How to Embrace Joy

"Intense positive emotions include delight, passion, rapture, thrill, triumph, head over heels in love, exuberance, elation, and rejoicing. In a word, joy.

Finding and protecting joy is worth doing at any time. And it’s especially important when you’re facing challenges at any scale, from worries about your child to alarms about your world. Joy is a reminder that you are not defeated in the sanctuary of your own mind.

No matter what is happening in the world around us, no matter what situation we’re stuck in, no matter how anguished we are for others, no matter how hopeless it seems and helpless we feel—we can always turn to joy, claim it, and welcome it.

The Practice

Of course, positive emotions are not about suppressing or covering pain, anxiety, or outrage on behalf of others. Positive feelings can be present in the mind alongside negative ones. In fact, they help us cope with the hard things and hard feelings of life and fuel us to keep on going for the sake of others. The worse a person’s life is, the more important it is to find and feel authentically positive emotions—including joy.

One way to evoke joy is to value opportunities to feel it that naturally appear in daily life. Intense gratitude for hot water, amazement at the sun, the extreme pleasure of sneezing, being blown away that your partner still loves you, so happy to come home after a long day of work—all of these are chances for joy.

You can also deliberately call it to mind, perhaps remembering a beautiful mountain meadow at sunset and then the world-changing overnight to white silence as you crawl out of your tent at dawn to a foot of new snow. Perhaps thinking about someone you love or a major challenge you have put to rest behind you."

Read the full article on Psychology Today

✨Takeaway: Joy is an intense positive emotion that has special benefits and can pull us out of ordinary routines and stresses. Recognizing and valuing little moments of joy can expand the possibilities for having them.

✨Reflection: What brings you joy?

#Emotions #Joy #Positive #Feelings #Embrace #PositivePsychology

If you liked the article, you may also enjoy: "How Anger Affects The Body"