Kelly McGonigal is a psychologist and a teacher, largely known for her online courses that are open to the public via Stanford University. She’s written a few fascinating, well-researched, and bestselling books. The Upside of Stress, in particular, made a really big impact on me.
I’m so glad that Kelly’s new book is about joy. It’s called Joy is a Risk Worth Taking. But, as Kelly jokes, it could also be called Joy for People Who Aren’t Happy.
Like me, Kelly tends to have a bit of a negativity bias. She would probably go so far as to tell you that she’s one of the most pessimistic people she knows.
AND—from her research and her life, Kelly also really sees the value of experiencing joy. And she makes a really compelling argument for why joy could even be seen as a moral obligation.
Today, we talk about the misconceptions of joy, how it’s different from happiness, and why some of us distrust positive emotions. We talk about the kind of joy that serves as an antidote to despair, and the kind of joy that is connected to our core needs—like belonging and mattering.
We talk about finding little pockets of joy when life doesn’t feel so joyful, and how we can help to expand someone else’s capacity for joy.
MORE FROM KELLY MCGONIGAL, PHD:
New Book: Joy is a Risk Worth Taking
Previous Books:
Kelly’s Website
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Well, I'm always excited when you write a new book. I still think particularly about The Upside of Stress. That book shifted something for me in a really helpful way, that whole idea of challenge stress, eustress, that stress is not inherently always bad. It's very helpful for someone who enjoys a lot of challenge stress in her life. So thank you, Kelly. Thank you.
KELLY:
I know, and especially when you surrender to the reality that you can't avoid it.
ELISE:
Yes.
KELLY:
We need another way to cope.
ELISE:
Exactly. I was just thinking about that this morning. My kids have the day off of school and my son's alarm clock went off anyway and I can never fall back to sleep. And I was like, "Oh, I'm so tired and I need sleep, but I am so amped because I have so much to do." And I was like, "It's good stress, Elise. It's good stress. You're up. Take advantage." Use it. Use it. All right, so let's talk though about joy, which is a simple three-letter word and you give it so much complexity and nuance and grounding. And I think that it's one of those words that we think we all understand because one of the most... I don't know if that's true. I would ask you actually, is joy one of the easiest emotions to identify or do people just conflate it with happiness? I experience it as a very different thing.
So how do people describe it?
KELLY:
I would say if you just talk about it, people conflate it and confuse it with a lot of different things. So usually I start by asking people, "Well, tell me something that brings you joy." When people are paying attention to their direct experience, people often key in on the same essence and in a way that I think of as being very similar to pain, the way that there can be a lot of different types of pain, physical pain, emotional pain, minor pain, excruciating pain, but it's not too hard to recognize the essence of pain. And I feel like joy is operating in that same kind of category, which means it's not something that you wall off from other positive emotions like gratitude or love or excitement or contentment. It can be part of that. But the essence of joy, I often describe it as being life affirming, and in many cases, joy is also self-affirming, that in the moment that you feel joy, you feel glad to be alive or hopeful about life.
And joy also quiets down the sense that maybe there's something essentially wrong with who you are, like a poor fit between who you are and the way the world is. And so in that way, it is also self-affirming, if that makes sense.
ELISE:
Yeah. I mean, and it's so pleasurable and in many ways, for me at least, transient. I think that people conflate joy and happiness, and I don't even know what happiness means. It's quite meaningless to me really, I think, as sort of this implied steady state way of being in the world. Whereas -
KELLY:
I always say I was going to call my book joy for people who aren't happy because I feel we all have the ways that we orient to the world. And I feel like one of the ways that I orient the world is very much present moment focused in the sense of I'm really interested in trying to make the present moment better, especially when the present moment is difficult to be in. And as you said, often happiness, when people talk about happiness, they do this mental calculation of everything going on in their lives and in the world. Is everything going great in my relationships? Am I worried about anyone in my family? How are things at work? How do I feel about the political situation? Is there anything going on in my body that I'm worried about? And people imagine happiness is when the answer to all of those questions is nothing's wrong, everything is right.
And they're looking for a sense that everything is okay, everything is as I hoped for, and not carrying any particular pain or anxiety. Whereas joy, as you said, it's like a flash. It's one thing right. It's one thing good, and it's almost like a little microcosm that says everything else could be chaos, but this makes life worth living. Or that moment of joy says who you are matters, or that moment of joy says you are not alone.
