The brain-deep emotion that matters more than happiness

You can be joyful and sad at the same time, but you can't be happy and sad at the same time

That's what makes joy often like so confusing to people. My name is Kate Bowler and I'm a historian and a podcaster and a writer and I study

issues about luck and meaning and what makes life, well, beautiful. Joy can coexist with the deepest and often most painful emotions because it is this bright, enlivening feeling

Joy has this way of binding together all these broken pieces and still making you laugh at the exact same time

which honestly is why I think it's like the most interesting thing to study

I spent a really long time as a very unlucky person

Actually, that's not true. Briefly, I was extremely lucky. I finally had this baby I'd always wanted after years of infertility

Then I got my dream job at Duke University, which does not sound like everybody's dream

but all I ever wanted to do was be a historian and hide myself away in a turret with books and

gargoyles and many grateful students. And I was married to my high school sweetheart

and I just had the feeling like life was just finally paying off. And then I had a really

devastating season of powerful unluck I was diagnosed with stage four cancer after a really long awful stretch of begging for care And then after that it was almost like happiness just wasn enough anymore

I was just never going to be able to, like, add up my life in the same way. So I needed something more existentially gritty

I needed joy. There are certain powerful experiences like joy that can actually help you be carried throughout a terrible time and into a new season

And so that's what I went looking for. People often confuse happiness and joy because it all just sounds like the positive end of the spectrum

They just think they're synonyms. That's partly because Americans are obsessed with happiness

We have an enormous happiness industry. Happiness will start to look like well-being and self-care and flourishing in kids in matching denim

But joy is actually something much more complicated. Psychologists make a pretty fine distinction between happiness as a definable set of qualities

as ease, as a kind of psychologically relaxed state. It's also really contextual, meaning that it's cumulative

It happens because things have gone well. That's what makes happiness lovely, but also makes it very fragile

One thing goes wrong and you can topple the whole mood of happiness

Joy engages not just the dopamine and the happier parts of our brain chemistry

It still coexists with our stress systems with really dark emotions with despair with enormous pain Meaning that we not escaping the reality of what we in We adding another layer on top of it

Joy is one of the most powerful human emotions, not just because it is sweet and fleeting

but because of its enormous capacity to change us. It makes us more grateful

It makes us more hopeful. It delights us, which is to say it makes us laugh

It's this great existential yes that reminds us that life is still worth loving, even in the midst of the worst times

It allows us to look at reality with new eyes. And also, you just have this feeling like, no matter what, I see it all, and somehow it's still good

joy has a very special place in particular in the christian tradition as a gift as like a divine

gift it's a moment of being beyond yourself that people of faith would describe as transcendence

and that's because you feel psychologically it has this real bonding feeling you feel very

connected to everything so that means you can feel very connected to other people you might

also feel very connected to the divine. Do you feel emotionally open to the possibility of things

Spiritually, psychologically, and just communally, joy is sort of the whole package of bringing together

what can feel like a very unreconcilable experience. Most of the preconditions for joy are actually like the direct opposite of what we need to be our machine selves There are a couple things that pop up over and over again as preconditions to joy And I think

one of the most powerful is emotional availability and connection. I think a person who wants to be

surprised is a person who's much more likely to find joy. Ultimately, if we want to be more joyful

people, we are probably going to have to like put down the phone and close the laptop and think of

ourselves as being experientially surprisable. So happiness is just an emotional state. Joy

is a story. It is a feeling that somehow in your spirit, that it feels good to be alive

to be here, to be put together with whatever you have left. That's what joy can do. It can

take you from the very bottom to the very top. And mostly what it takes is love

I think most people get joy wrong because they think it's a bonus level of happiness

I think it would be a huge relief to the person struggling with depression

to the person right in the middle of fresh grief, to the person who is just frankly

deeply bored by their life, that joy is definitely for them. And I think it being both emotional and

existential is what makes it feel gritty and real and like something that will carry you