Finding our ways towards specific emotions: Joy
The most frequent of Barbara Fredrickson's Big 10 positive emotions
In Part 4 of the core wellness course, we talked about how we can get a better handle on our inner emotional weather by learning to build and access doors towards specific feelings and emotions. I got a few email requests to dive into this a bit more with concrete examples, so this post attempts to do just that. I am also planning a series on “balancing our multiple selves,” and this goes well with that series too: sometimes when we are sad, we want to find our way back to our joyful self; we want to honor our current state, but without letting it stifle the other possibilities we have in us.
One focus of the post on guiding our attention towards the feelings we want, was to identify what those feelings might be. Here, we’ll instead start from a list of ten positive emotions — the Big 10 positive emotions proposed by Barbara Fredrickson: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
For each of them, let’s find some concrete examples of what could be access doors. If you want to share your own doors with others, feel free to reply to this newsletter email and list what works for you (and whether you want to share anonymously or under your name). If I get enough suggestions, I will compile them in a Google doc and link it here.
Today is about: Joy!
Joy
An image: here are some images when searching “Joy” on Google images.
it’s worth searching yourself and filing the ones that speak to you the most!
Also look through your own personal photos and file the photos that most evoke “Joy” for you. Photos of loved ones and photos of yourself captured in a moment of joy can be especially powerful.
A song:
Importantly, this last song exists in a Minions version:
A movement: if you google “joy” and look at the images, you will see lots of images of people with a wide smile and outstretched arms. What movement do you associate with joy? Smiling so much that it lifts your cheekbones high? Raising your arms? Skipping and jumping around? Clapping?
A video:
These last 3 videos are all on this list of viral videos that inspired joy over the world
A memory: thinking of a moment in your life when you felt radiant joy. Playing with a happy baby, playing with a puppy in the snow, getting wonderful news — once you’ve thought of a specific moment in your life, try to make the memory vivid: what were you doing, what was happening? How did your facial expressions feel? What was the scenery around you? The sounds, the faces of others?
These are just a few examples to get you started, that tend to work for lots of people — perhaps you’re more into cute owls than cute puppies, so there’s a world of gateways to joy for you to find and collect! And the ones that most touch YOU might be unique and very personal, especially when it comes to stories and memories. Build your own list for Joy and keep it somewhere easy to access.
There are a few additional links, notes and pointers below. If you’d like to hear more about some parts of this post, let me know and I will consider it for a future post or part of another free mini-course. And of course, I am always happy to hear any feedback on what you liked / didn’t like / things you’d like to see more or less of. I can’t reply to most emails but I read them all and they are always welcome.
Additional links and notes
Short definitions and brief context around Barbara Fredrickson’s work
A video of Barbara Fredrickson talking about positive emotions — this is part of a Coursera course on positive psychology led by Barbary Fredrickson. You can enroll for free to access all the course material.