ELISE:
Beautiful. Yeah, and I think that happiness, obviously, it's a whole industry, but it's presented to us as this steady state achievement, a place really that you can reach when all of the factors of your life are aligned, and it's in that way a delusion. I think anyone who's lived for a minute is like, this isn't a place. All of life is a process. And to me, yeah, joy is those little notches, those little deep rememberings or moments of presence or shared smiles with a stranger, which we'll talk about. We
KELLY:
Should give examples because like I said, I always start conversations or when I'm teaching a class about the science of joy, I always start by saying, tell me something that brings you joy. And I've learned to be even more specific because then people always go sort of abstractly to my family or nature. So what's something in the last 24 hours that you would say you recognize in that moment, something that's like that essence of joy that just affirms the value of life or makes you feel like who you are matters?
ELISE:
I mean, so many. I feel like I've become a joy monster, particularly as things in the world have gotten so hard. I'm very interested in being the weather, and if I can change the weather by being joyful, I'm going to do it. And we're going to talk about all those factor, like the loyalty we have to how hard things are. We're going to talk about that next. But in the last 24 hours, I'm finding my kids perpetually delightful. No, that's not a lie, but I just find them really so funny, needing to tell me the plot of a story or a movie with the most intensive and hilarious detail. I find so much joy in my cats. I am going to Montana next week to ride horses. Just even thinking about it makes me feel momentarily elated. My parents are in a great place. Talking to them is fun.
I love the work I do. So even in this moment of feeling incredibly stressed out and like I'm in a sprint, I'm having a surgery in a couple of weeks and I'm trying to get everything done. I'm experiencing a lot of you stress, Kelly, but just this constant, oh, the work I do is meaningful. It matters. I love this.
KELLY:
I just can't help but notice is all those examples of joy you gave. Also, if we were having a different conversation about stress and I asked you for the things in your life that cause a lot of stress, you probably would've put a lot of those things in the same... We would've been talking about that too. And that's one of the really interesting things about joy is that because joy is a moment of pleasure or relief, a positive moment that has a sense of meaning or significance because stress is also often a reaction to something that we care about, that we often find our joy in the same roles and relationships and goals that we experience stress.
One of the biggest, I think, misconceptions I hear from people about joy, you asked what are people conflating joy with, is people often think joy is this thing that's going to rescue them from their lives. I need to go out and buy something or go somewhere or do something that's really different from my life because my life is hard and stressful and I need that respite or that relief. And although it can be fine to look outside yourself for things that bring you delight or pleasure, but often the joy is just turning around at the actual context of your life and looking for those things that make you smile or laugh or feel good about yourself, about the world.
ELISE:
No. One of the most helpful reframes for me has been catching myself when I say I have to and making it I get to. And that's so trite. It's so trite. But you gave these examples in the book about the person with a debilitating autoimmune disease. She was like, "I love burpees," which I think we all recognize are incredibly hard and painful, but they were an impossibility for her. So when I'm exercising and doing a plank and totally miserable, I'm like, "I get to. Look how strong I am. I get to." It's really helpful. It's just a trick. It's helpful.
KELLY:
One of the funny things is that joy requires appreciation. So your capacity for joy depends in part on your ability to make these interpretations to... I would say it's a generous interpretation, allowing yourself to sense the significance of something rather than dismiss it. You really have to open yourself up to a more genuine and heartfelt way of interpreting these small details of your life, whether it's doing burpees or your kid telling you the plot to something that you're allowed to sense that as significant and not feel like you're being too sentimental for feeling appreciation for these things.
ELISE:
Yes. Or delusional. I mean, let's talk about that as this core framing of the book, which I think is so important. And for anyone who's listening and is like, "Elise, you sound like a Pollyanna." I actually have a more negative bias. I am hypervigilant. I have an anxiety disorder. I'm constantly scanning for everything that could and likely will go wrong. I'm not Dulu.
KELLY:
Me too.
ELISE:
I'm the early detection system is what people in my life call me. If anything could go wrong or will go wrong is going wrong. My nervous system will find it first.
ELISE:
Yeah. Enneagram type six, the skeptic cynic. I am surveilling, assessing, and often quite prophetic. And I'm not unaware of everything that is terrifying and scary and not as we would like in the world. And as you point out, this fear of happiness scale, which came out of South Korea, professor in South Korea, psychologist.
KELLY:
Mosin Joshin Liu. Yeah. And it's actually -
ELISE:
Moshin Joshin Lu.
KELLY:
So he's a professor in South Korea, but the research is global from all different parts of the world. It's one of the reasons why I love this research because it's really demonstrating that globally across many cultures, across the lifespan, many people have that deep mistrust of joy and other positive emotions for different reasons. Some of it is related to the fear that because we understand impermanence, that if things are good now, it means they are going to at some point be worse and we find ourselves bracing for that. We feel that vulnerability and worry about our capacity to handle loss or change or pain. For a lot of people, it's a kind of moral or ethical concern that it's not right to feel good. It's not right to be happy when there's so much suffering in the world or so much work to do. And so feelings connected to pleasure, feelings connected to personal meaning start to feel selfish or start to feel inappropriate.
