How Joy (Not Happiness) Brings Wellness
- amnicklaus
- Feb 26, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 1, 2022
The difference between joy and happiness and how one can improve your well-being.
In my last post, I wrote about how well-being is multi-faceted. When certain areas of our life are out of balance, they can affect the other areas, making us feel less than our best and sometimes even causing illness. Using the Institute for Integrative Nutrition’s (IIN) Circle of Life, you can check in with yourself and see how balanced your circle is.
So what if your circle barely looks like a circle? What if it’s more like a lopsided disc, or a pie with several pieces taken out? This is normal. The good news is, the first step to making any change is awareness, so knowing which areas of your well-being you’d like to begin focusing on will automatically help you balance out that aspect of life. Just pick one area and begin learning about it, setting goals and seeing how you can bring equilibrium to that part of your life.
One area of well-being is joy. This might be an odd piece of the circle to start with, but nonetheless that is where we will begin in this blog. You might think to yourself, how can I work on joy? Isn’t it just something that happens? But according to psychologists, joy is less of a spontaneous reaction and more of a cultivated practice.
Before we get too far, let’s differentiate joy from happiness: psychologists agree that happiness is more of a surface-level, destination-based emotional response, whereas joy is a much more complex, deeper attitude that can transcend any circumstance. Joy can be felt during even the saddest of times. This is because joy is closely connected to sorrow. According to Dr. Pamela Ebstyne King, a professor of Applied Developmental Science in Psychology, joy is a response to significance. She has found that “joy is our delight when we experience, celebrate, and anticipate the manifestation of those things we hold with the most significance—like a birth or graduation. Sorrow is our response to the violation, destruction, or deterioration of such sacred things.” Which explains why, during these significant sad times, like a funeral, we can still experience piercing moments of joy; though we are grieving, we are celebrating and expressing lost love within a community. As IIN notes, joy is a deep inward peace and intense momentary happiness.
Joy and happiness do coexist, but happiness tends to be a reaction to circumstances, ideas, and experiences, while joy is transcendent of these things, linked closely to the feeling of gratitude. As author Akina Chargualaf writes, “Happiness is a destination, joy is an attitude.” We often have thoughts like, I’ll be happy when I find my ideal job, or I’ll be happy when I meet the right partner. But joy comes to us in between now and then, in the way we navigate through our lives here and now. This is why joy is something that can be cultivated, because we can practice looking for things within our grasp that we enjoy. Even if we’re not necessarily happy with where our lives are at, we can experience joy in the small things.
I have felt joy during difficult times by focusing on a pleasant interaction, a delicious meal, even the way the morning sun hits the leaves of a tree. By looking for beauty in my day, I enjoy the life I have while working toward circumstances I desire.
Here are a few journal prompts you can use to start reflecting about joy in your own life:
-Do you enjoy life? -Do you enjoy YOUR life?
-Do you enjoy moments throughout each day? -What brings you joy? Take notes and photos of things, ideas, and experiences that bring you joy. (These can be the tiniest of things!) -Do you feel guilty enjoying things? Why do you think that is?
The great neuroscientist George Lakoff has written about how our neuropathways are malleable: our brain sends signals through our neurons creating mental pathways, and each thought strengthens the connection between these neurons, forming a thought circuit. By actively taking notice of and looking for what brings us joy, we can help reroute our thought patterns, making joy a more accessible emotion.
By this point, it should be pretty obvious why joy is an important part of well-being. Joy can help make us resilient during difficult times. Practicing joy can make us feel more fulfilled and satisfied with the life we currently live, instead of waiting for someday to be happy. Start thinking about what you enjoy, and then let yourself enjoy it all the way! Embracing the practice of joy is a great way to start balancing out your circle and bring more well-being into your life.
References
Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff & Mark Johnson)
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