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In this episode...

Joy by a Thousand Jolts

https://faithfulontheclock.com/joy-by-a-thousand-jolts

Want to feel more joy that strengthens your faith? Episode 141 of Faithful on the Clock looks at how small, consistent joy experiences can reshape our neurology for better happiness and connection to God.

Timestamps:

[00:04] - Intro

[00:44] - The cultural view and pursuit of big joy experiences

[02:20] - Key neuroscience — many small joy experiences can strengthen the neural pathways involved in feeling happiness, and we don’t need huge joy experiences for that to happen

[03:09] - Why small jolts of joy is realistic for the modern workplace

[04:56] - The Joy Reset principles and how small joy experiences can retrain the brain’s neural architecture

[06:09] - The connection between joy and faith; why neurological training might make it easier to connect to God and religion

[07:16] - Neurology as a physical component of faith

[08:36] - Encouragement to address underlying physical challenges that might interfere with neurological training for joy

[10:27] - Prayer

[11:13] - Outro/What’s coming up next

Key takeaways:

• Contemporary culture — including work — often trains us to seek out big lightning bolts of joy.
• Neuroscience research confirms that emotionally strong events deeply encode, making them more memorable. But we also know that repeated small experiences strengthen neural pathways. This means that the more small joy moments we have, the easier it becomes to access feelings of happiness.
• The way small moments of joy build good architecture in the brain means that we can learn to be resilient even if our work environment isn’t the greatest at offering a lot of big elements to be happy about.
• Dr. MaryCatherine’s book, The Joy Reset, outlines how trauma can block the brain’s ability to access joy. She argues that small, consistent joy experiences can reset the neurological architecture necessary for happiness and resilience.
• Joy and faith intersect. When we intentionally do neurological training toward joy, we might also make it easier to connect to our faith, since joy is a core teaching of Christianity. 
• Neuroplasticity is a long game. We might need to practice intentionally seeking small jolts of joy for many months or even years before we really see results in our brain architecture.
• It’s wise to address potential underlying physical issues that could interfere with building a healthier neurological architecture.

Relevant Links:

• The Joy Reset - Amazon

CTAs:

• Review The Joy Reset to better understand the mechanisms that inhibit our ability to feel joy.
• Practice mindfulness around small jolts of joy by writing down the tiny things that feel good for you through the day. Use your list to increase your awareness about what gives you the most joy and how you can more intentionally seek it out.

What’s coming up next:

Episode 142 of Faithful on the Clock welcomes Mark Struczewski — better known as Mister Productivity — for a look at how we can be productive for the right reasons in our faith.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. I’m Wanda Thibodeaux, your host, and you’ve tuned in to Faithful on the Clock, the podcast for Christian professionals where all the paint in the can mixes to get your faith and work aligned. I cannot wait to do the show today, because we’re talking about joy. This has really become a big passion of mine. But we’re gonna talk about how important it is not to look for big bursts of happiness all the time, but to continuously seek joy by a thousand jolts within our work and personal lives. I can feel the energy of it already, so let’s hit it.

So, to start us off today, you know, we’re coming up on Christmas really fast here. And if I were to ask most of you out there, I’d put money down that you’d tell me Christmas is a season of joy — or at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We see that word — joyful — all over in the seasonal decorations, and in the church, it’s hyped as this big thing that we can be joyful because Christ was born and took care of our sins. Well, of course, yes, Jesus did do that, and that is absolutely a reason to feel happy and for celebration. But my point here is that there’s almost this larger than life perspective to it all, right? Like, it almost feels like we’re just supposed to be over-the-top flooded with positive emotion and, you know, oh, my goodness, it just feels amazing. And if you think about it, that kind of parallels the attitude we have about a lot of material things in life, too. Like, we have that saying, go big or go home, and we seem to have this sense that everything has to be big all the time for it to have any value. And I think a lot of us, you know we are looking for the big joy hits, where — I don’t know, maybe we win the lottery or we land the one-in-a-million deal or something like that. These are like the big hits of happiness lightning that just — wham, they hit us in the face and we can’t believe how lucky we are to be alive. We’re seeking those hits all the time, to the extent that, to me at least, it almost feels like we’re struggling to accept that smaller experiences of joy are worthwhile or matter.

But if we take a look at the neuroscience of this, what we know is that, yes, when we feel something really strongly, whether it’s joy or something else, that makes an experience more memorable. It’s gonna deeply encode. But what we’ve also learned is that neural pathways develop over time. And the exciting part of this is that, when we have many small experiences that trigger the parts of our brains responsible for feeling joy, the neural pathways involved get stronger. So, small moments of pleasure and happiness, the more we have those, the easier it becomes for us to fire those networks. You can actually train your brain to be more able to be happy, and you don’t have to have huge over-the-top moments of euphoria to do it.

Now, why is this so exciting for me? Well, the first big reason is, let’s be a little real, okay? Most of us are not in work that elates us all the time. We are under pressure. We’re navigating deadlines and stuff with coworkers and a million things, right? I mean, some of us out there, I know, you’re all out there like, “The only thing I have to be joyful about right now is that I didn’t get fired in the last meeting.” So, this idea that we can walk into the office and always have access to these huge waves of joy, I just don’t think that’s very realistic. But most of us, if we just look, we do have the small joy experiences. You know, maybe the temperature of our coffee is just right. Or maybe we see somebody being silly on the street outside, or tech support calls us back ahead of when they told us they were gonna call. These don’t build joy pathways in that lightning way. But they do help us build what I’ll call joy by a thousand jolts. It’s a bunch of tiny little zaps, electricity literally moving in our brain to construct our ability to more easily feel happy. And I truly believe that if we look at Philippians 4:8 from a biological lens, that’s why the apostle Paul’s advice to think about good and lovely and, you know, positive things, actually works. The more we put our attention on those things, the more we neurologically build our ability to be joyful, little by little. And it means that even if we’re not in the greatest job, we don’t have to let that steal our happiness. We can intentionally train our brains to be resilient within environments even where there might not be big moments or reasons to celebrate.