And one of the arguments I try to make in the book that I feel very strongly about is that you could view joy as part of your moral obligation as a human being. And that comes not just from research, but also from my experience now. I've been writing and studying joy. My last book is about joy too, so about a decade now, spending a lot of time talking to people about joy. And one thing you recognize is that joy is connected to core human needs like belonging and mattering and hope and laughter and caring and growth, contribution, that joy is probably the least frivolous emotion because it makes us sense that life has value. It is like the greatest antidote to despair. And when people are connected to joy, even just when you ask people about something that brings them joy, you see their full humanity and our willingness to let people be joyful, to do things that bring people joy by letting them know that they matter or that there's something good in the world, something to look forward to.
When we show our own joy and share our joy, we are really saying it's okay to be fully human even in circumstances that feel deeply dehumanizing or deeply discouraging.
ELISE:
Beautiful. I mean, you put it really plainly. You write joy is an existential resource. And I don't think that that can be overstated, particularly when it feels that we're being disloyal to "reality" by not also feeling really bad. I think it is incumbent on each and every one of us who cares about the world to recognize that we can empower it more effectively through joy actually than just lament.
KELLY:
And this is one of the reasons, I mean, people who don't know my work, if you think that I like to focus on the positive in life, it's a pretty poor read on my orientation as the psychologist. I started out studying pain and then writing about stress, difficult change. And for a very long time my research was focused on compassion and our ability to respond to suffering and to pain with skill and with caring and with courage. And I really got interested in joy from teaching compassion and the standing for compassion cultivation training in contexts where people were dealing with very high levels of suffering. For example, working in palliative care for pediatrics. So you're dealing with children who are in pain, children with terminal diseases, families who are grappling with all of that. And one of the things that stood out to me in teaching this group of people is we had this class, this program that was really very much focused on dealing with the suffering, confronting the pain, the difficulty, finding a way to do that with courage and with empathy and strength.
And then I also happened to mention that I teach dance classes and some of these healthcare providers started coming to my dance classes and I remember a few of them being like, "This is way more what we need to sustain our ability to do this work than the compassion training." Now, the compassion training was still very helpful, but what they were craving was a moment of feeling connected to different parts of themselves, connected to community in a way that felt celebratory, connected to music, and it was a resource for this other part of their life where they were trying to show up with courage and stamina and groundedness to relieve pain and suffering. And that is actually what caused me to shift my focus a little bit more towards joy initially, trying to figure out why is it that someone might dismiss that or why would somebody deny themselves that and how can we trust what we love or trust our capacity to be uplifted by things?
ELISE:
Yeah. And just that reminds me, it's a small moment in the book or two moments in the book. It reminds me of when you write about really being in a dire circumstance, I think it was the children's unit where a family who had already spent years in its care for their son was waiting to hear about their daughter. And can you tell the story of how the team delivered that news?
KELLY:
Yeah, I know the story of the hallways. I know I read that in a medical journal. This was a physician whose son had been a liver transplant patient. He spent all this time at this hospital and many times had gotten bad news and he and his wife had a newborn daughter and it looked like things were maybe going wrong and they were in that same waiting room waiting for the test results for their daughter. It was bringing up all that trauma, all that anxiety, and they had many times been met with empathy for the bad news, empathy for the difficult parts of their son's treatment and health. And that day the news was good. And apparently the whole medical team came out through these double doors holding up test results, cheering and applauding to let the parents know that this was good news. And they started crying.
Some of the physicians were crying. Other parents in the waiting room were crying and cheering too. And what this physician wrote was that it was so beautiful and moving to be met with positive empathy in the same way that we often don't want to be alone or we don't want to have our pain ignored when things are wrong. People do not want to be left alone in their happiness or to feel like the good things can't be celebrated just because there are also bad things. Actually, I love that story too, because you can imagine how many people in that waiting room, it might not be a good day for them and that they were still able to enjoy this moment and celebrate with this family. Everyone wants to be that family, the family that gets the good news. And there's something so beautiful about the fact that collectively people could come together to rejoice in this relief.
And the physician was just saying, you should always take the opportunity to celebrate the joy. It's so meaningful when your joy is met with joy. It's actually, when people ask for the kind of self-help advice related to the research on joy, the thing I always say that is going to be the most life-changing for you is if you become the person that people can share good news with. And if you expand your definition of the joy that matters to you to being more than just your personal joy, that to view joy in the world as a good thing, when you see someone celebrating, when you see people expressing love to one another, you see a reunion, when you see people playing and laughing, when you see people experiencing the uplift of being alive in a good moment, that's something that you can celebrate and find hope in and meaning in and that you can be the person who reflects that back to people.
