“Joy is the experience of contentment, gratitude, and meaning, regardless of our external circumstance. Joy is not simply feeling happy. Joy encompasses quality of life and the ability to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose . . . Joy, by definition, cannot be the goal.” —Dr. Kerry Burnight, author of Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life’s Second Half

A mindset shift. A lifestyle choice.

Rather than ‘choosing joy’ a concept that is vast in its meaning as what brings one person joy will be different from another’s, it is rather knowing how to cultivate joy. What we choose are the ways to bring more joy into our life.

What awesome news to discover that this is a choice we each have the opportunity to make, and in so doing, we welcome more quality into our life today and each day moving forward, as well as a longer life to savor.

Gerontologist Dr. Kerry Burnight defines the term joyspan as how many years you enjoy living. “The experience of psychological well-being and satisfaction in longevity.”

In order to lengthen our joyspan, we need to know how to cultivate joy, and where to find it. The good news is, similar to contentment, we possess the capabilities within ourselves. We now just need to choose to put them to work.

How joy is different from contentment is that we won’t feel joy all the time during every minute of our life, but knowing how to cultivate it, ensures that we can recognize why we are not feeling joy, and choose to do something – make a change, shift our mindset, etc. – to bring us back to a feeling of joy.

Sometimes confused with pleasure, joy is distinctly different as we explored back in 2013. Pleasure is derived from savoring moments of happiness, and happiness, as is taught on the Introductions page is something out of our control. However, we increase moments of happiness occurring by cultivating a life of contentment that holds in the present moment so that we see the opportunities and then seize them to savor and appreciate. Pleasure is what we feel when savoring these moments.

Joy on the other hand is entirely within each of us as the quote at the top of today’s post/episode shared. The joy we experience depends on the everyday choices we make that impact our life experience and then how we choose to perceive them. A choice in our mindset.

By choosing a growth mindset, as well as an abundant mindset paired with social connection, generosity, loving-kindness and adaptability, as Dr. Burnight supports with evidence in her book Joyspan, we not only “buffer against cognitive decline”, we strengthen our well-being and enjoying now, in the everydays. Other choices that nurture more joy include following our curiosity, challenging our mind with mentally engaging activities and maintaining purpose and meaning in our lives.

The Tripod of Support for a Long Joyspan

Let’s simplify this a bit by exploring the tripod of factors that contribute and must be consciously invested in to support a long joyspan.

In order to maintain optimal health, we need to do more than just ‘stay alive’ and see the doctor when we don’t feel well. Prevention is essential. Instead of looking at how we take care of ourselves as preventing what we don’t want, why not look at it as welcoming in more of what we do want? This simple shift in our motivation as to why we make the life choices we make shifts the energy to one of expansion and exhilaration in what is possible rather than one based on fear of the unknown.

The three components of a long joyspan are caring for our emotional health, our cognitive health and our physical health. Below are lists sharing specific ways we can strengthen the health of each.

Emotional stability

• Emotional Intelligence
  • Taught in-depth in TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass, and an introductory post is found here.
• Understanding how the mind works
  • Taught at length in TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass
• Understanding the Nervous System and how to regulate ours
  • explore this detailed post to learn about this life influencing component of our physiology.
• Consciously engage with a growth mindset
  • Read this post to explore 11 ways to incorporate this mindset shift
• Consciously engage with an abundant mindset instead of the mindset of scarcity
• Practice gratitude regularly and celebrate the small successes as well as the grand ones

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Physical Health

“Your habits have more power to shape your health than your genes ever will.” —Kerry Burnight, author and gerontologist

• Regular workouts
  • episode #402 explored the fitness routine I am now using and have been for the past six months with positive benefits
• Healthy and nutrient-rich diet (don’t skimp on the protein as you need it for muscle maintenance (Dr. Stacy Sims recommends 40 g of protein daily for women in their perimenopausal years and then the rest of our lives)
• Regular and restorative sleep
• Preventative healthcare to ensure that if intervention is needed, it is caught early which often reduces any risk of interrupting our long life and good health.

