all the other virtues." Modern research shows that he was probably right. Gratitude can make us more generous with others, more patient, and less materialistic.

Gratitude also appears to be at least partially under our control. Researchers have shown that you can call it into existence by choosing to focus on the things for which you are grateful, instead of the negatives in your life. For example, writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2018, four psychologists randomly split a sample of 153 human subjects into groups that were assigned to either remember something they were grateful for, or think about something unrelated. The grateful remembering group experienced more than five times as much positive emotion as the control group...

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/gratitude-thanksgiving/620799/