We are often told that we should practise gratitude. Keep a gratitude journal. Write down three good things before bed. Notice what went well. Count your blessings.

And I think there is something about that advice that can feel truly futile, tiny, almost laughably inadequate in the face of everything else.

The world is full of things that are frightening, enraging, unfair and completely outside our control, and someone is suggesting that we write down that we enjoyed the rain?

Really? What is that supposed to do?

Well, quite a lot, actually, thank you very much for asking.

Because gratitude is not really about the individual thing we are grateful for. It is about where we are training our attention to go, and that matters because our attention already has a very strong natural direction.

Everyone’s brain has a negative bias. From a survival perspective, we need to pay more attention to the negative than the positive because the negative is where danger lies. When you get 100 pieces of feedback and 99 of them are positive and one is negative, we don’t need to worry about the 99 that are good because they’re safe. But the one negative? That’s the stuff that could hurt. So of course we focus on that.

And with ADHD, our brain functions like an amplifier. Everything gets turned up, so that capacity for negative checking can get amplified too. Add the impact of a lifetime of feeling that we don’t fit in, of getting things wrong according to rules that didn’t always make sense, of trying to comply while not quite being able to stop ourselves from being the quirky, shiny humans that we are, and there is plenty of reason for the brain to conclude that paying very close attention to the negative is sensible.

The negative bias is not something faulty in you. It is a human survival trait, and with ADHD, for all sorts of reasons, it’s been turned up to 11.

And we don’t need to practise what we are already really good at. If we are really good at seeing the negative in things, we don’t need to add to it. We’ve got that shit covered.

The negative voice is often a very strong judge voice, but from the brain’s perspective it is saying: I’m keeping you safe, don’t worry, I’ve got you. If we can see everything that could go wrong, perhaps we can’t be hurt as much. I come from France, where, my Goddess, we are champions of this stuff. Nihilism central. ‘No point trying anything, it’s all been done before, you’re only going to waste your time.’ I know this territory extremely well.

The problem is that while negativity may have kept us safe, it may also have kept us very stuck. When we put all our eggs in the safety basket, we are often forgetting to give trying things, expanding or risking a look in. The brain goes: no risk, great, we won. Meanwhile, we feel strangled, trapped, small and less capable. We need both safety and risk in balance.

When we are in survival-brain mode, the horizon also becomes very short. The survival brain is not terribly interested in whether the strategy it is choosing now will give you an interesting, expansive or satisfying life in ten years’ time. It is interested in whether you are safe in the next 20 minutes.

Negativity can work in much the same way. Not trying the thing, not trusting the person, not getting your hopes up, spotting every possible reason why something won’t work: all of that can reduce vulnerability in the now. The fact that, over time, your world may become smaller and smaller is not really part of the calculation.

And this is where gratitude starts to become much more interesting.

If you are looking for the negative, you will find it. It abounds. But the reverse is also true: if you are looking for the positive, you will find it.

And yet, for most of us, that somehow doesn’t ring as true.

For quite a long time I did what people would call a gratitude practice. Mine happened on Facebook because Facebook was easy for me and I like writing there. Once a day I would find something to be grateful for. Sometimes that was easy and sometimes it was surprisingly hard. On those days it might have been: I guess I’m grateful I’ve got a roof over my fucking head. I guess I’m grateful I have cats.

The point wasn’t really the individual thing. It was the practice of noticing.

But I think there is another reason gratitude can be difficult: there is risk involved. What if I get disappointed? What if I let myself enjoy this and then it goes wrong?

This is where Brené Brown’s idea of foreboding joy comes in. She writes:

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. No emotion is more frightening than joy because we believe if we allow ourselves to feel joy, we are inviting disaster. We start dress rehearsing tragedy in the best moment of our lives in order to stop vulnerability from beating us to the punch. We are terrified of being blindsided by pain, so we practice tragedy and trauma.

But there’s a huge cost. When we push away joy, we squander the goodness that we need to build resilience, strength and courage.

The good news: everyone who showed a deep capacity for joy had one thing in common: they practiced gratitude. In the midst of joy, there’s often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability. Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the worst-case scenario, the people who lean into joy use the quiver as a reminder to practice gratitude.

I think that gets to something important about why gratitude can be harder than it looks. It isn’t simply that we think it is silly or pointless. Letting ourselves notice what is good means allowing ourselves to have something we could potentially lose. There is vulnerability in that.

Gratitude, then, isn’t pretending that everything is fine. It is practising staying with the good thing rather than immediately rehearsing its disappearance.

And it doesn’t have to be some great transcendental revelation. Today it is grey and raining after weeks without much rain, and I am genuinely thinking: thank God the rain is here. The grass is green. What a gift.

For me, colour works in much the same way. I fight the world with colour. When everybody is walking around in black and grey in winter, I’m like, fuck that shit. I can’t control everything that is grey and dark and negative, but I can literally inject some colour. Bombard the place with colour.

Sometimes what is available to us is even smaller than that. When I walk down the street, it can feel like a political act for me to meet people with a smile. I live somewhere very multicultural, and I am conscious, for example, of women wearing burqas and the way people can react to them by looking away or frowning. So whenever I see someone in a burqa, I smile. For me there is something almost like being a fucking political ninja about it: I am a safe person for you.

And all it takes is a smile. Smiles break boundaries.

This is what I mean by gratitude. Not denying what is terrible, not painting over it, not pretending everything is fine. It is refusing to allow the grey, the dark and the negative to engulf the entire field of vision just because our brains happen to be extremely efficient at spotting it.

Maybe we don’t need to get rid of the negative voice. Maybe we can say: thank you, judge. You’ve done a great job. Thank you, negativity. You’ve kept me alive. You’ve kept me here.

Now fuck off, because I need to chase my joy.

You’ve done your job. I need my adventurer to come in now, get sparky with things and go: this is lovely.

The things available to us may look tiny beside everything that is wrong. A rainy day. A colour. A smile.

But they are available to us.

And that’s why I believe gratitude is a weapon of mass construction.