PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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How can we feel more moments of joy? Explore how joy is rooted in connection, gratitude, and paying attention to the people and moments that bring meaning to our lives.

Summary: Did you know that joy isn’t just something we feel, but something we practice? On this episode of The Science of Happiness, poet Ross Gay shares how connection and attention can help us cultivate more joy, while psychologist Philip Watkins explains how gratitude can amplify that feeling. Learn how hanging out, noticing moments of connection, and reflecting on joyful experiences can help bring more joy into your life.

How To Do This Practice: 

1. Notice connection: Pay attention to the people, places, animals, and natural world that make you feel connected.
2. Make time to be together: Look for opportunities to hang out, share experiences, and spend time with others without an agenda.
3. Pay attention to the small moments: Notice everyday interactions and moments of goodness that you might otherwise overlook.
4. Share your joy: Tell someone about something that delights you, celebrate good moments together, or help someone else carry their joy.
5. Savor what feels good: When you experience joy, pause and let yourself fully appreciate and celebrate the moment.
6. Reflect with gratitude: Think or write about a joyful experience and what it meant to you or how it made you feel connected.

Today’s Guests:

ROSS GAY is an award-winning American poet and author. His latest book explores the complexities of joy and its connection to feelings like gratitude and sorrow.

Learn more about Ross: https://www.rossgay.net/about

PHILIP WATKINS is a psychology professor at Eastern Washington University. He conducts research on different aspects of well-being including gratitude, happiness, and joy.

Learn more about Philip and his work: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/profile/phil_watkins

Related Science of Happiness episodes:

How Joy Helps Save the Planet: https://tinyurl.com/2d5hjz9s

Are You Remembering the Good Times: https://tinyurl.com/ysbwrnr4

The Contagious Power of Compassion: https://tinyurl.com/y6bpvbv5

Related Happiness Break episodes:

Tap Into the Joy That Surrounds You: https://tinyurl.com/ykuz28za

How to Awaken Joy, with Spring Washam: https://tinyurl.com/ybpuvuj6

The Unexpected Joy of Slow Looking: https://tinyurl.com/4uudwwc2

Message us or leave a comment on Instagram @scienceofhappinesspod. E-mail us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

ROSS GAY: It seems like my greatest experiences of joy have been in these sort of projects with other people.

I live in Bloomington, Indiana and there's now something called the Bloomington Community Orchard. And it was an idea by our friend, Amy Countryman. And she sort of found her way to thinking about proposing, like, an urban orchard, a city orchard. 

And Amy had this call-out meeting. I mean, it was a good turnout, a hundred people or something. 

We formed up these teams to like map out how to like, prepare the site – how to select plants. We found tons more volunteers. We did all this moving of manure. And it was on. 

We were a group of people who didn't really know each other before we started and we were building this project. We were, you know, working on this project.

We would have these long meetings because we didn't know how to have meetings, you know, and they would be potlucks most often, and they would be at someone's house and there would be kids around.

We didn't know how to do it and we were like bumbling and it made us closer because we spent time being like, “What's the recipe for that risotto?”

It was this gathering for ourselves because we want to live in this community. We were dreaming our own community into being, but we also were doing it for people that we didn't know – people who weren't born yet actually. And that just felt like some of the most meaningful work that I've ever done. 

That feels to me like fundamental to joy.

Joy is being fundamentally connected to one another. You know?

SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I’m Shuka Kalantari, our podcast’s Executive Producer, filling in for Dacher Keltner. 

Today is all about joy: what’s special about it, and we can feel more of it.

Here with us is poet Ross Gay, most recently the author of Inciting Joy, where he reflects on the different ways we can experience the emotion, and why it’s so fundamental to being human.

We also hear from psychologist Phillip Watkins about how to feel more joy and the connection between joy and gratitude.

PHILIP WATKINS: They both require, kind of a positive, non cynical interpretation bias of good things in our life.

SHUKA KALANTARI: All that, after this little break.

Welcome back. I’m Shuka Kalantari, the executive producer of The Science of Happiness, filling in for Dacher.

This week is all about joy and the different ways we can find it in our lives.

Poet Ross Gay spent a lot of time nurturing joy and he shares about it in his recent book of essays, Inciting Joy. And he’s here today to share a little with us.

