“How to add joy to your life?” might sound like a silly question but bare with me! Have you ever been so caught in the gloom and doom stories about our world that it impacted your mood and daily life? Have you ever had to fight for so long about the cause you want to carry forward, that your thoughts turned dark?
Dear changemakers, I have been there so many times. I remember that I almost cried when I learnt about the situation in Ukraine. I got so mad and I stayed angry for days after the French president declared that my country will go back to nuclear power. Excruciating pain came up when I saw pictures of a beaten up woman and learnt that her guilty partner, the man who attacked her, was still free.
I know that when we feel so concerned about the well being of our planet, of our society as a whole and of our future, it is hard to stay positive. In particular when we are changemakers who spend their days fighting darkness to bring the light back. Anger is our fuel! But we don’t have to run on that fuel full time, beautiful souls.
We also gotta bring love back to create change and move towards our goal. To succeed, we gotta fill our cups with love, positivity and joy. If you want to build a brighter future, you gotta learn how to be intentional with your emotional state and you gotta learn how to add joy to your life.
In that blog post, I will share with you simple tools to support you in adding more joy to your life. Read it until the end, pick one tool, try it and see how it works for you.
How To Add Joy To Your Life? Practice Gratitude!
Breaking news, your brain is made for survival! So it is built to notice the “bad”, more than the “good”. That’s why you can easily sink into negativity, pessimism and overly worry about what could go wrong. If you want to live a happier life, you gotta rewire your brain, aka: train it to focus on the positive.
Practicing daily gratitude is a good exercise to focus on what’s going well in your life and in our world. In the morning or at night, make it a ritual and say out loud three things you are grateful for. There are always three things, I promise and they can be simple. I am often grateful for my healthy body, my family who loves me and the songs of the birds in the early morning. Or even a cup of coffee!
Celebrate Yourself To Add Joy To Your Life
Another way to add joy to your life is to celebrate yourself because if you do feel happy about who you are, it will be easier to bring joy to your life. When you see what you do well instead of where you are lacking, it gives you a better image of yourself.
I love and practice two exercises to celebrate myself. Daily, at the end of the day, I write three of my wins down. What did I do well today? Again, that can be as simple as: “I smiled to someone on the street, spreading love and joy.”
You can also start a success journal, where you will reflect on your week. Journal about what you succeeded at. What did you do well as a changemaker for our world? And how did you achieve that result so you can add more of what worked.
Start A Joy journal
Sometimes, when our lives are so busy with actions, to do lists and reasons to fight, we forget what brings us joy. The point is then to figure it out so we can add more of it.
Keep a journal close to your bed and every night before sleep, make a note of what brought you joy that day. Do that for a week and after those 7 days, notice the patterns coming up around the feelings of joy. Any resistance? What brings you joy? How can you add more of it?
Catch the negative thoughts
Each time you feel low, look at the thoughts that are going on in your mind. Write them down, all of them, freely. It’s ok if they are dark, nobody but you will read them. Forgive yourself for these thoughts, it’s ok! There is nothing wrong with you for being negative, it’s just the nature of your mind and years of conditioning.
Than, bring the thoughts to enquiry. Take your thoughts one by one and ask yourself: “Is that true”? and find counter exemples. That should bring some perspective.
If you need help to start with mindfulness and gaining awareness of your thoughts, start a meditation practice. I love using insight timer to meditate.
Tap Into The Feelings
Ok, that might sound a bit crazy but I promise that it does work. When you want to add more joy into your life, it’s always good to generate it from the inside out. No emotions are created by external factors. Yes, external situations trigger them but they are already present inside. So look inward! Are you sure there is no joy within you right now? Can you bring a joyful memory back? Feel into that, focus on that, make that little joy flame grow, let the feeling expand.
So here we are, I shared with you five tools so you know how to add joy to your life. Again, that is so crucial as an activist, a changemaker, an ethical business owner or an ecowarrior. The future of the world relies on you and your ability to take care of yourself first so you can then have the capacity to move your cause forward.
If you enjoyed those tools and that you feel like you need a deeper level of support and guidance to bring joy back to your life, know that I would love to support you. My 1:1 life coaching container for changemakers is designed to go deep into your emotional, mental and somatic state so we can create long lasting inner change that will uplevel your life and your activism game. Learn more about the container here and if you already know that you gotta start adding joy into your life RIGHT NOW, you can apply here so we’re sure that container is a good fit.