That's a very life-changing approach to joy.
ELISE:
Yes. That affirming or the taking what's happening and trying to help extend it or make it reverberate farther or making people feel safe, feeling joyful. I think that's why, as you mentioned that story, having just gone through medical experiences, you're like, "I feel guilty that I'm doing so well, and yet I also need to express that instead of it doesn't help for me to stay loyal to a bad story or try to diminish my relief." Doesn't actually make anyone else, doesn't do anything for anyone else.
KELLY:
In a way, going back to this idea of having a moral responsibility to allow for joy, I also think what do people in the worst situations want? What are people longing for? They're often longing for things we would describe as joy. They want a moment to enjoy themselves with people they love. They want to have something to look forward to. They want to feel peace looking at something beautiful in nature. They want to be able to celebrate traditions or holidays. They want the things that you start to feel guilty about and your ability to appreciate those things, I view as part of this sort of grander desire for all people to be doing well, for all people to be suffering less.People think of it as almost being inconsiderate or rude or inappropriate for you to be grateful when other people are suffering, but you could easily flip it and be like, "What is life for if the people who have those moments of peace or something to celebrate are willing to dismiss it or throw it away?"
ELISE:
Yeah, I think that's so valid.
I want to talk about the larger cultural context of suffering and joy and why it's this broader medicine that we need so desperately, particularly here where our world is feeling very unkind and very cruel. But before we get to that, envy is one of my favorite topics. It's become this book that I wrote On Our Best Behavior, which is The Seven Deadly Sins. Envy is the chapter that's the gateway. I write about it as the gateway to the other sins for women that envy is this core wound in part because I think women struggle to identify what they want. And so when we see someone who has something that we want or is doing something that we want, because we've been conditioned to think of envy as bad, we're not even conscious that we're envious. Instead, we just feel the pain, which you write about, of seeing something we want reflected back to us.
And the instinct is to make the person who has it responsible for our pain and to try to diminish them. So I think it's the source of a lot of women on women hate and that if you can reverse engineer it and say, "Oh, I understand what's happening. I understand why I'm so uncomfortable.” I had never heard it described as pain, which you write about," then I could actually have a little bit more of a GPS orienting me to what I want. So I was very excited to see it in the context of your book, which is that I think it goes in many ways, right? I think women are scared to say that they're doing really well or that they're really happy because they know it will inspire envy and they will be taken down or experience all that projection. And then simultaneously, it makes it really difficult for us to be happy for each other and to celebrate each other.
So can you talk a little bit about what you see in the research?
KELLY:
Yeah. So envy is a type of pain. It looks like pain in the brain when people are experiencing it, and it really is, it's this pain of recognizing your own unmet need or unfulfilled aspiration. And sometimes if you feel like it's really out of reach, not just, "I don't have it yet, but that will never happen for me," the pain feels all Grief also. And that, as you said, that's very much connected simply to understanding what we want, our goals, our values, our aspirations, our dreams, our needs. But because it's connected to seeing somebody else have what we want, it immediately triggers these thoughts of social comparison or feelings of injustice or feelings of shame. We start to layer in these other really difficult emotions because humans are so good at comparing ourselves. And that's a new level of pain that gets added to simply not having what you want because then the mind can start to create stories like why do they have it and I don't, what's wrong with me or why is life unfair or what's wrong with them?
And then there's the third pain, which as you say, we also don't want to feel it. We think it's wrong to feel it. We don't recognize it as an expression of the part of ourselves that's really connected to what we care about, particularly when envy... I mean, I also should say the research on envy often focuses on a particular type of envy that maybe I'm less interested in, like envy for success. I think about the people who go to a coffee shop alone and see somebody talking to someone and they're laughing together and that person feels a longing for social connection. We feel envy for a lot of things people don't talk about as much, not just envy for people who are rich or have a fancy car. There's a lot of longing for the things that we really would define as what would make our lives meaningful and ideal.
And so then we add that pain of judging ourselves like we shouldn't feel this way. And if I were really a good human being, I wouldn't feel this way. So then we start... It's all of that. And the thing about envy that makes it so difficult is it's one of those emotions like shame that even though it has a function, the way most of us experience it, we experience the side effects of it that are really less helpful, the way that it can cause us to disengage, to shut down or withdraw, and then also to create social distance between other people, especially who we're envious of is someone in our lives who in theory we should be happy for, a family member or friend or a coworker. And we start to think their happiness is a threat to me, so I need to protect myself from it and I'm not going to go to the celebration.