Thank you for joining us on The Science of Happiness. 

ROSS GAY: Thank you for having me.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Inciting Joy is this collection of beautiful essays that considers all these different ways we can incite joy in ourselves and in others. I wanna take a step back and ask what do you mean by joy? And what is the definition of that that you've come to find throughout writing these essays?

ROSS GAY: I think that what I mean is like the ways that we practice our entanglement, You enter into joy when you practice entanglement. And when I say entanglement, I mean like being fundamentally connected to one another. All of these things like gardening or pick up basketball or skateboarding or, you know, aspects of school at its best, et cetera…there are these sites where we get the opportunity to practice being entangled with one another.

ROSS GAY: It’s also the feeling we have. The light that emanates from us when we help each other carry our sorrows. And that notion of joy to me, it sort of suggests something of entanglement.

Shula Kalantari: What led you to this idea that joy is so entangled with sorrow?

ROSS GAY: I feel like one of the reasons sorrow is so – it feels actually fundamental to our capacity to relate to one another, to our capacity to care for one another is because sorrow is not an escapable thing. 

Sorrow is a profoundly common language. You know, heartbreak is a profoundly common language. And if the idea is that joy is the evidence of practicing our entanglement, our being threaded up into one another, then it seems to me that our common languages are going to be some of the places where that's gonna happen. 

To me, it seems a hundred percent the case that our being connected to one another, caring for one another. That itself feels to me like, also fundamental to joy. 

I think like walking through town stopping by the place where I get coffee and just being with people who maybe I know a little bit, maybe I know a lot. Just, yeah, being around people. You just– It's not unusual to share what you love to be like, “Oh, have you had any of those potatoes yet? You know, you gotta get some of those potatoes, have you read this book? You know this book's blowing my mind.” Or like, oh yeah, “I'm listening to this music lately.”

I was just walking through the airport the other day and I was just walking around because my flight was late. And so I had all this time and I saw a woman standing at the water fountain kind of looking up and there were birds flying around the airport, which I love. And I kind of noticed that she was looking at the birds and I said, “Ah, they're great, aren't they amazing?” And she said, “I'm trying to get them some water.” So she was kind of like, “Don't spend too much time on the water fountain. Cause I'm trying to get the birds’ water.” 

That was a completely incidental, we bumped into each other. We both needed the water fountain be, and we were both admiring how wonderful it is that birds show up in airports. It's, it's wild, you know.

Those kinds of exchanges, those, what we think of as like small and maybe exchanges you don't even remember, which I think of more and more the older I get as being like, really the fabric of life.

That itself feels to me like also fundamental to joy. It's profound.

SHUKA KALANTARI: We can also experience joy by reflecting on other people's joy. People call it empathic joy and research from psychologist Barbara Frederickson shows that when we arouse this empathic joy in ourselves, all kinds of amazing things happen, like we feel more positive emotions and thoughts, it enhances our memory, which makes me wanna start doing it right now, because my memory is a mess. And not surprisingly, it increases our capacity to build friendships, build social networks, just by literally reflecting on other people's joy.

And so I wonder, you know, If you have a practice in this yourself of incorporating other people's joy kind of consciously into your own mind and life?

ROSS GAY: My experience of joy is connected to witnessing other people's experience of what I think of as joy or being connected to one another. Which is really just a noticing practice. You know, like noticing stuff, paying attention to stuff. The writing practice is very much part of that. What we put our attention on obviously grows. What we study grows. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: So what are suggestions of ways or pathways that we can find to cultivate more joy in our own everyday lives and notice more joy?

ROSS GAY: Hanging out. I feel like hanging out is to come back to what you're saying, it's like social connection – it's the place where so much of it happens. 

Like kids hang out, ride your bikes, get in trouble, you know? But I also feel like, all of these alienation devices, and the alienation devices are like, you know, our computers our phones, but also all of these other ways by which we are allegedly being kept safer by not being in contact with one another.

