Speaker: 00:03
Y is a podcast that focuses on mental health and other aspects relating to what goes on inside of person's health. We are by no means professionals on this field and only aim to make these conversations about mental health easier for the listener. Nothing we say or talk about is professional advice unless explicitly mentioned. If you seek professional advice or experience symptoms of an actual mental health disorder, please contact a professional or visit your closest center for behavioral health. You are not alone. And this topic is on happiness plus joy. Cheyenne, what do you want most in life?
Speaker 1: 00:40
I would say happiness. But a lot of the times people either have unhappiness or happiness. And even to those people that do have happiness, sometimes it just feels as if something is missing.
Speaker: 00:58
Do you feel as if like happiness can just be easily like you can have happiness easily at one point, or and it can be easily taken away, and you get through this cycle of being happy and unhappy, and being happy and unhappy just because of the things that are circulating through your life, such as materialistic things or goals that you reach, and then you want to be happy, but then you just realize that hey, I'm unhappy now. Like, how do I chase this thing of happiness when it ends up also leaving leading to unhappiness?
Speaker 1: 01:35
Well, the problem is that a lot of the times with happiness or unhappiness, the two main feelings or the two main things that are attached to both are the success or a failure of a certain goal in mind. So let's say you do a good one week or one month at something that you want to achieve and you're happy, but then the next month you're doing absolutely terrible and it just brings you down. And that's the issue with happiness and not happiness itself. What we really want to look for is joy and joy in our daily lives.
Speaker: 02:19
The definition of joy is the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune, or by the prospect of possessing what one desires. The definition for happiness is a state of well-being and contentment, a pleasurable or satisfying experience. That's where I see the difference, I think. Is the pleasurable or satisfying experience? It's like this short little answer for you. So when you do feel unhappy and you get this pleasurable or satisfying experience, you become happy. However, with joy, you feel the good fortune. It's this spiritual identity of feeling like I guess everything is good, and that life is life, and I'm living it to the fullest. And we get lost. And the these boundaries between happiness and joy are so flipped around that we kind of want to like guide our audience to understand that hey, you chasing after happiness is just a small part of actually chasing the ultimate, I guess, desire of being joyful. Exactly. So, how do you think we can help our audience focus less on trying to be happy and to focus on the attitude of being joyful in life?
Speaker 1: 03:45
I think that in order for us to find what brings us joy, you just need to think of things that make you happy in the moment, like all the time, always. Not to attach it too much to a goal, because then again, that leads to unhappiness or happiness. But once you get that happiness, you need to find the other aspects of joy themselves, which can be just how you feel in the moment. And in order to do that, you just need to go through things you love to do every day, talk to somebody. Because these these are not necessarily goals, these are actions that bring you joy within your life, and not necessarily just something that you feel like you have to do within the day. It's just something that comes naturally, something that's that resonates in your spirit.
Speaker: 04:46
To make things harder for yourself, I feel as if we put so much pressure on this idea of happiness and that we need to chase this. We need to be happy, that if you don't feel happy, your life isn't good, and that happiness is all that life is all about. But I feel those if you can't allow yourself to feel the emotions of unhappiness and not allow yourself to feel the emotions of being sad or being in despair, then you can't feel the emotions of being happy. Cause we you I think you need to feel all of your emotions. And if you are sad, it's okay to be sad, and you need to feel those feelings because if you keep telling yourself, like, I need to be happy, I need to be happy, you're never gonna actually be happy. You're just gonna go in through this feedback loop and you're just gonna keep telling yourself things and you're gonna be more unhappier than you were. So I guess the idea is that if I keep chasing happiness, I'm never going to reach happiness. Because all it's doing is I'm just going in through this cycle of just chasing the same thing. And I guess if your idealization of whatever makes you happy and you don't reach it, you become unhappy. So then you're you're back, you're still stuck in this cycle. But if you chase the joyful life that you want to live, whether it's doing different small things that help you be joyful, then I think that's what you can allow yourself to idealize or realize more about life. And I feel as if if you can do that, you can actually really enjoy life rather than chase this cycle of happiness and unhappiness.
