This is the THIRD in a five-part series on Joy. We both read a little book by Dr Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey: The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People: 15 Minute Brain Science Hacks to a More Connected and Satisfying Life. And thought it would be great to share with our listeners.
I (Renee) wish I had this information when I was raising my kids!
Many of us are walking around with an inner world of fear. A fear house. And those of you listening who have a fear relationship with your parents or your employer or with God, know that it is not sufficient to create a life that is rich and full.
If you missed the first two episodes, we recommend that you go back and listen to them because we laid a foundation for all the future episodes. As a reminder, we said in the introductory episode that in Western cultures we tend to see joy as a choice. But joy happens predominantly in the relational right hemisphere of the brain, while choices and cognition happen in the left.
This is significant, because the data flow in the brain moves from right to left, not the other way around. Right brain activity informs left brain activity, not the reverse.
Joy is primarily a relational experience that is more like a reflex anchored in the relational part of our brain. so our choices can help us move toward Joy. we can choose to visit a friend who lights up to see us. we can choose to dwell on memories of relational joy. We can choose to spend time quieting and appreciating the good things in life. At the time of birth the part of the brain that grows with the experience of joy is barely developed. how well it develops and grows is largely influenced by relational activity. These essential skills can be developed before we are even old enough to speak. and we can develop them all throughout our lives no matter our childhood experiences.
There are four habits you’ll need to build your joy house, the authors use the acronym CASA, which means “house” in Spanish.
C – Calming
A – Appreciating
S – Storytelling
A – Attacking Toxic Thoughts
Today, we are talking about APPRECIATING.
Appreciation may be the single most common habit of joy-filled people. It is also the practice that will most quickly grow your capacity for joy. If you want to build a big Joy Center in the front of your brain and lay a solid foundation for your joy house, appreciation is the fastest way to do it.
Appreciation trains the attention system in our brains to scan for the good stuff in life and pay attention to joyful things. Fear trains our brain to focus on ways to minimize the danger in our lives. it abandons joy and amplifies damage control. Over time – often without realizing it – our brains learn whether Joy or fear is more important to us. if it realizes that we are more concerned with what there is to fear, it amplifies all of the fears and potential fears in our environment. if it learns that we value joy, it begins to amplify what there is in life to appreciate.
If our brains learn to focus on fear, we get good at fear mapping our world. This means that wherever we go, we notice potential danger and focus on that.
Bonnie and Renee can give examples of when that has happened with us or when raising our kids… For example, a bad experience with a dog can cause a child to fear-map the world for danger when animals are around.
One of the reasons we focus on appreciation is that it trains our brains to run on the fuel of Joy rather than fear. left untrained, our brains will naturally run on fear. just imagine planting a garden, then disregarding it. If we simply let it grow without any follow-up care, what will happen to this patch of land? The weeds will quickly take over and pull resources from the plants we want to see flourish. This can happen with the brain’s attention system. without training it to run on the fuel of joy, our brain will focus on fears. The weeds of fear will dominate our thoughts and feelings and sap all our strength and energy. Let’s look at these opposing fuels.
The Fear-Fueled Brain
The fear-fueled brain looks for what needs to be avoided rather than embraced. for those of us who live this way, we can find that we spend far too much time and far too much emotional energy avoiding difficult emotions. With every emotion we have to avoid, our world gets smaller. If I can’t handle anger and have to avoid getting angry or dealing with angry people, my world shrinks a little bit. If I can’t handle fear and have to avoid anything that triggers anxiety, my world shrinks even more. you get the idea in some ways, the only thing our brains really fear is an emotion we can’t handle.
Here are some characteristics of a fear-fueled brain or an internal World built on a foundation of fear.
- We scan for threats rather than good things to enjoy
- we feel guarded and avoid vulnerability. Self preservation is key!
- We often give fear-based guidance rather than desire driven wisdom. one avoids pain while the other focuses on how to stay our relational selves.
- We are driven by self-preservation. Thus, fear dominates our time and energy rather than Joy.
Routinely reflecting or ruminating on the things that bother, frightened, hurt, and Annoy Us trains are brains attention system to scan for threats learning to practice appreciation and reflecting on Joy from our past trains our brain to expect joy in the future the brain that is trained to run on Joy will scan the environment for good things to enjoy. We look for the beautiful aspects of life rather than scan for what can cause us pain.
