Amid this ongoing roller coaster of emotions, an unlikely buzzword has emerged from the Kamala Harris presidential campaign: joy.
But joy doesn’t fall under the exclusive purview of any one political party. It’s more than a slogan; it’s a pathway to good health. Cultivating joy in everyday life can lessen the mental and physical impact of stress and anxiety. Read on to learn how experts say joy impacts health and how to get more joy into your daily life.
How Joy Affects Health
Scientists are still untangling the ways in which joy changes peoples’ physical and mental health. Until about 10 years ago, scientists weren’t really studying the impact of joy and happiness on physical and mental health, says Stephanie Harrison, a former scholar of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and author of the book New Happy.
Since then, “Joy has been conceptualized in a few different ways,” she says. “Some describe it as one of the supreme positive emotions, being part of other emotions such as gratitude. Others argue that joy is the emotion that we experience when we connect to something that is meaningful to us.”
Experiencing joy can be the catalyst that pulls a person out of a negative emotional spiral.
“Feeling joy kicks off that positive upward spiral of feeling good, feeling more motivated, and achieving goals. It helps you to experience this state of positive emotion that elevates you,” Harrison says.
Positive emotions can improve a person’s ability to regulate their nervous system — and affect the body’s natural fight-or-flight response to stress. Regulating stress is a huge benefit of joy, says Patrice Harris, MD, a psychiatrist in Atlanta and medical editor in chief at Everyday Health. (Dr. Harris has no relation to Kamala Harris.)
How to Cultivate Joy
Joy doesn’t always just happen; you may need to take action first. Here are some strategies.
Enjoy the Little Things
A huge secret to cultivating joy is experiencing the emotion in small moments, says Dr. Harris.
“Sometimes we wait for some big joyous moment, but find joy in the small things, like the rain if you have a garden and you need your vegetables to grow, or seeing a cat do something funny on social media,” Dr. Harris says.
An analysis by University of California in Berkeley researchers at BIG JOY Project, which included 70,000 people in more than 200 countries, found that people who deliberately experienced small moments of joy every day — around seven minutes of joy per day — for a week reported being 25 percent happier than they were before.
Connect and Take Action
To Harrison, joy is the emotion associated with connection or reconnection. In the context of election stress, this could mean getting involved with your political party or groups that advocate for issues important to you.
Voting can have a similar effect, Harrison says.
“When we take action, it truly doesn’t just drive our motivation, but it can have a profound impact on our emotional state of being,” she says. “It’s a recipe for a fair amount of unhappiness to sit at home and stress about an outcome.”
Don’t Push Manufactured Joy
You’ve likely heard the term toxic positivity, the unrelenting pressure to only experience emotions such as gratitude, happiness, and yes, joy.
Harris says the true benefits of joy don’t come from manufactured moments of joy. Acknowledging that there are bad days is key to cultivating authentic joy, she says.
“Nobody needs someone to tell them to find joy when they’re having a bad day. We should give ourselves grace to feel what we need to. I encourage everyone to, when it’s not going well, to feel that,” Dr. Harris says. “By pressing joy all the time you invalidate the huge span of emotions humans experience.”
Spread the Joy
When someone feels stuck in a perpetual bad day, Dr. Harris says helping others can be a powerful way to initiate feelings of joy.
Harrison agrees, arguing that happiness is rooted in human connection and kindness, not material things.
Consider the results of a study in which researchers divided 122 people who had moderate anxiety and depression into three groups. Some performed three big random acts of kindness two days per week; others were asked to plan a social event twice a week; and the last group was asked to complete a thought record — a technique used in cognitive behavioral therapy — twice a week, in which they would identify distressing or distorted thoughts and then learn coping strategies.
“Since joy tends to be shared, it tends to ripple out and affect other people in positive ways, too,” Harrison says.