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Cognitive Health

• Reduce your stress
  • Read/Listen to episode #299 and read this post about living subtly and its benefits
• Become a student of your mind
  • explore the detailed syllabus of TSLL’s Contentment Masterclass
• Mindfulness practices to give you the driver’s wheel of your thoughts
• Learn and put into practice regulating your nervous system
• Make continual learning a priority
  • keep challenging your mind to form new neural connections as neuroplasticity declines with age unless we use and stimulate new growth (which is absolutely possible!). Read vigorously – nonfiction and fiction, daily puzzles, learn that language you have always wanted to learn and keep at it, even through the challenging moments (which there will be many as is part of the learning and acquiring new knowledge process), learn to play a musical instrument, and sign up for that dance class.
• Feed your brain well
  • Listen to episode #336: How to Live a Life that Nourishes Your Brain, Thereby Elevating the Quality of Your Entire Life
• Physical exercise
  • while physical health was explored above, it plays a vital role in our cognitive health because in order to learn, we need to keep the brain nibble (keep the neuroplasticity from declining prematurely), and physical activity increases “brain derived neurotrophic factors, proteins essential for brain plasticity and learning”.
  • listen/read episode #402: How to Keep Ourselves Healthy – Mind and Body – for the Rest of Our Lives
• Maintain a healthy social network

Other ways to cultivate joy:

• Remember to play without any outcome in mind. Just play!
• Engage in work and hobbies that bring fulfillment, purpose and energize you rather than drain you
• Explore, see, visit and/or create Art
  • “engaging with beauty through art fosters an elevated state of joy, liberating the mind and soul from mundane concerns”
• Be kind (not nice, as we explored the difference in this post)
• Healthy, joy-filled social connections
• Remember to laugh (with others, not at others), watch a smart comedy that tickles your funny bone and let yourself laugh with inhibition, share time with others or engage in activities that prompt laughter, light-heartedness
• Be self-compassionate
  • In episode #122, we explore the importance of self-compassion

Benefits of Cultivating Joy

The benefits are immense when we choose to consciously live more joyfully. To be clear, this isn’t a Pollyanna rose-colored glasses engagement with the world, but it is an engagement with the world – being fully present, and it is consciously responding with a constructive mindset as shared above. We cannot dictate exactly what those benefits will look like or how they will appear, but below outcomes will result in some positive form or another.

• Long lasting cognitive abilities
  • mental Thriving
  • improved mental health
  • cognitive strength
    • “Positive emotions can protect the brain from cognitive decline, reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Maintaining purpose and meaning has been shown to improve cognitive longevity, keeping the mind sharp well into old age.”
• Strengthens resilience
• Strengthens social bonds
• Increased confidence
• A reduction of stress
  • When we reduce stress, we reduce the release of cortisol in our body. Cortisol released chronically accelerates aging and damages cardiovascular health.
• Increased focus on personal goals/intentions
  • Because you are secure within yourself as you know your purpose and have strengthened your emotional health, you no longer worry about what others think, and instead, listen and heed your inner compass.
• Enhanced coping mechanisms

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Choosing joy, once we know what that means and how to do it, and then follow through, our life becomes more peaceful, true freedom is felt, and a sense of balance carries us through our day. As we ground our lives in contentment, we are able to notice when joy is ebbing, care for ourselves as we need to, feel the feelings that need to be felt because we cannot always be joyful and must honor as well as explore what rises up so that we can fully heal, but we, through the skills of mindfulness and knowledge of the nervous system know how to bring ourselves back to joy.

May today’s episode/post remind you of how much power and capability you have within yourself right now at this very moment to create a joy-filled life, and thus cultivate a life of quality that is enjoyed for a wonderfully long life.

Petit Plaisir

~Mademoiselle Holmes

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