The right hemisphere, the emotional engine, tells the left hemisphere, the cognitive engine, what to focus on. The right hemisphere needs to be trained if we are going to focus on what is there to appreciate and enjoy. without this practice in place, the left brain will naturally focus on problems that need to be solved.
The Joy-Fueled Brain
Joy is a relational experience. it comes from knowing you are the reason for the twinkle in someone’s eye or the smile on their face. This doesn’t mean you have to be with someone else to feel joy. you can feel Joy remembering how it felt or you can feel Joy anticipating what it is to come. If you have ever had a group of really good friends, you can often feel Joy by retelling the stories of your experiences together.
When your brain learns that you like to do this regularly, it begins to amplify memories, experiences, and opportunities for experiencing this kind of joy. On the other hand, if our brains learn that We crave non-relational addictions, it can amplify those just as easily. This is one of the reasons that learning to reprogram our brains to amplify Joy is an important part of overcoming addiction.
The reason joy and fear are so foundational to the way we live is that they control the relational circuitry in our brains. There is a social system in every brain that controls whether we feel like ourselves or not. The system is run by our relational circuits. When our relational circuits are firing on all cylinders, our relational self becomes present and we tend to feel and act like ourselves but when those relational circuits start to misfire or shut down all together, Our non-relational self comes out. When this happens we live out of fear rather than joy. We become problem-focused, anxiety-prone, non-relational, and motivated by damage control.
Chris Coursey recently wrote a book called The Joy switch. The core idea in this book is that we all have a joy switch in our brains that controls whether our relational circuits stay on or start to dim when my joy switch is on. It is easy to act like myself, remain relational, and regulate my emotions. However, when the joy switch starts to dim or goes off all together, I lose access to the part of my brain that remembers who I am and how it is to like me to act.
Joy fueled brains are not brains that never feel upsetting emotions. they are brains that operate with the joy switch on most of the time and learn how to flip the joy switch back on when it starts to dim or shut down.
Study on Joy pp 82-83
The Joy GAME
The authors have a practice to help get your mind into a joyful place: it is called The Joy game. as you might expect the word “GAME” represents four practices to help you focus on what you have to appreciate.
G-Gratitude
A-Anticipation
M-Memories
E-Experiences
G–Gratitude
“G” is for gratitude. In this sense, we mean anything in our present situation worth appreciating. Sometimes we have to look a bit harder to find what there is to appreciate in our present situation. The goal, however, is not simply to list reasons to be grateful. The goal is to let yourself feel the experience in your body and stay in that experience for a few minutes.
A–Anticipation
“A” stands for anticipation. It is helpful to have something to anticipate with joy. Hope is often equated with having a plan. It hurts when we plan for something good to happen and those plans get ruined. (Hope deferred makes the heart sick… Proverbs 13:12) It can tempt us to stop hoping and stop planning, but that would be a mistake. There is often more joy in the anticipation of what is coming than in the event itself. it would be a shame to Rob ourselves of the joy of anticipating the good stuff to come.
M–Memories
“M” stands for memories. We can relive past experiences that made us smile and brought us joy. spending time in those memories is a great practice for developing the habit of appreciation. sharing the memory with someone else who entered into the joy with you, would just make the experience that much more powerful. collecting joyful memories that we revisit on a regular basis is a wonderful practice for growing our emotional capacity.
E–Experiences
e stands for experiences. the idea here is to be creative and do activities or plan activities that we enjoy. for example if you like gardening, make sure you plan to spend some time with your garden. that gives you something to anticipate, which hopefully becomes something that will help you feel gratitude in the present, and give you my memory to revisit later. there’s almost no end to the experiences we can plan but anytime we can share those experiences with someone else who also enjoys them our joy will multiply.
Conclusion
the two habits of calming and appreciating are essential to the foundation of any Joy house. it doesn’t matter who you are, these two habits bring emotional stability to the foundation of our world. as the authors noted earlier in the book, quieting is the number one predictor of long-term emotional help and appreciation is the fastest way to begin growing our capacity for joy.
If you have been living with a fear house in your inner world, it is going to take some work to lay the foundation for a new house, but it is totally worth the effort. These two habits build resiliency. They allow you to roll with the punches life throws at you, so you can calm down as needed and restore Joy when your levels get depleted. They train us with the skills we need to endure hardship well.
See pp88-92 for exercises. Share ones we have done.
The next two episodes will deal with how to build on this foundation.