Curious Neuron

Do you allow yourself to feel joy?

• Cindy Hovington, Ph.D. • Season 7 • Episode 7

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What if you could turn fleeting happiness into lasting joy and protect yourself from worry and self-doubt? In the latest Curious Neuron podcast, join me, Cindy, as we explore the connection between joy and emotional regulation. We’ll dive into neuroscience and the insights of Brené Brown to tackle the fears and anxieties that often block joy.

Let’s rethink joy—not as material things, but as simple pleasures and meaningful moments. Learn how savoring these moments can boost your resilience, happiness, and emotional health. We'll share stories and challenge you to a week of joy-savoring. By embracing joy, we can model emotional resilience for ourselves and our children. Don’t miss out on making joy a key part of your life!

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review or rating and please share it with a friend or group of parents.

Discover our membership:
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Related Curious Neuron Podcast Episodes:

  1. The science of happiness with Stephanie Harrison
  2. You don't have to create a new you
  3. I don't have time for myself 

Curious Neuron blog posts:
Emotional Intelligence: Building a Home Where Emotions Thrive
Understanding Emotion Regulation: Key to Mental Health for Parents


Sources:

  1. Jose, P. E., Lim, B. T., & Bryant, F. B. (2012) – Study on savoring and its link to life satisfaction, showing that people who actively savor joyful moments experience less anxiety and more happiness.
  2. Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., & Salovey, P. (2011) – Research on emotional intelligence and how allowing oneself to experience joy positively impacts emotional regulation and mental well-being.

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Speaker 1:

Hello, my dear friend, I have a question for you. Do you allow yourself to feel joy? And I know, after hearing that question, you might think, cindy, that's ridiculous. Of course I allow myself to feel joy, but as we're going to walk through the questions that I asked the members inside our membership last week, what you will start to notice is that perhaps these moments of joy are very short-lived and are transformed into moments of worry or self-doubt, which is what we discovered by reflecting on this. So stay tuned if this is something that you want to explore with me today. If you are new to the Curious Neuron podcast, welcome.

Speaker 1:

My name is Cindy and I am your host. I am a mom of three from Montreal, canada, and I have a PhD in neuroscience. My goal is to bring you the science of emotions, whether it's through emotional intelligence research or emotion regulation skills. Parenting and emotional development are also part of this, because I just feel that, when it comes to parenting, there's a lot of parenting advice out there, but as somebody who studied emotions, I realized, as a parent myself, that if I didn't know how to regulate and control my emotions or understand my own emotions, it made it much harder to support my child during their journey of emotional development, and so my goal is to help you not only learn how to understand your own emotions and regulate them, but how to teach this and model this for your child. If you haven't done so yet, please take a moment to click on the subscribe button. By doing that, it shows the algorithm that you actually care about the podcast enough to be notified for the next episode next Monday when it comes out. So please take a moment to do that and make sure that you rate the podcast. If you have just a few seconds, and if you have a little bit more time, take a moment to review the podcast. This is what allows me to get the funding to continue this podcast. And, speaking of funding, thank you to the Tannenbaum Open Science Institute here at the Neuro in Montreal, as well as the McConnell Foundation. Both of these foundations and organizations believe in the importance of sharing science with everybody, and that is my mission here through Curious Neuron.

Speaker 1:

I don't want to give you advice. I want to share the science with you so that you can take this and decide how it makes sense in your home. I'm not telling you what to do. I want you to have the information and you make that decision, and so thank you to both those organizations and thank you to you for listening to the podcast. Make sure that if you're enjoying this podcast, if there's an episode in particular that you liked, that you share it. Share it on Facebook and Instagram, share it on Twitter or anywhere that you communicate with other parents that might be able to enjoy this podcast. This is what's going to allow us not just to grow as a community and a podcast, but also that's going to allow the next season to come.

Speaker 1:

Every season is dependent on the metrics that we have right, so help me grow this podcast. Share it at work, in a newsletter, at school, with parents Whoever will be able to benefit from understanding their emotions a little bit more and supporting a child that they are with. If you haven't done so yet, please take a moment to visit the show notes. There are discounts for apps like PocPoc, which is my children's favorite app. It's an open-ended app and Montessori based, and I have zero guilt when they play with it because they're literally exploring different sounds and sights. There's also a link and a discount code for better help, and so if you are somebody that is struggling right now and needs to speak to somebody and seek some therapy that you can do from the comfort of your own home. I have partnered with BetterHelp to give you a discount on your first month, so visit the link in the show notes. And, in addition, if you'd like my free parental well-being kit, you can visit the show notes and click the link to get that free 40-page PDF that will allow you to start your own well-being journey and learn about emotions and learn what you can do to reduce your stress. And, lastly, I have opened up a membership and decided to open up the free trial and extended it from three days to 14 days, days to 14 days, and so if you'd like to take advantage of that to give it a try, so you know that every week we meet on Tuesdays at 12 pm Eastern and again at 8 pm Eastern.

