Practicing Joy for Better Mental Health

When we consider mental health, we often think of pleasant feelings or, at the very least, an absence of unpleasant feelings. We associate mental health with feeling at peace, content, or hopeful about the future. But the truth is, mental health is less about what feelings you are experiencing and more about being a good steward of the feelings you have. Our feelings are certainly not our fault. But they are our responsibility. And anytime we experience a feeling, we have a choice between reacting in a way that perpetuates pain, or, to steward the feeling in a way that leads us toward practicing the fruits of the Spirit. 

We see the invitation to steward our feelings throughout Scripture. One of my favorite examples is found in Lamentations 3. The author was honest about his pain. He was vulnerable in expressing the depth of his suffering. But there’s a turning point in the passage at verse 21 where he said, “Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” There’s no reason to believe that the man’s circumstances have changed, and there’s no indications that his feelings shifted. He remained honest about his pain, but he made an empowered choice to preach truth about God’s character and God’s faithfulness to him in the past. He decided to act on what he knew to be true instead of simply reacting to how He felt. We cannot wait to feel something different before we do something different. In other words, when it comes to our mental and emotional health, we have a lot more agency than we often realize.

The same is true for our joy! We often make the mistake of believing that we have to feel joy before we have permission to practice joy. We worry that we are inauthentic if we practice something before we feel it. But practicing joy while we wait for our feelings to follow isn’t fake. It’s formation! We can think and act our way to a new feeling, but we cannot feel our way to a new way of thinking and acting. Practicing joy and acting on what we know to be true is good stewardship. 

Here are three ways you can practice joy today: 

1. Savor.

Savoring celebrates the ordinary, expanding our awareness of what is good and deepening our connection to our present joy. It extracts joy from the moments that our brain would be tempted to overlook or discard. Our brains are efficient and will readily dismiss memories it considers insignificant—including those everyday moments of joy—unless we savor them. You don’t need anything other than thirty seconds of your time.

To begin, choose one moment from your day—it can be the present moment or select a picture of joy you experienced earlier in the day. It might be the look on a friend’s face when you gave them a compliment, a lovely scene in nature, the sound of your child’s laugh as they played in the backyard. Imagine that you are taking a photograph of that moment with your brain. Next, ask all five of your traditional senses what they are going to remember about this moment. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? What do you taste? What do you feel? In savoring the ordinary moments, you celebrate your life and experience more joy in the life you are already living. 

2. Thanksgiving. 

We often talk about gratitude’s impact on joy. And the research is clear that the practice of gratitude does indeed increase our joy as it helps us notice and name what is good, shaping our perspective and putting language to what we feel. But what we don’t often discuss is that the practice of thanksgiving—expressing the gratitude that we feel out loud to other people or to God in our prayers—significantly increases the joy we would have experienced had we simply felt grateful in our hearts. Thanksgiving is the avenue we’ve been given to celebrate the gift with the giver. Joy multiplies when it’s shared. This is true of our prayers too. Through thanksgiving, we can celebrate our gifts with God and double our joy. 

3. Share Good News. 

The research is clear that sharing good news with others increases our joy. Imagine the joy available to us when we share the Good News of Jesus with others, including who He is and the difference He has made in our hearts and in our story. Some of us are tempted to hold back from sharing good news because we are afraid that sharing our joy is boastful or self-aggrandizing. But when we recognize the truth that everything we have is a gift of grace from God, we can share freely because the good news is a reflection of God’s goodness, not our own. Let’s not hold back from celebrating the God who has given us a permanent reason to rejoice! 

It’s empowering when we recognize that while we may not be able to control which feelings walk in and out of our lives, we get to choose how we will steward our stories. We can choose to react in a way that perpetuates our pain. Or, we can choose to take responsibility for our feelings so that our pain can ultimately be an avenue by which we grow and become more like Christ, nurturing our mental and emotional health. 

Daring Joy

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