I'm not going to stay in that text thread. I'm not going to send them any sort of well wishes. I'm going to protect myself from that. I've been talking for a while.
ELISE:
No, no. I mean, go for it. I think this is also valid. I think it's those micro moments, as you said, more than... I feel like I'm, for example, the only person in Los Angeles on the West Side who's not on a GLP-1. And so I have these moments of, oh, she looks... I feel like every pound lost by another woman lands on me and I go out and I'm like, oh, everyone looks so much better than... That to me is, maybe that goes into the... I'm just much more conscious of it now of anger rather than, oh, I'm happy this person feels great in their body and is no longer succumbing to food noise or whatever it is.
KELLY:
It's that zero sum mindset. So one of the things in the research is when do people feel most trapped in envy is when they think about happiness itself or the things that they aspire to in life as being zero sum. So if your health is improving, somehow that is a threat to my wellbeing or if you experience some sort of success at work, somehow that means that I am falling behind. There's a sense that there's only so much happiness or success to go around. I think one of the reasons why I'm so interested in joy is because when we do talk about envy, sometimes I think people are looking at the wrong things in life and part of the problem is also assuming that if they had that thing, their life would be filled with more meaning and self-acceptance and hope. That's why I said that the type of envy I'm less interested in are things like success or things like physical appearance because the research is pretty clear those things actually don't drive your gladness to be alive.
ELISE:
Well, there are also end state goals that are ephemeral and not real. It's all part of the delusion that we started this conversation with. You get there and there's no there there.
KELLY:
Sometimes envy is an opportunity to do a reality check. And the thing that I love about joy, joy is such a great emotion. When people start to track it in everyday life is that there's a kind of wholesomeness that emerges. I have people in my classes keep joy records, whether taking photographs or keeping a list. I've interviewed so many people about what brings them joy and I've read research from all over the world translated that I've asked people what brings you joy? Tell me about a moment of joy. And joy is just operating fundamentally differently from the things that people think about as what would make me happy. Joy itself is moments of connection, feeling like what you do matters, feeling good about something you did because it was hard or because it's consistent with your values, enjoying things that are beautiful or wonderful in the world, seeing the good in other people, doing things that you love simply because when you're doing it, you just feel happy, you experience emotions that lift you up like playfulness or humor or discovery and curiosity.
And when I even ask people for their most joyful memories or moments in life, the things they say are often ordinary moments of meaning or connection. It's never the moment I got a raise or the moment I saw a number on a scale. Nobody ever says anything like that. And so one of the reasons I try to actually encourage people to start paying attention to joy is not only these things are often available even when life is difficult, but it's about reconnecting with a part of yourself that we don't get a lot of encouragement to connect to, but it's such a deep part of human nature. The things that make us glad to be alive are these things that are connected to our ability to matter in the world and enjoy the world and feel close to others and less to some of the things that we more typically envy.
ELISE:
100%. I think too, the whole book feels like a love letter to people who experience anhedonia or joy dampeners or who feel sad, disconnected, etcetera. And it's this small daily diet of these little experiments that you offer of find someone, exchange a smile with a stranger, take a minute and talk to the bagger at the grocery store, have an interesting conversation with a stranger, greet people with enthusiasm, small things.
KELLY:
Thank someone for helping you put something beautiful into the world, help someone celebrate something. I know a lot of the experiments are social. I'm glad you brought that up too, because one of the things that's interesting, all the books that I write are based on classes I teach and the people who are willing to pay money to take an online university affiliated course are people who are serious about something. It's different than just watching a short reel. So the people who have come to my classes on the science and practice of joy, they're basically falling into three categories. One, people who think they've lost their capacity for joy, including people who believe they have never experienced joy. So I'm very familiar with what that's like and that the fact that many people may have been listening to this conversation if they're still here, they're thinking, "That's not me.
I never feel that way or I used to feel that way and it's impossible now." There are people who are desperate for joy because their life circumstances are creating a lot of pain or uncertainty. People who are grieving, people are going through a health challenge, people with a new disability, people living in war, and they are so hungry for joy. And then there are the people who just want the people in their lives to experience joy, the people who are like, "I want to be a source of joy for others." So that's interesting you said it's like a love letter to people with anhedonia, which is the feeling like you've lost your capacity to enjoy life. I don't know if it's a love letter, it's more like it's an encouragement. It is for you also because the worst thing about anhedonia and including also depression or grief is that it will often tell you that you'll never feel good again, that it's not right to feel good or happy, and you have these experiences in life where the response you are hoping to have, maybe happiness that's not also tainted by grief or anxiety, or you're hoping to just feel your heart explode with enthusiasm for something and now you don't feel that spark.
