On Lowering Your Threshold for Joy with Kelly McGonigal

Before I spoke with Dr Kelly McGonigal (she/her) on the podcast, I spent a day reading her new book on joy.

That evening, when I walked into a yoga class and the teacher asked how I was, I heard myself say, ‘I am so good.’

It took me a moment to realise why.

Kelly is a psychologist, author and educator. All of her books are based on classes she has taught at Stanford University, including The Upside of Stress, The Joy of Movement and her latest, Joy Is a Risk Worth Taking.

In this conversation, Kelly defines joy as the human capacity to be uplifted by what makes life worth living. She believes we have this capacity for a reason. Being human is hard, and joy helps us keep going.

We talk about why joy can feel like such a risk. And why, for many of us, myself included, there can be so much guilt about expressing joy when there is so much suffering in the world.

Her response to that guilt gave me tingles down my spine, especially her story of two people in Ukraine who joined her online joy class and told her joy mattered more than ever.

Listen in as we explore lowering your threshold for joy, what pain and joy have in common in the brain, and why joy, more than any other emotion, wants to be let out.

In this episode, we explore:

• Sharing joy as a first practice, and why ‘positive empathy’ connects us as much as compassion for each other’s pain
• Letting someone help you as an underappreciated act of joy
• How conversations about joy brought Kelly closer to her father during his final illness
• Kelly’s definition of joy and its functions: a signal of what makes life worth living, a signal to others that they matter, and an energy that moves us toward connection
• Joy as small and fleeting rather than peak happiness
• Lowering your detection threshold for joy, and tracking one micro uplift a day
• The barriers that make joy feel risky, including fear of loss and guilt amid suffering
• Joy as part of our moral responsibility, and why calling joy a privilege is dehumanising
• How depression can make joy harder to access, and why every practice in the book was tested with people who were struggling
• How pain and joy both work through the brain’s meaning system
• The ‘champagne bottle’ of joy: why joy has more ways of being expressed than any other emotion, and how shared joy builds trust and closeness
• Kelly’s hope that her book helps people feel better about humanity

Connect with Kelly McGonigal

Join the hybrid Mental Health Aware Yoga training today

Download the free Patanjali’s Eight Limbs and Mental Health Aware Yoga ebook

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