Practising gratitude during a genuinely difficult period can feel almost dishonest, as though it requires pretending the difficulty is not real or does not matter, but a careful gratitude practice does not ask anyone to deny hardship, only to notice that hardship rarely occupies the entirety of a difficult day.
Even within a genuinely hard stretch, small things frequently remain intact, a supportive friend, a moment of unexpected relief, a basic need still being met, and noticing these does not diminish the difficulty but does provide a counterweight that keeps the whole of a hard day from collapsing into a single, uniform experience of suffering.
This kind of gratitude tends to be harder to access and less automatic than gratitude during an easy period, which is exactly why it is often described as the more valuable version of the practice, worth building deliberately before it is genuinely needed rather than only attempted once difficulty has already arrived.