Well, joy is something that many of us have been taught you have to earn. You have to earn your joy. You have to be useful, and then you can have fun.
This often starts really early in life. I remember coming home from school and saying, “I want to go out and play.” It's like, “No—you have to do your homework first. You have to clean your room first.”
And unintentionally, as parents, we can sometimes do this—you want them to do the thing, and then they can go play and have fun. They have to do the serious thing, and then they can be silly.
If kids try to slip in being silly in the middle of doing a task, we beat it out of them. Like, “No time for silliness. Come on. We've got somewhere to be. Don't you know? We're on the clock.”
And this messaging that we get as a child often carries through—particularly if you had parents who were quite serious, who weren't all silliness and giggles. If that was just their personality and that was how they parented, then joy becomes an indulgence.
It becomes something frivolous. That when there is a little bit of space, then okay—when it doesn't matter, when you're off the clock—then you can have this thing.
Overlay that with the messaging that women have also received, subtly and sometimes overtly, around being helpful and being responsible. Joy comes after you take care of everyone else.
If you can relate to feeling guilty for sitting still… if you get triggered or eye-roll at people who are silly or consider them frivolous, or like they’re throwing their life away in the pursuit of pleasure—let me guess.
You probably have the belief that when you've got all your ducks in a row, then you'll go and do the fun things.
You'll work your butt off for your entire career and then go have tons of fun in retirement.
Those beliefs are all indicators that this is a belief that runs very, very deep for you.
Now, "earning it" can mean you have to do something productive first. But "earning it" can also be around your perceived version of credibility.
So, there's somebody in my world who completely triggers me. She’s someone who dances around in a glitter jumpsuit, has had all this success, and I sit there and say, “You're a yoga teacher. You have no experience. You haven't earned the right to have that much fun.”
And it was only after unpacking some of my own work—around why am I so triggered by her? Why do I sit there and go, “Ah, you don't deserve this. You haven’t worked hard enough for it. How can you be having fun?”—
And then all this success comes? That's not how it works.
And then all this success comes? That's not how it works.
But what if it did?
What if joy, and fun, and frivolity, and humor, and contentment, and happiness… were not rewards? Were not things that come at the end of something else—at the end of something productive, or at the end of something worthy, or the end of a degree, or whatever you believe has to happen in order for you to have this critical emotion that is rocket fuel for high performance… and it's the reason that we live?
We as humans are given this nervous system and these beautiful emotional states that light us up, that make us feel human, that make us feel alive—
And all you have to do is be around a child who is inherently silly, who laughs all the time, unencumbered at nothing—to know that we’re born this way.
It's beaten out of us. It is suffocated from us. And it's done so subtly and so slowly that very often we don't even realize it until it's completely gone… or completely stifled.
And so it's only, you know, this little sort of random thing that happens. But even then we contain it—because: “Too much to do. Come on. Get in the car. No time for silliness.”
I remember—I had that moment. One of my daughters is particularly silly, and I remember yelling at her, saying, “Get in the car.”
And she's like, “Mom, I’m just being silly.” And I remember saying to her, “We don’t have time to be silly.”
What message is that sending her? Her nervous system? My nervous system?
Why the hell are we here if it’s just all about getting somewhere—rushing, getting to school, getting to work, getting to wherever?
What’s the point?
We all harp on about the fridge magnet that says enjoy the journey—but if there's no space in that journey for what matters, then what are we doing?
Let’s talk about reason number two that your joy has been stolen.
Part of the wiring that happens—conditioning from a young age—is that joy has to be earned. You have to do other things, and you have to put other people first. As part of that journey, your nervous system becomes addicted to stress and cortisol.
It’s really hard to feel joy when your body is stuck in survival mode.
When we are living this life of busyness, run by the clock—back-to-back meetings, calendars—living life on a knife’s edge, our nervous system becomes wired for hypervigilance.
By this, I mean it’s always looking for the next thing that could destabilize this knife’s-edge way that I’m running my life. So anything that takes up a little extra space than you think you can give it—never mind the fact that you’re procrastinating, or that it’s not available for you to rest because you feel guilty or worry that you’ve missed something—your nervous system is stuck in this state.
What’s really interesting, when you learn more about feelings and nervous systems and how all this works, is your body actually gets addicted to the chemical state of stress.
And your body’s main goal—your brain’s main goal—is to keep you alive. And it wants to do that today the same way it did yesterday, because yesterday you survived, and you’re still here.
So what your body and brain will actually do is find things to make you stressed about, even if you're not, because it doesn’t know how to sit in calm. It doesn’t know how to sit in rest. It doesn’t know how to find room for joy.
Because when there is so much cortisol, you’re bracing. You’re living in fight or flight. You’ve got your breath held. And what joy is—it’s an exhale.
And your nervous system’s going, “Mmm-mmm-mmm. Can’t do that. We can’t exhale because if we exhale, we’re going to drop a ball.”