Speaker 1: 06:53
And a lot of the times with joy, it's all about just living in the now. You know, it's almost like a current state of mind where happiness is almost spoken about in a future tense or a past tense. Like I was happy, or I'm gonna be happy if I do this, you know, always thinking about that. Whereas joy is just the little things, like a lot, I feel like a lot of times that you can have joy without happiness. Because again, happiness is just a small part of it of what joy is itself. And in order for you to have that joy, you just need to have that separation between what's going on in your head and like right now, like how how you feel about something versus like what you think you're gonna accomplish in the future in order to achieve that happiness.
Speaker: 07:48
You know what's crazy? Like you just said, like, I want, like everyone chases the I want to be happy. I've never heard in like I was happy, like the past, I've never heard anybody ever say I was joyful, you know?
Speaker 1: 07:59
Like I've never heard someone say, I was joyful, and now I'm not like what I'm not joyful, like yeah, because it it's always spoken about in the present tense, but it's not spoken about enough because that's that's the main thing. It's almost like it's right in front of our faces, but we don't know how to grasp it because we're not taught as humans to interact that way. It's always just like, you want to be happy, do this. You want to be happy, do this. It's it's not like, oh, you think you're not joyful, look at your life in this aspect. You want more joy, then you just need to realize this about what's going on in your life. That's the difference.
Speaker: 08:42
It's not a formula. I feel like we put it on as a formula for happy for me to achieve happiness. I need to first achieve X, then I can get my answer to my formula of happiness. And I don't believe I don't that it's an emotion. You can't put a formula on an emotion. That's not how emotions work.
Speaker 1: 09:01
Yes, and happiness itself is a controlled emotion, but well, both of them are emotions joy and happiness. But happiness is the controlled emotion. Joy is how you view things that as those different aspects of your life, it's how you absorb the information and apply it to your own soul. Happiness, you know, it comes and goes, so it's just like it involves a high level of control that sometimes we don't have, sometimes we don't know how to use. And joy is just all about it is like that it is what it is, and I'm okay with that, or it is what it is, and I'm happy because of it. And that's like where happiness ties into joy.
Speaker: 09:52
I'm I could be that kid in the classroom who raises his hand and be like, I I felt happy and I felt unhappy, and I felt little bits of joy, I believe. I I can't I can't come on here and say that I felt what joy feels like, and it's this glorious magical fairy dust from the gods themselves. No, like I've I've really never felt it. I I pray that one day I do get the chance to actually feel what joyful feels like and to be fully joyful and to be as as happy as you can say you can be. But I think the thing that we really need to focus on is finding your ways to be joyful. Because joy is like these small things that end up adding up to each other, giving you this more fulfilling perspective in life, and in general, just helping you maybe become even a better person that you never thought you could see yourself ever becoming. So, some ways to get joy is gratitude is actually a huge one. It's one of those little baby steps that can actually push more of into a full step. Giving back is actually one of is is a human emotion that sparks so much happiness and joy in ourselves that people don't understand how important it is to be to have gratitude and to give back and to be a part of your community. If you can do that, I promise you you'll feel a lot more happier than I put X plus this and I'm happy. Like just figure out what it is. Don't look at it as a happiness emotion, but look at it as maybe something that can actually help you practice joy. You don't need to, you can't achieve joy like right away. It's not like I can wake up in the morning and be joyful. It's putting the small, it's like putting it into a puzzle. You need to put all the corners first and then work your way to the center to finally reach your goal.
Speaker 1: 12:04
Little by little.
Speaker: 12:05
Little by little. Do you do anything that's joyful?
