Discover the beauty of Joy
Reviewed and verified by Anthea Lai, Registered Psychotherapist
1. Understanding Emotions
Do you struggle with understanding your emotions and how they affect you? Learning about the core emotions can help you improve your emotional regulation skills. Being more informed about the core emotions can allow for more open and honest communication with your loved ones. This month, we will be focusing on the core emotion of joy.
2. Why do we tend to not focus on the joy, even when it shows up?
Negative bias is a natural psychological phenomenon where we focus more on negative experiences, emotions or information than the positive. This bias can have a negative impact on our mental health. Not only do we see the negative… When we feel joy, we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to “soak in the joy” like we would soak in the sun on a beach… and we quickly jump back to the negative or “what if”.
Being more aware of this natural bias showing up in our lives is the first step. Once you notice it, you can make a choice in being mindful to give thanks, self-validate and celebrate the positives in our lives.
3. What is Joy?
Joy is the positive feeling of happiness, contentment, satisfaction or delight from within ourselves. When you feel joy, you and others around you can experience your joy when they see you smile, see the wrinkled skin under your sparkling eyes, laugh out loud or speak with an upbeat energetic tone.
On an internal biological level, we feel joy when our brains release a healthy level of serotonin and dopamine, the neurotransmitters related to happiness. Joy can also cause warmth and lightness in the chest, deeper breaths and a calm relaxed body. These reactions from your nervous system and circulatory system are here to allow you to experience the fullness of joy, one of the core human emotions.
4. How to Acknowledge and Embrace Joy
To notice what things you are grateful for in your life can be a way to help bring you joy. For example, it might be the simple things of having a roof over your head, spending a meal with your friends or family, and appreciating nature around us. Taking time to embrace the things you are grateful for can shift your mindset to focus more on the positive things in your life instead of the problems.
Engaging in hobbies you enjoy, connecting with your community or spiritual practices, exercising, or listening to music can trigger joy emotionally and biologically. Focusing on the things in your life you can control instead of things you cannot will also allow you to focus more on the things that bring you joy.
Just smiling or laughing, even if you don’t actually feel happy at first, can tease your body into lowering your heart rate and reducing stress, which stimulates our “happy neurotransmitters”.
5. We can learn to receive joy more easily together through attending psychoeducational courses, groups or therapy sessions
Learning to be mindful of your emotions may be hard, but it can ultimately result in many positive changes in your mental well-being, relationships with others, day-to-day interactions, and more.
At Grace Health Centre, we offer psychoeducational courses, supportive groups and counselling to support you in your life journey especially if you find that it is difficult to feel happy.
The psychoeducational course “Tame Your Emotional Rollercoaster” which teaches Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skills to help build your mindfulness skills to our core emotions. For more information, you can visit our page.
You are not alone in this and being a part of a learning group community setting can be life-changing.
For more information, you can visit our page.