When Everything Sucks, Rehearse Your Joy
Like a muscle, your ability to feel pleasure can deteriorate if you don’t use it
I keep a running mental list of things that make me belly laugh: videos of my kids when they were babies; old episodes of Impractical Jokers; a spontaneous FaceTime call with my best friend from college. When I catch myself slipping into doom and gloom, I pick one — not as a way to bypass my emotions, but to make sure I don’t forget how to feel them in the first place.
There’s a time for sadness and anger, and these days, it seems to be 24/7. Summoning joy, on the other hand, hasn’t felt so easy for a while now. As we round the year mark of the pandemic, even the ability to cry-laugh at Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar with a glass of pinot in hand feels hard to access.
But what if your well-being hinges on those few-and-far-between feel-good moments? In a recent chat with Natalie Dattilo, a psychologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, I learned just how important those small doses of lightness really are. When negativity is so readily available, it’s extra important not to let joy fall by the wayside — not just for your immediate mental health, but for your long-term brain function.