Now, just to give this a little deeper credibility, I want to draw your attention to a book by Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald. The book’s called The Joy Reset, and McDonald is a researcher — she specializes in trauma work. And in this book, she basically explains how trauma can block our brain’s ability to feel joy. Now, some of you out there might be like, “Well, what does that matter to me, I didn’t — I don’t have trauma.” And if that’s genuinely true for you, fantastic. But a lot of us, you know, work is really hard. We’re legitimately stressed all the time. And our nervous system still can get conditioned to that and learn that the office is not safe so that we neurologically struggle to feel joy. And the longer we’re in that kind of environment, the more our joy pathways can atrophy while our fear ones build if we don’t do anything about it. And so, in that context, her big point is that it’s these small, consistent moments of joy that allow us to rebuild the neural architecture that allows hope and connection again. You know, we don’t necessarily need the big promotion or to always have these perfect speaking engagements happening. We just need a bunch of little jolts constantly firing through the day.

So, obviously, this has a really amazing potential for good in our jobs and careers. But the second reason I’m really excited is because joy and faith intersect. If you think about the heart of Christianity, it’s built on this idea that God is a joyful God. It’s built on the concept that He loves us and wants to bring us into His Kingdom where there’s no pain anymore. So, if you can’t feel joy, it’s also really hard to feel connected to God and all of these foundational ideas of the Christian faith, right? I can tell you from experience, it distances you, because the core of the Christian environment is so different from what you feel that you can start to feel like you don’t belong or like you’re just not capable of really understanding it somehow. And in the worst-case scenario, I think people can be in that situation and think, “Well, if I don’t feel joy, then a joyful God must not exist. Or if He does, then He just must not care, because I’m miserable and He’s not doing anything about it.”

So, if you’re out there in that situation, my message to you today is that there’s absolutely a biological, physical component to getting reconnected to faith. On a neurological level, we have to get our brain into a condition where it’s capable of feeling and sustaining joy, or we’re gonna hear the Word over and over and be numb to it in a very real way. And the big thing here is that that preparation is an intentional choice. It is an intentional choice to look for joy by a thousand jolts so that those neural pathways build up in the healthy way we need them to. So, I’m really seeing McDonald’s work as a bridge between biology and theology that we can use in a really practical and deliberate way. It’s just the scientific view of what happens when you actually do follow Paul’s Philippians 4:8 advice. And when you think about how joy and faith connect to our ability to maintain hope and be resilient and how mental health connects to overall physical wellbeing and all of that, I don’t think we should underestimate the value of practicing what Paul said. And if we’re going to see our body as a temple for God, it makes perfect sense to me that we would respect Him enough to clean up the place a little and make sure it’s ready for Him.

Now, as we leave the show today, the caution I absolutely have to give here is that neuroplasticity, that ability our brain has to keep shifting these neural pathways, that is a long game, OK? Building any kind of thinking pattern or habit takes time. And I stress that because our contemporary work environment and culture, it really teaches us to want immediate gratification and results. And I know, again from experience, that when you lack joy in your life, the need for relief can make you impatient to feel better. And I do believe that, you know, if God wants to give you this new architecture all at once, He totally can do that. But assuming it is not in His plans to do that for good reasons, this is something that’s gonna take you choosing God over and over again, maybe for months or even years, depending on what you’ve been through and what your individual biology is like. And because every person’s body is a little different, I don’t want anybody out there to compare themselves to anybody else. And you know, if you’re working with a therapist or pastor or a doctor and it turns out there’s a physical problem getting in the way, then please, by all means, address that. Like, some people, they genuinely cannot make enough of certain neurotransmitters, or they’ve got hormonal problems. That is not their fault. There are all kinds of conditions we know can overlap with brain function and mental health. So, please, do not be embarrassed or ashamed if you need that kind of support, OK? I want us to use all the appropriate tools in the toolbox we can, because the way it can change our life to reconnect to God and joy is too valuable to ignore.

So, let’s just close out as always with a moment of prayer.

Lord, staying connected to your joy has honestly been one of the biggest struggles of my life. You know all the reasons why behind that, and You know all the reasons why for everyone listening, too. So, I pray that You’ll give us better vision. Without You, it’s so, so hard to see all the things You’ve put around us to give us those little jolts of joy we need. Help us to be patient as we build the right structure, and comfort us in those moments where we still can’t access joy enough. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.

That’s all I’ve got, listeners. I will of course keep putting plugs out there for you to check out my new book, Grace in the Grind: 52: Devotions for Thriving in the Workplace. Hopefully that can be part of your journey back to joy and give you some encouragement. It’s available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other major retailers, so check out the links in the show notes to get your copy. Our next show is going to welcome Mark Stuczewski, Mister Productivity himself. We’re not gonna give you hacks to do more, but we will share a great conversation about being productive for the right reasons within our faith. I will see you in two weeks, everybody. Be blessed.