Emotions

Will Work for Joy

December 18, 2021

Photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash

“I am willing to allow more joy into my life.”

—Monday yoga class affirmation.

It’s easy to feel joy when everything is going the way you want it to. But what about when life blows a big fat raspberry in your face? How can you seek joy when you’re going through tough times, and feeling grief, frustration, or anger?

While the holiday season does bring many simple pleasures (Holiday lights! Peppermint chip shakes!), it also ushers in longer to-do lists and the weight of a year-end reckoning. It can be a heavy time of year, especially if you’ve suffered losses or have troublesome issues on your mind (and who doesn’t?!). It can feel anything but joyful. And for many people, the cold, dark months of winter can be an added strain on their mental health.

It’s these rough times when we need to dig deeper to find practices that help us to feel joy.* Fortunately, psychologists and other professionals who study joy and happiness have some help for us. (While joy and happiness aren’t precisely the same thing, for the purposes of this blog post, I’m lumping them together.)

 Here are a few tips I’ve found useful lately:

It’s OK to feel joy, even when times are tough. Even when happy things are happening to and around me, sometimes I don’t let them register because so many people are suffering right now. I feel guilty, like I’m being insensitive. As Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of Joyful (see my post about the book here), points out “…feeling joy is different than pretending nothing’s wrong. And in [a] world where anxiety is a fixture, not an anomaly, joy is essential to our survival.” (Her entire post, “Can You Still Find Joy When It Feels Like the World Is Ending?” is worth a read.)

Let your environment help you feel more joyful. I also recently listened to a podcast interview with Ingrid Fetell Lee, and she reminded me how many ways we can bring joy into our surroundings. Two of her suggestions that I’ve embraced already include:

Having something green in my office (helps to reset concentration and attention). I have a lot of green in my home office, including green furniture and artificial plants (my cat eats real ones).

Keeping something silly or surprising in my car. Cars have a lot of little individual compartments that close up, and, according to Lee, that creates the potential for surprise, one of the factors that adds joy to our lives. I have a tiny origami dragon in one of the little compartments on my dash that makes me smile every time I see it. This could be a fun thing to do for someone else, too—hide a little fun surprise in their car.   

“Practice” positive emotions. According to psychologist and neuroscience researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, our brains use our past experiences to make sense of and create the present. “By practicing particular emotions, you can ‘rewire,’ your brain…. So when you start to feel a negative emotion, such as sadness or frustration, you can more easily swap that negative feeling for a positive one, such as awe or gratitude.” For example, maybe the next time you’re stuck in traffic, instead of feeling frustrated, pause and feel grateful for the fact that you have a vehicle that runs and can take you where you need to go.

This may seem a bit “Pollyanna-ish,” I know, and I’m not saying we should ignore or stifle negative emotions completely. I do think we as a society have allowed ourselves to forget how good we have it and we’d be happier if we turned our focus more often to all that is good in our lives.

Actively seek experiences which bring about positive emotions. What actions or experiences bring you joy? How often do you deliberately perform those actions or have those experiences? Especially when times are hard, we can’t wait around for happiness and joy to “just happen.” We have to pursue them. As Natalie Dattilo, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, reminds us in “5 Happiness-Boosting Things to Do Before the End of the Year, According to a Positive Psychologist,” “Happiness doesn’t just happen… Routine and planned activation of the pleasure and reward centers of the brain is required to feel good and to preserve our ability to feel good in the future.”

These experiences don’t have to be complicated or expensive, either. The example I liked the best from this article, was the “awe walk”—a walk where you deliberately look for the unexpected and delightful—allowing yourself to experience the beauty and intricacy around you. (Read Dattilo’s five end-of-the-year happiness tips here. And for more ways to seek delight, visit NPR’s Joy Generator.) 

If you’re feeling little joy right now, I understand. And when you’re suffering, it seems impossible to do the things that might make you feel better. I hope one or more of these small things will help.

What little things can you do to welcome joy into your life?

*Please note: these suggestions are meant to help with run-of-the mill negative moods and emotions. They are not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please seek the help of a mental health professional or other qualified provider if you have a mood disorder or depression.

A Book That Takes Its Time

The Best Route to Happiness

July 20, 2018


“Happiness is primarily about cultivating your inner life, instead of trying to influence your external life…. Even if you can control most things, controlling everything is impossible. So the best route to happiness is not trying to control your surroundings, but to control what is happening inside you. If you can control your feelings, your emotions, and your desires, you can be happy. It’s not what happens that makes you unhappy—it’s your reaction to what happens.”
—Frederic Lenoir, “Be Aware of the Good Things Around You,” A Book That Takes Its Time

Emotions

Should We Pursue Happiness?

November 09, 2015


Albert Camus said, “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Does this mean we shouldn’t try to seek ways to be happier? Should we just “get over it” and live the life before us?

Well, that depends on what we mean by happiness.

If we’re confusing happiness with pleasure, maybe. Continual chasing of pleasure and feel-good moments will not bring deep and lasting happiness. Being afraid of or avoiding negative emotions will also backfire, because frankly, no life is devoid of experiences that feel sad or scary and there is a lot to be learned from those experiences. But happiness as I define it here on the blog isn’t just pleasure—it’s a deeper, wider, more all-encompassing emotion. An emotion that includes joy and pleasure, but also satisfaction after achieving something worthwhile, or living up to my ideals in a difficult situation. It also encompasses contentment and a feeling of well-being. So many facets of happiness make achieving it easier as well as more worthwhile.

We run into trouble when we feel we should always feel happy. Negative feelings are normal. Thinking we shouldn’t have them can make us even more miserable. We shouldn’t pursue feelings of happiness at the expense of everything else. That would be like eating only chocolate and never eating spinach and expecting to be healthy. Maybe the spinach doesn’t taste as good as the chocolate (at least to me it doesn’t), but it offers nutrients chocolate doesn’t. I want to be strong and healthy in both body and mind, and I can’t do that if I only eat chocolate…or pursue pleasure. We should be open and accepting of the richness of all our emotions, even times of sadness, fear, boredom, or frustration. These emotions often bear a message of change, or wake us up from sleepwalking through life.

I can’t say that I’ve been especially happy the past two weeks. And yet—I have. I’m heartbroken over losing our beloved family dog, but somehow the breaking open of my heart has allowed in the caring and understanding of others, and in those moments, I’ve felt loved by and connected to them in ways I hadn’t before. The crack in my heart has released my feelings of love and gratitude for those people, and for the many other rich gifts in my life.

What does pursuing happiness mean to you?

Emotions

To Successfully Pursue Happiness

May 07, 2014

“To successfully pursue happiness, one must also work up the nerve to feel it, knowing full well that to finally open the heart is to encounter the other outlawed emotions in all their terrible glory.”
—Linda Kohanov, Riding Between the Worlds

Pursuing happiness: My son at age 4 with a litter of puppies. Scout is
the one licking his face.