 |
| 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?