Speaker 1:

And if you want to join two of these weekly calls and see the weekly posts, and on the 21st you can also join the monthly Q&A that we have. And this month we are talking with Stephanie Harrison, who is the author of the book the New Happy. I will put the interview that I had with her on the podcast in the show notes as well, and it is just a phenomenal book, which I'm actually going to cover inside the membership this week and next week we already did last week as well as we are reviewing her book and getting ready to ask her our questions. So there's a lot going on in the next couple of days and so if you want to join and get access to all of this for free, there are no strings attached. If you don't like it, after 14 days you cancel and the payment does not go through. And I'm doing this because I know the impact that this is having on parents and I just want to make sure that you get enough time to test it out for yourself and to see a difference, and so you could click the show notes at the link in the show notes to join the Reflective Parent Club free for 14 days.

Speaker 1:

All right, so let's take a moment to think about this question that I asked you at the beginning. Do you allow yourself to feel joy? And, like I said even when I was journaling about this, because what I do is every Tuesday I prepare a reflection prompt for our community, our membership, and what I do is the week before I reflect on it. I think of questions that are allowing me to dig deeper into this topic and I bring these reflection prompts and these different questions to the community. And, as I put, I wrote this question on my sheet of paper, on my notebook, and I had it right in front of me. Do I allow myself to feel joy? The answer was automatically yes. Of course, it would feel ridiculous to say that I don't allow myself to feel joy, and so what I did. The next question was then describe a moment where you felt joy and there are many different variations of this right. So there can be achievements.

Speaker 1:

Right when you reach a certain milestone, whether it's something at work that happened and, for me, obviously, having my own company. Every little milestone feels like a great achievement. And then I brought it to family right, every good moment. So a moment of joy was my wedding day. A moment of joy was the day that my children were born. A moment of joy is me going to see them every night before I go to bed and while they're sleeping, giving them a kiss and hugging them and just saying out loud thank you, because of how grateful I am that they're in front of me, and then I let myself sit with those moments and in that moment of pause, I moved past those small or brief not small, but brief moments of joy, right, because a day is very brief in our lifetime.

Speaker 1:

And I realized that many of these moments that I was thinking of whether it was a milestone, an achievement, getting my PhD, getting accepted into a PhD program, whatever it was they were short-lived. And when I thought about it even more, I realized that that short-lived joy, although it was present, was often followed by worry. So, for example, thinking about our children and when we look at them in awe and gratitude, does that moment for you switch into fear or worry? The reason why this whole reflection prompt came to my mind was because I was reading a book by Brene Brown and she spoke about joy, and she spoke about joy. We often think about these uncomfortable emotions that we move past very quickly as quote unquote negative emotions, right? So if we think about anger or sadness or fear and worry, those are emotions we think about, that we become uncomfortable with. But when you think about joy being such an extreme, positive and good, you know feeling if you want to use I don't like using good and bad, but that's what we kind of related to Well, it's very similar.

Speaker 1:

Do you share these big moments of joy with people around you? So let's, let's dig deeper into that, shall we? So if we think about an achievement at work or even school right, if you're in graduate school or you're a doctor or any job that you get and you're really proud of yourself, do you go out and share it with the world and celebrate it? You might call one or two people, you might call a parent, and this is what I learned as we were talking about this inside the Reflective Parent Club. Parents said or the parents that I was talking with within the membership were saying that they would often and not even all of them, but most of them would call a parent, but when it came to sharing this big moment of joy with friends, they held back. What if it looked like we were gloating? What if it looked like we were trying to shove our achievements in their face? But, most importantly, these moments of joy that they experienced, especially around achievements, were often followed by how will I mess this up? Will I mess this up? How or why do I deserve this? In fact, I don't think I deserve this. And so it was really interesting because at the beginning of the call, we were all sharing these moments of joy and how special these moments were.

Speaker 1:

Many people spoke about that new job or that new position. They got at work or a degree, or some talked about getting an award at work and how good it felt, but how short-lived that moment was and how quickly they pushed it aside, just as they would a negative emotion and, honestly, as we sat there during our Zoom call, it's almost as if we all had this simultaneous aha moment of holy crap. We actually push joy to the side in the same way that we push anger and sadness to the side. It's actually uncomfortable. It's not even an emotion that we share with friends the way that we would want to. We don't even open up about these extensive or intense sorry moments of joy. We don't. We don't share it, because what will others think?

