Joy – The 2nd Foundation for a Healthy Life

In this series we give you tips on how to reach your most vibrant health by giving your body what it needs to thrive. Here are the 10 health foundations:

Come back next month to learn more about Hydration and why it is so important to your body. But now, let’s dive into the wonderful world of Joy!

Our mental attitude has a significant impact on our physical health, the way we feel, the way we live our lives. Living with joy does not only feel better, it has also been shown to increase longevity.

Joy is a choice. It might not feel like it – especially when you are in a slump – but there are many different habits that transform a gloomy outlook of life into a joyful one:

• Notice and acknowledge the little moments of happiness in your life
• Engage in small acts of kindness
• Practice gratitude
• Lend a helping hand
• Meditate
• Listen to your intuition
• Do what you love doing
• Practice being yourself
• Be part of something larger

Our doctors at Siskiyou Vital Medicine recommend a daily 10-minute prescription of joy.

A simple way to raise your level of joy is to intentionally notice the small, feel-good moments in your life. Because our minds are so trained to only see the negative, this is something you might have to work on at first in order to bring joy into your awareness. Watch for anything that makes you feel good: the pleasure of eating something tasty, the joy of seeing a loving mother with her child, the satisfaction that comes with a job well done (i.e. washing the dishes or mowing the lawn), the unexpected happiness of seeing someone smiling at you. Ask yourself at the end of each day, “What made me smile today?” Ask a friend or loved one what made them smile today. Turning attention from complaining and venting toward celebrating and noticing happiness can be truly transforming.

Acts of kindness are a meaningful way to increase joy in your life. Why? Because it makes both you and the recipient feel good – a win-win! If you look out for opportunities to lend a hand in your daily life, you will not just make yourself feel better but help to improve the lives of others as well. Examples include:

• Hold the door for someone
• Say something encouraging to a stressed waitress
• Leave change in a public bathroom
• Return a shopping cart to its rightful place
• Pay for a coffee for the person in line behind you
• Compliment someone

The joy you can create with these acts is contagious and will create ripple effects!

One of the surest ways to increase joy is a gratitude practice. If this is not something you already do daily, let me encourage you to find a spot for it in your schedule. Good times  to incorporate gratitude may be right after waking up, during your lunch break, or before you go to bed. Practicing gratitude can be as simple as telling yourself, your family member(s), or even your pet, three things you are grateful for today. If this is not a big enough challenge, try for 10. Endeavor to find new things to be grateful for every day. Make it a fun game! You can also use a journal and write your thoughts down, which gives you a way to look back, and can be an enlightening experience by itself.

If you’re not sure where to start, some ideas may include

• being thankful for catching green lights when you’re running late
• for a front row parking spot
• for an unexpected sunny morning
• for 5 minutes of snuggling with your loved one before falling asleep

It’s okay to start with small, simple, seemingly insignificant moments of gratitude, as even appreciating the small moments help transform your thoughts. You may find yourself looking for things throughout the day to be able to write them down later!

Increase joy in your life with meditation. There are many scientific studies that have found that meditation makes you calmer, happier, more grounded and less triggered. Meditation can help take you out of your sympathetic nervous system response (fight or flight response) and restore balance into your parasympathetic nervous system. This helps balancing stress hormones, improves sleep, and has many additional positive effects on your overall health and wellness.

Here is a list of different kinds of meditation you may want to try:

• Body Scan
• Relaxation Meditation
• Mindfulness Meditation
• Mantra Meditation
• Humming or Drumming
• Guided Journeys / Self-Hypnosis
• Breathwork Meditation
• Transcendental Meditation
• Yoga
• Martial arts
• Or anything else that puts the focus of the mind back on the body.

A good way to get started is to find a guided meditation that appeals to you and do it at the same time every day. Set an alarm for yourself if you need to! Right after waking up or before going to bed are great times for meditating. Searching on Youtube can be helpful, as well, to find the voice, style, background sounds, and imagery that work best for you. Remember, the point of meditation is not to stop thinking, but to calm your mind chatter or give it something else to do while you explore the spaces between your thoughts, the void where physicalness originates. This is a truly joyful place that, once found, will call you to come back again and again!