And we have the story that it will always be that way, but the research is pretty clear that for most people there's a trajectory in which joy is possible, that that capacity can be restored and can be strengthened. And all those little experiments that you mentioned, even if they sounded quite cheesy to people listening to this, those are experiments that have been shown to strengthen the capacity for joy, including among people who are grieving or depressed or experiencing anhedonia. That's why they're in the book.
ELISE:
Yeah, just those noticings. I mean, you called it these appreciations, but just while we were talking, one of my cats just jumped into my lap. I know, and I'm like,
This is - It brought me a little joy too. Yeah, just a little joy. And for those who are listening too, who I think are stuck in this disloyalty of feeling good when others are feeling bad, et cetera, the research that you present I think is such a compelling argument for those who struggle to do things for themselves, but who are willing to do things on behalf of the collective or other people. Ideally, we do both, but you write about sort of this, and it seems like in this country, so many of us are watching what feels like an endless cycle of cynicism, despair, hate, if not hate, then deep unkindness, fear of each other and fear of strangers have us by the throat.
KELLY:
I have a perfect example for this. This is something that really stood out to me. I was reading a Substack by Tara Parker Pope, and she wrote about her experience on September 11th. She was at the World Trade Center, and she wrote about how every year she reflects back on the number of strangers who were incredibly helpful and kind to her. And her Substack was this beautiful description of all the ways these strangers had helped her, giving her shoes because she had had to tear off her high heels so that she could run when the tower was falling, the doorman who pulled her into the building. I was so moved by it. I shared it with some folks, and the first thing that my husband said when I shared it was that he wondered nowadays, probably people wouldn't be as likely to be that helpful, that there wouldn't be as many kind strangers.
I though that's absolutely not true.
ELISE:
Look at Minnesota.
KELLY:
But we are so immersed in a landscape of media and culture and messaging that makes us think that whatever was good in humanity has been extinguished, that we think in a situation like that, that the doorman wouldn't help, that someone wouldn't give you shoes, and there's something... That's what's toxic. We're so used to talking about toxic positivity. It's so toxic to have that level of cynicism that it's a particular type of pain. It's a particular type of despair to believe that. And one of the things that I love about joy and different types of joy is that it often has an elevating quality to it, even things that aren't... I was elevated and moved by Tara sharing the story of strangers who helped. That lifts me up. But you could also be elevated by simple things like going out into nature and seeing something beautiful or laughing at something funny or helping someone.
There are all these moments of joy, listening to a song that you love, being thanked for something at work. These moments, they actually are an antidote to that kind of cynical despair about human nature, even when they don't seem directly connected to it. And so our ability to appreciate these small things is a way to resist. It's almost you have to make a philosophical choice. I embrace joy, not because I'm making some kind of calculation like, no, really, there's more good in the world than there is bad in the world. No, really, there's more good in human nature than bad in human nature. I don't want to be a human being who is going to waste my life only operating from a sense of that type of despair and believing only the worst in humanity. I believe that desire that I just expressed can coexist with the fact that, like you said, you started by saying you are not a positive person.
I think I'm one of the most pessimistic people I know, really. It's not just anxiety. If you ask me to make predictions and make bets about things, I am not an optimistic person. To me, it's absolutely compatible. That worldview is absolutely compatible with wanting to find the things to be elevated by as a way to say, "This is the stance I'm choosing to take towards life because I want to be the version of myself that still looks for ways to offer things to the world, that still wants to show up and be somebody who interacts with somebody today in a way that makes them feel like they are a decent human being whose existence is a good thing in the world.
ELISE:
You write a lot about the synchrony that we experience, the contagion, and it works in both ways. Obviously, fear is one of the most contagious of emotions, but so is joy, right? And that the sort of heart rate variability and mapping of experiences like the World Cup or these collective explosions of joy.
KELLY:
Can we talk about this? Because I feel like very few... I'll probably do very few interviews about this research where I get to actually talk about the science. Can I take a minute and explain? Because with every class I teach or book I write, there's always one scientific idea that I'm secretly hoping gets out into the universe so people can capitalize on it. With my last book, it was this idea of hope molecules and that when you use your body, your muscles release these chemicals into your bloodstream that act as an antidepressant, that give you hope. And it's so amazing to think about that. So the idea that I'm most excited about with joy is that as an emotion, it creates, I guess you could call it a biology of togetherness. So it's happening virtually with us now, but if I were with you in person and we were having this conversation and your cats were crawling around on us and we're laughing together and feeling like we're experiencing rapport with some of these things we're talking about, we are going to have our physiologies pulled from being separate operating systems into suddenly one super organism in which we are literally biologically not independent anymore.