Speaker 1:

To the point that somebody mentioned that, even when they had received an award for work that they hadn't shared it at a dinner party and somebody else that knew about it said hey, how about you share and talk about the award you just received? I think it's a huge deal. First, we should be cheering and saying cheers to you for receiving this award, but please, I'd love for you to share with everybody here why you got this award. It's an achievement award. It means that you're the best at what you do, and this person sunk in their chair with embarrassment over something that they had worked so hard for. Why? Why do we have to feel embarrassed if we achieved something? Why do we have to feel embarrassed if we achieved something? Why do we have to feel embarrassed Because we won an award? This person in particular even started bringing down the level of this award, how important it was. This person had received this award for being the best in their field and yet when they described it, they said it wasn't a big deal. Have you ever done something like this? Have you ever stayed quiet when you should have been celebrating? Have you ever brought down how important something was not to embarrass yourself in front of other people or look like you had this really big ego and you felt the need to share it with everybody? Why do we do that to ourselves?

Speaker 1:

And, on the other hand, the part that I had read in Brene Brown's book. She shared a moment where we look at her child as they are sleeping at night and feel this intense joy and gratitude for them, we give them a kiss, and that moment also can be short-lived, because that moment of joy turns to worry and fear, hoping that nothing ever happens to them, worrying that something will happen to them rather than living in the moment and seeing that they are okay and they are safe and they are loved and that we are grateful for them. We think about the negative sometimes, and it was when I read this part of her book that I quickly started thinking about how that applied to my life. And when I was thinking of different moments that I experienced applied to my life, and when I was thinking of different moments that I experienced, even something like my wedding, with the amount of joy that it brought, it brought the fear of how will I mess this up? I came from a family that was broken. I had never seen or experienced a healthy marriage, and so how would I know how to do this, how would I know how to argue with my husband now if I had never seen somebody argue in a healthy way? And so that day of joy, it wasn't automatically, obviously, that I switched to the worry, but it was quite, you know, soon after where I started saying, wow, this is going really well, when am I going to mess this up?

Speaker 1:

As we continued talking about joy inside our membership, there was somebody who said what about what defines joy? She felt that in the world that we live in, joy can sometimes be because of material things. And so if a I don't know a new phone or a new car or a new home signifies a moment of joy, and if that, if those things that we get are the only things that bring us joy and not the experiences or connections with other people or relationships, then is our definition of joy broken. So I'd love for you to kind of explore what is joy for you. Take a moment, grab a notebook. Or if you're out for a walk or doing something, just take a moment to pause after I. Or if you're out for a walk or doing something, just take a moment to pause after I say the following reflection prompts to think about what that looks like for you. So how do you define joy?

Speaker 1:

And if you're not sure, think about a recent moment when you felt joy. Was it when you purchased something? Was it when you consumed something? Was it when you connected with someone? Was it when you felt that you were good enough? Something that happened at work, anything. Think of those moments and reflect on those. Write about them. What was it in that moment that made you feel joy? Those write about them. What was it in that moment that made you feel joy?

Speaker 1:

Once you've thought of one of these moments, focus on just one at this point and let it linger, sit with that emotion and recall how long it lasted. Was it just a few minutes, a few hours, a few days? And was this particular feeling of joy suppressed, not shared with others? Or did it change into another emotion? Did it change into worry or self-doubt? And then, lastly, what can you do to allow yourself to sit with this joy a little bit longer? Can you journal about it? Can you share this with a friend that you trust, that you feel safe and comfortable with, or your partner, somebody that you can talk to and say I'm so proud of myself, or I just feel so good right now, and I need to share this with someone. It's interesting to me how many conversations fall around.

Speaker 1:

You know the pursuit of happiness and how we are looking for moments of joy, but then, when we are in that moment of joy, we seem to push it away a little bit too quickly, rather than sit with it and let us, you know, soak in it, just soak in that joy, because I do think that that's what's going to help us, as parents, with our wellbeing and mental health, because, as we know, parenting is tough and we need those moments of joy. And so my challenge for you this week is to find moments of joy. Moments of joy don't have to be big moments, they don't have to be that achievement at work. It could be something very small, like a moment where you sip your hot coffee and all you do is acknowledge the moment of joy, the joy of sipping that delicious cup of coffee, or maybe it's a great glass of wine, maybe it's your child asking you to play with them and you take those five minutes to sit down and as you're playing with them or watching them play and they're telling you what to do with the blue truck, you look at them and they are happy and that makes you feel happy. Acknowledge the moment of joy that you feel. Just say it in your mind. I feel joy right now and it feels good.

