holding joy

what brings you joy? go ahead. think of just. one. thing. it’s as simple as what has already come to mind. now, see if you can hold that joyful thought for a moment. it could be a sweet full breath of air. the beauty of a view. listening to the subtle layers of sound. a memory. someone you love.  now hold it. notice the response in the rhythm of your heart. can you make peace being here, with this little joy, in this moment? can you accept it as it unfolds, without your thoughts rushing elsewhere? can you feel this joy in your body? do you dare to let it expand, to grow and swell with hope within you?

we all want happiness. but science tells us what we intuitively know, we’re really bad at holding onto it. as soon as we experience some joy, our mind shifts to what’s next; dinner, a chore, that work email, the news, and soon we’re on the chase again. we attain a bit of happiness again and again. and we shift out of it, again and again, leaving our time actually in the emotion fleeting. this is the finely tuned evolutionary function of the human mind, it constantly scans the environment for threats, endlessly planning, ruminating on the past and generally ensuring our survival. which is not a bad thing. survival does after all keeps us alive and protects us from threats. the problem is, there are unreal threats everywhere. we perceive and conjure and recycle them, ad nauseum. so for us humans, the real challenge is learning to thrive. 

the practice, in both yoga and the science of happiness, is to overcome that negativity bias. not to ignore it, but to allow the positive to co-exist. this is easier with less excitable postive emotions, well documented in yoga. think contentment, gratitude, and love. ultimately any positive emotion can be fleeting. but we can learn to savor it, to pause and allow it to expand, drawing out and deepening our experience. 

when we do, we’re not just feeling more joy. we are actually increasing our well being physically, mentally, and socially. it’s true. happier people are all kinds of more successful, healthy and wealthy. oh, they have more friends, too.

we can begin to break our negative ruminating and scattered thought patterns and sustain positive emotions by holding the them for 8 seconds. just 8 seconds is all researchers found it takes for joy, or any emotion, to make its way into our subconscious, and linger, balancing out the negative thoughts etched into our nature. 

8 seconds a day for your happiness. sounds like a hack. but  then again, we know we’re bad at this happiness stuff. and, hey, scientists say.