Our heart rates will start to synchronize, the rhythms align, our breathing will start to align, our nervous system activity will start to look more similar, but also our brains will somehow start communicating with one another, not just doing something similar at the same time, but somehow activity in my brain, almost like it's music playing in the room, is somehow reaching you and having an effect on your brain, and then your brain is able to send signals that affect what's happening in my brain. And with all of this physiological synchronization that's happening and mutual attunement, we experience that. We feel it as not being alone. We feel it as a kind of trust or we feel it as a kind of togetherness and joy more than any other emotion, and really more than any other activity or experience that I can see in the literature. If you want to create this biology of togetherness, you need people to laugh together, to play together, to have a positive conversation together where they feel supported and encouraged to listen to music together and make music together.
You need people engaging in something that's creating these positive emotions that then somehow become this bonding agent. And so the feeling that you are alone and also the feeling that you need to put a cocoon around yourself to protect yourself from other people, that kind of existential loneliness and alienation, to think that there's a biological antidote to it that we experience with these small moments of connection, of joy, of shared happiness, that is so inspiring to me. And it's why all the joy experiments that you mentioned, like just returning a smile or helping someone celebrate or thanking someone so that then they're feeling good and you're feeling good and you feel that together or go to a sporting event or go to a concert is so that we can access this part of ourselves that just is going to instinctively, intuitively allow ourselves to be interdependent and be connected.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, and I think it's so beautiful too. You talk about this report that came out of Luxembourg where it was about pro-social behaviors in 50 countries around the world collected over the span of almost 15 years, calculated the percentage of people in each country who volunteered, donated to meaningful causes or helped others in their communities, and then they also reported the mortality data around deaths of despair, so alcohol, drug use, self-inflicted injury, suicide. So when pro-social behavior increase in a country, a drop in deaths of despair followed. We really do function as a collective heart, right? The macro is a reflection of the micro. And so for those who are like, "Why bother who are really in anhedonia," then do it for everyone else. To me, it's a muscle that I've needed to build through these small acts of appreciation, noticing, pausing, just luxuriating in moments of deliciousness with my cat or my neighbor's dog who I get to walk or whatever it is.
But that's the goal, right? You can lift the vibration of the whole country.
KELLY:
Yeah, I loved that research too. So that research I presented at the end of a chapter about acts of joy, because I think sometimes when we talk about joy, people have heard a lot of happiness hacks like eat one square of dark chocolate. And I argue that acts of joy are really more about understanding people's core needs and doing things that fulfill those needs, things that make hope possible, that make connection possible, that make mattering and meaning possible. And when you do those things, you create joy and often connection. When you make someone feel like you listen to someone, you let them tell their story and you make them feel that they matter, that's an act of joy. I know this because it's not just the research, but when I ask people, "Tell me about something that brought you joy for the last 24 hours," and people give me all these joy reports in my classes, they say things like, "Someone listened to me." They almost never talk about the chocolate that they ate.
So you can do these things. And so I mentioned that study about pro-social behavior reducing deaths of despair, because I really feel like that's what acts of joy are about. They're a way of orienting to your community and to life where you are part of what you want to do each day is the pro-social act of not only helping people, but also helping people know that they matter, giving other people an opportunity to contribute, having these small moments of connection, putting something beautiful in the world. Those are also pro-social acts. And the idea that, as you said, it does make a difference, and it doesn't mean that you're going to necessarily save one person's life, and it doesn't mean that you can rescue someone through your own heartfelt desire, but when you live your life that way, you may never know the effect that it had on someone, but you may have given someone a reason for living, or you may have made that person feel like they are worthy of asking for help, that it's possible to trust that someone who wants to help them really will help them.
You change the universe that someone is living in ways you may never know.
ELISE:
I think that's so beautiful and it can't be overstated. I'm lucky. I host a podcast, I write, I hear from people all the time who are sending notes of appreciation, which is my joy fuel. It's deeply meaningful to me, and just having that firsthand experience and acknowledging that, yes, I'm in a position in which I have a slightly larger platform to do that, but you can imagine the implication of just sharing a moment with the barista that you see every week who... It's so important.
KELLY:
You don't need a podcast. You're better off probably not having a podcast. I think so. I'm just kidding. I mean, I think the sort of public facing the broadcasting is actually less meaningful to people often than the one-on-one interactions. And some of the other research in the book that I love, Dave Smallen's research asking people to describe meaningful moments of connection, how they range from deep expressions of love on one hand to being seen and acknowledged as a human being or even just being seen, how often people described having their name remembered or being recognized or someone taking a moment to make eye contact as a meaningful moment of connection that then brought them relief and joy and a sense of mattering. There are many things that we can do in our lives that make a difference.