Speaker 1:

How many moments of joy are you going to be able to find in your day that might, in those little micro moments just might overpower those challenges because maybe, when it'll be bedtime and it's absolute chaos in your house, like it is every single night, you're going to think back about, you know, through those moments of joy that you had during the day that were really nice. Maybe breakfast went really well and you had the time to sit at the table with your child and to ask them how they're doing. Maybe you went to work and somebody complimented you and that felt good and you acknowledged that moment of joy, rather than saying, oh, this shirt, that's an old shirt, it doesn't even fit well anymore, right? Did you allow yourself to sit with that joy? It feels good when we get a compliment. Did somebody say, hey, you did a really good job at this presentation or this project? And rather than say rather than say, thanks, but think I don't think it was as good as it could be. What if you sat in that moment of joy and you said, wow, I feel appreciated right now and it feels good. What if that would change all the other moments that are really difficult?

Speaker 1:

As parents, you know everything I talk about. Sometimes I don't bring up a study, but there's always research behind what I talk about, and so what's interesting to me is the amount of research around these positive emotions and how they support our well-being. I'm going to post a couple of these in the show notes, but there was a study in 2009 that showed that individuals who regularly experience positive emotions, that they exhibit increased life satisfaction and they have reduced depressive symptoms, even during stressful times. So the study kind of reminded us that allowing ourselves to feel joy strengthens our mental health and our emotional resilience. We all want to be emotionally resilient and we all want this for our kids. So how are we modeling this emotional resilience to our kids? We have to help them find the moments of joy. We don't want to make the moments of uncomfortable emotions go away. We can't. It's impossible. They will always find ways and moments that feel uncomfortable. We have to help them sit in that. But in addition, we need to show them that we also need to sit in the positive moments, and the more we can sit and find these positive moments, the less intense the negative moments might feel.

Speaker 1:

Savoring this sort of joy and positive emotion is good for our well-being, as I said, and this savoring, this deliberate savoring, does enhance the experience of a positive emotion, and so what that means is if you are feeling, if somebody gives you a compliment and, rather than brush it off, you sit with it. Somebody says it, I don't know. Let's say you're at the mall and somebody gives you a compliment and you sit in the car and as you're driving away from the mall, you come back to this moment. You deliberately savor that moment of joy and how good it felt. Well, a study in 2012 found that savoring these moments of joy again, they help reduce the negative emotions like anxiety and depression, and they increase overall happiness in somebody's life and overall life satisfaction.

Speaker 1:

The last important point that kind of strengthens why we need to sit or savor these positive emotions is a study in 2011 that showed that embracing joy during achievements enhances not only our personal well-being but our motivation for future success. And so it means that, similarly with our kids, where they might not feel motivated at school, if we can allow them to savor and celebrate and feel the joy of a good moment, a good grade, a friend, somebody saying something nice to you, whatever that positive moment is if we can teach them how to savor and embrace these moments, it'll help motivate them. So when things aren't going well, it'll motivate them to kind of push harder, knowing that there are moments of joy and the same thing goes with us. Maybe it's not motivating to start bedtime every night, or maybe you don't feel motivated to support your child in that big moment of tantrum and those big emotions that they're struggling with, but knowing that on the other side of that, the other side of supporting them, is a moment of joy that you can savor longer than this really uncomfortable and perhaps frustrating and annoying emotion, perhaps that'll motivate you to help them in that moment. Right? So there are so many ways that we can look at this, but in the end, what I'm hoping you have taken from this podcast episode is to savor moments of joy, deliberately savor the moments of joy and let's see what that looks like in a week.

Speaker 1:

Take this challenge, the challenges to savor the daily moments of joy, for one week. Send me an email info at kirstenoncom after your week. Send me an email info at kirstencom after your week. If you do this, if you write this down and you find a difference, email me, not only if you want, if you're interested that you could come on the podcast. If you notice a difference, I will give you something for free the membership.

Speaker 1:

You can decide which membership you want monthly, one month, if you want to try it, a quarter or a year I will give you that for free. If you show me the proof, write it down, the little moments of joy every single day that you make note of, send me a screenshot of your sheet of paper, and if you want a year free of the membership, I will give it to you, because that's how much I know and believe in the importance of us savoring these moments of joy. If you don't believe me, try it. I hope you enjoyed this podcast and if you do, if you did, please take a moment to share this podcast episode with a friend, and I will only, by the way, take the first person that emails me. I cannot give away too many podcasts, too many memberships, but that first person that emails me in a week from now I will share with you.

Speaker 1:

I will give you the membership for free for a year, if you want it, because I do think it's important. For free for a year if you want it because I do think it's important for us, as parents, to support each other and to acknowledge that it's hard and to find ways to make it easier, and that is the whole point of the Curious Neuron podcast. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate you being here and please take a moment to pause for yourself this week and remind yourself that you matter even more now that you are a parent, you matter. See you next Monday. Bye.