Is Joy Something You Find or Make?

Positive emotions are supposed to be great for you, and of course it feels better to be happy than sad.  But so what?  If sadness is where you are, what’s the point of lecturing yourself to “be more positive”?

Before we start lecturing ourselves or others about what emotions we are supposed to be feeling in any given situation, it may be helpful to sort out some semantics.  Emotion and mood are used pretty much interchangeably in ordinary conversation, but the science of psychology sees them differently.  Emotions are fleeting responses to internal and/or external stimuli that may seem relevant or irrelevant to one’s functioning in the moment.  Mood, on the other hand “describes a positive or negative state of mind that is more diffuse and longer lasting and that typically emerges in the absence of an identifiable stimulus”1.

My outlook, my choice

And then, we can go beyond the data and consider what I’m calling “outlook”.  Unlike emotion or mood, my outlook is my choice.  Do I see the world as primarily a good or bad place?  Do I believe that most people are basically kind or basically selfish?  Is my life moving towards some purpose that is important to me, or am I adrift in chaos?

Choosing a positive outlook, regardless of the emotional state of the moment or of the general order or disorder of moods, can be an effective choice towards making life better long term.  A great deal of research has shown that people who have more positive emotions do better on a wide range of health indicators, including cardiovascular fitness, immune system response, less pain, and better sleep.  So we need to find out how to seek out these feelings of joy, excitement, delight, contentment and so on.  If they won’t come to me, I will track them down and catch them myself.

Here are a few active measures we can take to find joy in life:

  1. Notice the moment.  Pause your eyes when they sweep across a pretty tree and really see how green and alive it is.  Feel the hot water from the shower pounding down and just enjoy how great it is.  Taste the food you’re eating, and compare it with other meals you’ve had and enjoyed in the past.  Listen to music, or the sound of children playing, and of course, cliché or not, smell the roses!
  2. Do things that you know are fun, even if you don’t feel like it.  It’s not an unusual experience that you get dragged reluctantly into doing something by a partner, child or friend, only to find yourself forgetting you didn’t want to and having a great time.
  3. Call joy deliberately to mind, by remembering peak or delightful experiences you have had.  Develop a catalog in your mind of things you can remember at need.
  4. Use gratitude, but not to excess.  Nowadays, it’s quite common to hear people talking about a “gratitude journal” or the like, but the emphasis is often on getting as many things down as you can think of.  Instead, just think of one or two things you’re grateful for today and take time to really experience the gratitude that is attached to those things.  There’s no need to move on to the next and the next item you’re grateful for if the feeling of gratitude is making you happy right here.
  5. According to our colleague, Rick Hanson in his blog Just One Thing, “you can just flick a kind of switch in your mind and turn directly toward joy. Really. The more experiences of joy that you’ve had and taken into yourself, the easier this gets.”  It’s kind of like asserting control over your own brain.  You can decide what you will carry with you in developing the outlook on life that you want to have.

So look for joy, surprise, contentment, relief wherever you go.  They are not inside you waiting for you to feel them “correctly”, they are there in your life waiting to be found.  If you develop an outlook that says there’s good stuff out there, good people out there, then you will be able to find them no matter what your fleeting emotional life, or your unearned mood state, may be at the moment.

Nancy

Reference:

Tomaso CC, Johnson AB, Nelson TD. The effect of sleep deprivation and restriction on mood, emotion, and emotion regulation: three meta-analyses in one. Sleep. 2021 Jun 11;44(6):zsaa289. doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsaa289. PMID: 33367799; PMCID: PMC8193556.