And it feels actually like a kind of discipline that I'm, like, wait a second, I shouldn't be ordering my book if I don't need to off the computer. I have a bookstore in town. Go to the bookstore, ask someone to show me where the book might be. You know, anytime I can have an actual interaction with a human being, feels really important to my soul, but also like, my mental health. And I feel like there's a sense that among a certain kind of tech-ish – the world that we're kind of headed toward, it feels to me that less of that is better, actually. If I could get through my life, if I could travel from here to California without ever having to touch another human being, well, hey, I did a good job. That is such a sorrow, you know, to me asking directions from a human being, that's incredible. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: There's this concept in psychology of passive joy and active joy, right? Passive joy is just kind of contentment in the moment, like good is happening around you. And then active joy is when we share our joy with others, and there's research showing that it's kind of a snowball effect right? When we share our joy with others, then we experience an increased sense of joy, and this energy going back and forth and I wonder, what are some ways that you like to share and spread your joy?

ROSS GAY: My greatest experiences of joy have been in these projects with other people. But I also feel like my practice is also to be like, and your greatest experiences of joy will also be being with the trees and being with the soil, and being with all the creatures, and being with the bird song, and being with the light, you know, who are also our company. It is a kind of like – the practice of connection – like you have to practice it.

This is kind of like a consideration of gratitude too, because we don't spend a lot of time being like, thank you, wind. Or thank you, sun. Periodically will be like that, but like to be like, no, fundamentally every day, every second, everything. Thank you leaves, shade. Thank you.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Well, Ross Gay, thank you so much for being a guest on our show. I just adored reading Inciting Joy. So thank you for your work and thank you for spreading it.

ROSS GAY: Thank you. Yeah. I really appreciate what you all do too. Grateful.

SHUKA KALANTARI: What brings you joy? Email us and let us know. We have our contact info at the end of this episode and in our show notes. And share this episode with someone you want to spread joy to. 

After this break we’ll hear from a joy expert on how to feel more of the emotion and why it’s connected to gratitude. 

MIDROLL

SHUKA KALANTARI: Hello and welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I’m Shuka Kalantari, filling in this week for Dacher Keltner. We've been hearing from the poet Ross Gay about how to incite more joy into our lives and the lives of others. And how, for him, joy comes from feeling connected to other people, and our environment.

Joy expert Philip Watkins agrees.

PHILIP WATKINS: I would interpret joy as a positive emotional response to being connected with someone or something important to me. 

SHUKA KALANTARI: Watkins is a psychology professor at Eastern Washington University. His research shows that people who are very joyful are also very grateful. And vice versa, feeling grateful creates more joy as well.

PHILIP WATKINS: They're related because they both require kind of a positive, non cynical interpretation bias of good things in our life.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Watkins says  — joy isn’t something you can force.

PHILIP WATKINS: You can't just sit down and say, “Okay, I'm gonna be joyful now.” You know? Something has to happen. Something positive has to happen. And so that's why you can't just produce it. But you can prepare for it.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Joy is fundamentally tied to feeling connected to others -  so Watkins thinks we can set out to feel more of it by focusing on that togetherness in our lives.

PHILIP WATKINS: When people interpret positive events in a way that brings them closer to someone or something important to them, that's how you prepare for it.

SHUKA KALANTARI: Keep an eye out for ways you’re already connecting, and opportunities to connect more. 

And when you do find yourself feeling joyful, Watkins says you should let yourself savor that emotion.

PHILIP WATKINS: What does joy make us wanna do? It makes us wanna celebrate, right? So certainly celebrating the thing is going to enhance or amplify or prolong your experience of joy.

SHUKA KALANTARI: And finally, reflect on joyful things that have happened in the past, kind of like Ross Gay does through his writing.

PHILIP WATKINS: Recalling joyful experiences and thinking about, and writing about why they were joyful to you, why you felt more connected with this person and, and how important that was to you, that experience was to you is, is probably another way of kind of bringing joy more consistently into your life.

TRUC NGUYEN: Hi. I’m Truc Nguyen, one of the producers of The Science of Happiness. 

Next time on our show, we explore why we sometimes hesitate to engage with strangers—and how even these brief encounters can benefit our health.

CHRIS: Kind of it all hit me, like, "Wow, we had this really big conversation," but it was so short. Like, I wish I had said this or asked her about that.. I was happy to have been able to learn so much about this person and to kind of show that, um, even though they were, like, in their own world at the time, they were really open to talking to me.”

Find out more on the next episode of The Science of Happiness.

Thank you for listening to The Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Anna Zou. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our host is Dacher Keltner and I’m the executive producer, Shuka Kalantari. Have a great day.