Speaker 1: 12:09
Um I would say, okay, I I do things that make me more happy than joyful because most of the time where I find my joy in life is like what you said, from other people expressing their gratitude because I'm not actively searching for it, but it's just one of those things that you stumble across during your day or during your week that is super uplifting and it just really helps your state of mind. And I I know sometimes it happens to people and they'll just kind of let that thought pass them by and they don't really think about it, so they're not joyful. So again, it's joy is also just a state of mind. So it's not something that I actively work on, but it is at the same time. But it's just because it's part of my mental state and the way that I think. Because really, depending on how you think about something, you're either gonna feel happy or unhappy about it, and you're gonna feel joyful or not joyful about it, you know. So it's just really it all boils down to how you feel about what is going on in your life, how you decide to view something. Because you can be the most negative person and you'll never feel joy in your life, and you're never gonna feel happiness as much as you should. And you'll mostly just feel unhappiness. But I try to think of my life in such a positive light and the things around me that are going on in such a positive light that that's what brings me joy. Like it's not so much of an like a physical or mental exercise for me, it's more just how I decide to think.
Speaker: 14:04
I could give an easy really quick, easy example. So when you do become an artist, I think the one thing that you're always told is that like you'll never make money in this industry, you can't make money, there's no money to be made. And when you do something that you actually enjoy to do, whether it is creating a piece of art, whether it's painting, drawing, whatever it is, when you follow the road of I can't make money from this, so I'm going to do something else and forget about the thing that I enjoy to do, and do like work at a hotel or something, or do something else that doesn't give you the enjoyfulness of doing something that you enjoy. You instead, if you did follow the road of I'm going to create this piece of art, I'm going to paint, I'm going to draw, whatever. And I don't care if I make any money from it, I don't care if I could starve. Like, I'm going to do the thing that I enjoy to do, no matter the circumstances that come behind it. Because you can still feel joy and not be happy.
Speaker 1: 15:13
Exactly. And I think what I one of the the big things dealing with happiness and unhappiness, a lot of people tie it to their jobs as well. Like how you mentioned, like instead of like working over here, I'm going to go work over here and be happy. A lot of the times people don't make that disconnect and actually follow through with it because they they've only been taught to like accomplish a goal, accomplish a goal in their life, to achieve happiness. So that's why they're stuck there. So I think that if they keep doing it, they keep working at it, eventually they'll get they'll get happiness. But a person who chases joy and know what joy is and knows how to mentally prepare themselves for joyful thoughts, they're the ones who can separate from that and not care what anybody has to say or what people at their job have to say, anything like that. They just do what they want because they're content with life and everything around them brings them joy, no matter what. And they found out how to make that separation from their almost kind of rat race of happiness. Because it's either unhappy or happy. Joy is just joy.
Speaker: 16:29
Exactly. And they can play like I think what people need to understand is that these two things aren't like separations of each other, they're actually just like they hold hands with each other, they're they're hand in hand with each other. And if you practice one, you practice the other. And so, but with joy, it takes a lot more. It takes other things, it takes other separations of other things to come together and coexist together to reach joyfulness. With happiness, it's just like this one thing. It's just like I did this, it did this, and then now it's this, and that that's the formula track again that we're following. However, if you can practice again what the little things about joy and the little things about happiness, you'll slowly start to realize the differences between them, and you'll slowly figure out what you actually want to do, whether that's the external factors of your life, whether the external factors of your friendships. But once you can actually figure that out, it's a whole different ball game for y'all.
Speaker 1: 17:44
Yes. And one more thing I would like to add is if you feel like joy is missing from your life, one of the first steps is just taking that step back and really viewing things in a more positive light and just really opening your eyes because a lot of the times there can be joy in your life that you're just missing because you didn't look in the right direction.
Speaker: 18:13
You just gotta look, I guess, in the right direction. Don't be blinded by this chase of happiness because you're just gonna end up in the rat race. There's a way out of the rat race. There always is. There's always a way out. And you can figure it out a hundred percent. 100%. But I just have one reminder for you. Please, please, please, please, please. Remember, you are not alone. We got you. How does that sound short? Sounds great. Thank you for joining us today.