Cultivate Joy

As we embark on this joyful season full of connection and love, we tend to wonder how long the feeling will last. Once the warm, fun moments with loved ones pass, sometimes we feel hollow after feeling so much, and internalize that feeling. The days start to feel dull, no more red green and gold decorated spaces or cheerful embraces, just the start of a new year.However, redirecting this way of thinking can help hold onto joy for longer!

For a long time, I believed that joy, whimsy, or happiness weren’t meant for me if they were fleeting. In my head, it just meant that I didn’t have everything put together yet. As time went on and I continued to grow and mature, joy was still fleeting. It felt like a personal moral failure. All I wanted was to be happy, yet I was moody and depressed most of the time. Hardship always seemed loud and urgent, and joy felt small in comparison. 

At one point, I realized the back and forth was okay, and that feeling joyful isn’t an end goal, but rather something to be cultivated over time. Joy isn’t objective. It is up to us to define what it means. Joy is something we gather in small moments over time: family dinners, rituals, or even surprising turns of events. As time passes, we learn to notice these moments, create our own, and allow them to exist alongside our struggles, connecting ourselves to our environment around us. 

Cherish All & Any Moments

Sometimes we feel as if we’re obligated to be happy all the time, and in turn, we feel guilty when we're not. However, it is essential to remind ourselves that we are human and our emotions eventually run low. 

Joy often comes and goes quickly, which is why it is important for us to practice gratitude when we do experience joy! It shows up in small ways: a warm cup of coffee, a payday notification, or a text from a friend, and when it shows up, it’s up to you to acknowledge it. Practicing gratitude is vital because it literally rewires your brain to bring in more happiness and improve self-esteem. Psychology Today mentions that making conscious efforts to count one’s blessings is a valuable practice. By recognizing the good things in life, no matter what size, it strengthens our mental health and relationships with those around us. I know on tougher days when I decide to embrace gratitude, the day ends with me feeling better, knowing I chose the better outlook.

Make sure you enjoy and truly cherish the good moments in your life you have with your loved ones or even yourself. Take notice of the warmth and kindness of strangers, be appreciative for laughing a little extra today or that work was actually good for once. Soaking in all the feelings these small moments bring will only ensure that the big moments feel even better.

I love the holiday season. Despite not having celebrated festivities growing up, it brings me joy to see how happy others are during this season. I love all the excitement over decorations, seasonal flavors, and gift planning. I saw a car covered in lights and a bow one night, and it lit up my night. It feels good to know people have these small things in their lives that bring them happiness. The truth is, these tiny moments matter. They are building blocks for our journey in life. One day, we get to look back at these moments, and our brains understand that life isn’t all that bad after all.

Create Pockets of Joy

Navigating the world in your early adulthood can feel scary, and you’re met with the harsh realization that life is hard about a hundred times. Despite all this, you can still continue every day with your head up. You can create pockets of joy in your life by doing the following:

• Take ten minutes for yourself daily, no phone or distractions. Feel grounded and meditate. Doing this is proven to reduce stress, depression, and anxiety, as spending a dedicated amount of time a day will calm your nervous system. 

• Embrace new things in your life; find a new restaurant or route to work. Sometimes our brains need a change of scenery, and you are always bound to find something unique in unfamiliar places.

• Seek laughter; find movies, content creators, or people in your life that evoke laughter in you. It is such a valuable feeling to laugh so much your cheeks hurt. 

• Listen to the music you love; music has a way of touching each and every one of us, and there are happy memories connected to songs that can be unlocked with a listen!

• Find good TV: this provides continuity in your life, the gift that keeps giving as it is novelty and you discover something new everyday.

I personally have found music to be the best form of cultivating joy. Music is really personal and special to me, as every genre and song signifies a different part of who I am. I love that I can explore through time and different variations of music that not only energizes me, but I get to relive the feeling over and over again. The important thing is to find something that replicates that experience. The best part is there are no rules to creating your own pockets of joy, as long as they are true to you. 

Joy & Hardship Must Coexist 

In challenging moments of my life, I constantly badgered myself for feeling like I slid backwards after so much growth. I couldn’t understand why joy felt so fleeting in my life, or why I couldn’t hold onto it longer. Whenever I expressed these feelings to someone around me, I was told the same stale “life has its ups and downs” every time.

I used to hate hearing things like that from people with way more experience than me. It was always “that’s just how life goes,” “don’t waste your energy on that,” “things eventually work out,” and it felt as if they were throwing me a baseless affirmation. As the years went by and as I eventually matured, I realized every single one of these cliché lines are right, and ultimately, accepting life’s challenges and shifting my outlook helped me learn how to cultivate joy in my life. 

Sometimes the best thing is to openly accept the hardships in life, along with the happy moments. Just because we prefer the joyful times over the hardships doesn’t mean these experiences cancel each other out. If anything, it means they coexist together. You can accept that life is begrudgingly harsh and that, even in those harsh times, you can find moments of calm, peace, and happiness. Just because you’re exhausted, grieving, or ultimately just feeling down doesn’t mean you can’t still laugh and feel fine for a small moment. Understanding the ebb and flow of life will help us brace ourselves for the hardest times and appreciate the light that still seeps through in the dark.

Allowing yourself to coexist with hardship is an act of love for yourself. You are reminding yourself that you are allowed to feel more than one feeling at a time. Emotions aren’t always easy to deal with, and they often show up as a whirlwind of confusion. And while these confusing feelings can be hard to understand, learning how to sit with them is a powerful component of self-exploration and healing.

There were many times in my life where I felt that I had nothing to be happy for because of how much dread I was experiencing. I couldn’t feel the ‘nice’ emotions buried under anxiety and misery. For a while, I thought I was doomed for being unable to appreciate the good things amongst chaos. The truth is, I was only able to meet myself where I was at the time, and at the time I didn’t have the tools or the capacity to shift my mindset.

I have allowed myself to accept joy in my life and create an atmosphere where I can prosper in it. I realized that if I was consistently working towards an idealized vision of happiness, I would never appreciate the feeling in the moment. My life felt a lot lighter once I accepted the idea of cultivating joy instead of working towards it as my end goal. Ultimately life does end up being about the little things. Sometimes, it’s best to find beauty in the mundane rather than hoping it pops up out of nowhere. 

You deserve to feel joy in the season full of warmth and connection. The more you welcome this whimsical feeling into your life, the more grounded and resilient you’ll become.

About the Author

I’m a Journalism and Media Studies major at UNLV, expecting to graduate in the Fall. My role as an intern is Blog and Newsletter writer here at LYF, I hope to learn more about writing and gain skills during my time here. I’m passionate about all things creative and believe that art should take center stage in our life to preserve humanity. I love to read, write and watch sitcoms in my free time! Most importantly, I live and breathe music.