Meditation takes practice. Don’t be discouraged by your brain going this way and that, “not turning off,” or being even more distracted. When you realize you’re distracted, acknowledge the thought and acknowledge it to yourself as, “thought,” and refocus again. You’ll find that with practice, your brain will be able to remain quiet for longer periods of time. Even 5 minutes of meditation is shown to lower heart rate and decrease a stress response. Give yourself space to learn and be kind to yourself throughout the process.

Meditation can help make you aware of your triggers. Meditation gives you outlets to release your reactions to triggers, so that as stressors in life pop up, you are more equipped to handle them and manage your emotional response in a healthy way. A true state of power!

Yet another way to increase joy is to practice listening to your intuition. Intuition is the little voice that gets drowned out by the mind chatter. It’s the feeling you get in your stomach that tells you the situation you are getting into is either really good for you, or something you need to move away from, fast. Sometimes it may present as an uneasy feeling that something isn’t quite right. Everybody has access to their intuition, but most people have learned not to listen to it. If you decide to give your intuition a space, you might start to see miracles happen in your life. This small voice of intuition is your higher self / soul speaking to you. You will find that listening to your inner self is a choice, but you are better off if you do. This will also imbue you with the knowing that you are on the path your soul has chosen for this lifetime.

A clearer state of mind and connection with your intuition will make it easier to spot the lies in your environment and prevent falling pray to people that don’t mean well, or for situations that are not good for you. All of this can be practiced. If you have a bodily ailment, your intuition will help you figure out what it is, where it came from, and what your body is trying to tell you with it.

If you do the things you love to do, joy will already be there. I encourage you to make a list of the things you truly love – might it be making music, drawing or painting, gardening, cooking a fabulous meal – and do one thing from this list every day. If you don’t have the time for it, carve it out by starting with 10 minutes a day. This practice will make you happier overall and also transform your life! The fun thing about doing what you love, often, is that you will have more energy to do the things you don’t love! You will feel a new drive in your life, and by doing what you love, you will inspire many others as well.

Being truly YOU will bring you the greatest joy – through the experiences, the connections, the serendipities that come with it. This might sound strange, as many of us think we are not good enough to be ourselves. Remember that you ARE good enough, that everyone else is already taken, and that YOU are what this world needs – so DARE TO BE YOU!

Are you a part of something larger than yourself that lifts your heart and inspires you?

People are happiest if they are part of something bigger, something meaningful. A close-knit community is a commonality that all the blue zones – areas in which the most centennials live – have in common. A community does not have to be your family, it can be any number of people that have something in common and kindly share it with each other.

Conclusion

The importance of daily, unapologetic, guilt-free joy is immeasurable. Don’t ask permission from others! Ask yourself, “If I knew my life would be over in 5 years, what would my chosen, daily routine look like?” Work to make that happen.

What do you do to increase the joy in your life? Drop us a line and let us know!

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Sources:

Dr. Joseph Mercola – multiple articles
https://search.mercola.com/results.aspx?q=joy#stq=joy&stp=2

Joe Dispenza
https://drjoedispenza.com

Mindful.org – Healthy mind, healthy life
https://www.mindful.org/3-simple-ways-to-cultivate-joy-every-day

Health and Happiness go hand in hand, Matthew Solan, Executive Editor, Harvard Men’s Health Watch https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/health-and-happiness-go-hand-in-hand

Healthy happiness: effects of happiness on physical health and the consequences for preventive health care, Springer Nature, Research Paper
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-006-9042-1

The Science of Happiness in Positive Psychology 101by Nicole Celestine, Ph.D.
https://positivepsychology.com/happiness/#a-look-at-the-science-of-happiness

Positive affect and biological function in everyday life, Andrew Steptoe, Jane Wardle
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197458005002769

Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study, Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, and Wallace V. Friesen, University of Kentucky
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp805804.pdf

The power of positive emotions: it’s a matter of life or death–subjective well-being and longevity over 28 years in a general population, Jingping Xu  1 , Robert E Roberts
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20063931/