Article At a Glance:
- Joy isn’t an exact science, but it can be found and enhanced through intentional practices.
- Seeking out joy can strengthen overall wellness by supporting flexibility and bounce-back after setbacks.
- Start by defining what joy feels like to you, then make space for self-care, finally don’t discount small moments of pleasure.
- Savoring ordinary moments can strengthen positive emotions and enhance life satisfaction.
- Support (social/material), wellness habits, hopeful beliefs, and values-based purpose all contribute to resilience.
- Your values can act as a roadmap for creating more fulfilling, joyful experiences.
Why Joy and Resilience Matter
When was the last time you remember being full of joy? When was the last time you woke up feeling like you could take on the world?
If you can’t recall any recent moments that fit these descriptions, you’re not alone. Many people are struggling to find joy and build up resilience for what life throws at us.
Being disconnected from joy in our lives can lead to poor outcomes for our wellness and relationships. Additionally, not being able to bounce back from life’s setbacks can have an accumulating effect, leaving us hopeless. Joy and resilience are two elements that can enhance the good moments in life and help us weather the bad.
Finding Joy in Life Today
Joy, much like our other emotions, is not an experience that we can force to occur nor can we ensure that it will stick around forever. Of course, this does not mean the pursuit of joy is futile. Even a temporary moment of joy can benefit our lives in various ways.
But how do we find joy in our lives today? A good place to start is by asking yourself: What does joy feel like to me? For some, joy might be simply having respite from their stressors and being able to meet their needs. Work, family, relationships, the news, health, and much more can overwhelm us on any given day.
Most of us don’t have a regular practice of stepping away from our stressors to find peace and care for ourselves. It may even seem selfish or privileged to consider stepping away from our responsibilities to seek out joy and reprieve. Keep in mind that you cannot pour from an empty cup.
Refilling your cup through seeking joy makes you more capable of showing up as your best self in every other part of your life. Even five minutes of quiet time, alone with no distractions, can provide an opportunity to reflect and get in touch with what your self-care needs are for that day.
Finding Joy in Ordinary Moments
Seeking joy isn’t only done through managing stress and attending to self-care. One can find and expand joy in the smallest, most ordinary moments.
There is research that shows there are psychological benefits of finding and savoring simple pleasures to enhance life and promote positive emotions.
Simple pleasures can be available to us every day and could encompass things such as:
- appreciating a sunny day
- having your favorite food or drink
- relaxing in a bath
Connecting Joy and Values
Ultimately, what brings you the most joy will depend on what you value most in your life. Try to think of a few of your most joyful memories. Consider what made those moments so good.
Make a list of descriptors and themes of the environments, events, people, and sensations that make up these memories. These descriptors and themes are examples of things you value most in life.
Maybe you value:
- family
- nature
- travel
- learning
- creativity
These values can become your roadmap to seeking out more joy in your life today. Even enacting your values in small ways can lead to experiences that are fulfilling and supportive of a sense of life satisfaction.
What Resilience Means
Not only can joy enhance our lives, but it can add to our ability to get through tough times. Resilience is a concept that refers to how we adapt to difficult experiences or ongoing challenges in our lives. You can think of resilience as having flexibility in our emotions, our outlook, and our behavior.
Having flexibility in these areas of functioning will help us to manage the tough stuff and find our way back to baseline. There are several factors that influence a person’s level of resilience.
Factors That Influence Resilience
Social and Material Support
First, social and material support play a huge role in resilience. If we are able to ask others for help or if we have the resources needed to get out of a crisis, then we will be more likely to bounce back from setbacks.
Furthermore, having consistent wellness practices supports our ability to get through life’s challenges. If we aren’t sleeping enough, eating well, or moving our bodies, then our stressors can feel much harder to deal with.
Of course, having social support and material resources can make access to wellness-promoting activities much easier.
Hopefulness vs. Hopelessness
Second, our internal world also has a significant influence on our resilience. How we look at our lives, the world, and our futures can affect how well we recover from hardship. One’s assessment of their future isn’t dependent on their tendency towards optimism or pessimism.
Rather, we have the ability to consciously choose beliefs rooted in hopefulness versus beliefs rooted in hopelessness. Ideas that come from hopelessness leave us feeling worse about our situations and powerless to affect change. In contrast, ideas that come from hopefulness can help us cope with our setbacks and leave us feeling empowered to bounce back from them.
Consider this: would you rather have someone tell you to give up and accept your suffering forever, or would you rather have someone acknowledge your hardship and inspire you to keep fighting for yourself and your life.
We don’t always have access to external voices that inspire hope, but we can always choose to cultivate this outlook for ourselves.
Values and Purpose
Finally, similar to finding joy, getting connected to what we truly value, or what gives us purpose in life, can be a great aid to our resilience. If we have a clear motivation or direction for why we keep going even when things get tough, we are much more likely to bounce back.
For example, if someone values family, then they would be much more likely to get through a tough work week knowing that they will get the fulfillment of quality time with family at the end of it.
Moving Forward With Meaning
Often, I say to my clients that coping with the hard stuff is good, but coping with the hard stuff in order to be able to reach something good is even better. We all can benefit from pursuing something that is personally meaningful or significant even in small ways.
Much like savoring small pleasures to expand joy, we can find small ways to put our values into action to help make us more resilient during challenging times.