ELISE:
Well, thank you for this book. It is a beautiful prescription and I think an invitation for anyone who follows in any of those three buckets that you described. What's the largest group?
KELLY:
The people who take my classes, it's the people in that middle group who value the consequences of joy. They want to feel connected, they want to feel hopeful, they want to feel their life has meaning. They want to enjoy life, and they have a lot of circumstances that are making that challenging. But if you are somebody... Every now and then I meet people who find joy so easy. They don't understand any of this stuff. They're like joy dampening. Why would anyone feel guilty about joy? I enjoy every moment of life and I love to show... You know what? You're going to have a lot more insight and empathy into the people in your life. You're always wondering why they dismiss joy or why it's hard for them to allow themselves to feel good. There's a lot also in this book, I think, for people who want to understand how to come to terms with the complex difficulties of life and still have space for that natural instinct to play, to have hope, to connect to joy.
ELISE:
It's not a canceling. Yeah, it's not. It's a both end book. But for people I think who are in the well, it's small, really small, really small, manageable wins that I think start to just slowly widen the aperture of someone's life.
KELLY:
Can we give someone a homework assignment?
ELISE:
Yes. I know you like to give homework. All right, professor, tell us what to do.
KELLY:
One that I always start my class with and start the first chapter with is to ask someone about something that brings them joy. And because someone listening to this now has an excuse to do it because they can say that they heard a podcast about it. So you won't seem weird or unusual for asking someone that question. And then a couple things happen. When you ask someone about what brings them joy, you are sending a message to that person that their happiness matters, that you care about them, you're interested in them. You will see something often really interesting and beautiful about who that person is. It's an opportunity for a moment of connection and share joy. And I also find it makes people trust joy more because what people say when you ask them what brings you joy or what's something that's brought you joy in the last 24 hours, they say things that make it easier to understand, oh right, this is a feeling that is necessary, that is good, and that means when I feel it, I'm also allowed to appreciate it and show it.
ELISE:
That's beautiful. Okay, that's the assignment. And I'm going to further it because it's not always regular, but I try and do an office hours for people who are part of my newsletter community and we're going to share joy. We're going to share moments of joy and appreciation. So if you are part of that community, then jot some things down, start some noticing. We're going to start sharing and I'll include links for anyone who wants to join the community. All right, we're going to do it.
KELLY:
I also want to say, I don't know if you remember this, but when I was revising the book, you had sent out a newsletter that was making one of these same core arguments. This was a couple years ago, but you'd written a newsletter about joy.
ELISE:
Yes.
KELLY:
And I have to tell you, making these same arguments, it's necessary, all the things that you were bringing up, you sent this newsletter out and I remember emailing you and being like, "I'm so glad you sent that," because at the time I was revising it, I think I knew all this stuff was true, but I still had this voice in my head that people don't want to hear it. I remember your newsletter coming in that day, and it was such a shot of courage for me. I was like, "This woman's not afraid to say it. You're writing a book in secret about it. Somebody else is like," We need to hear it now. "So anyways, that was one of the moments that really was like," Kelly, if you believe this, you need to say it.”
ELISE:
It's hard to say the obvious and unpopular thing. It doesn't feel virtuous, and yet I think your book is suggesting the most virtuous thing of all is to be joyful, be willing to be brave enough to change the temperature of the room encounter.
KELLY:
It's what people want from life, and it's so beautiful when people feel connected to joy. You can't be in the presence of authentic joy and not be moved by the obvious value of it.
ELISE:
Thank you. That's so meaningful. I appreciate it. I think that the title of this book, Joy Is a Risk Worth Taking, is fascinating because it points to what we chatted about, which is Not only the negativity bias, but the foreboding of joy, this fear that if we're so joyful, something bad will happen in response or that it's a zero sum game or that joy has a cost. And I think that Kelly would argue, no, it is actually a bank. It's a bank of existential energy and it's an essential good for staying alive and thriving. So Kelly teaches a very popular class at Stanford. Let's take the class, let's take the course, get this book for you, for a friend, and start these small experiments that yes, they seem kind of almost silly because they're so insignificant and yet they can just sort of slowly turn your boat around and reorient you towards noticing these small moments.
It's little instructions like start a conversation about joy, savor a small pleasure, try heart breathing, capture your micro uplifts. These are just a few of them. Appreciate something in nature. Greet people with enthusiasm. Thank someone for helping you. Do something you love. It's a great diet. Let's do this diet. It's the best diet of all the diets, guys. I'll include links in the show notes to join the Pulling the Thread community on eliseloehnen.com. We're going to appreciate some joy. It's going to happen, so come do it with us there. If you got something out of today's episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow Pulling the Thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That's how we've grown this thing. It's so helpful. Thank you.