Episode 047: Live Happier Through the Holidays Part 3 Joy
Part 3 of 6 Living Happier Through the Holidays: Joy
Links Mentioned:
Send a Handwritten Letter: MoreLoveLetters.com
+ Read the Transcript
Hey there! I'm so happy to have you here. I'm on the third part of my Live Happier Through the Holidays series. If you've missed episodes one and two, you can go back and listen to episodes 45 and 46. They're not in any particular order; it's just each week, I have a different theme. This week we're getting into joy, and I think that joy is a crux of the holidays. It's something that we want to be feeling throughout the holidays. Unfortunately, we don't always feel joy. I'll be talking more about that in the upcoming episodes, but we're concentrating on joy this week.
Everyone says to me, "I want to be feeling more joyful, and I want to feel happier." To feel joy and to feel happiness, we need to be intentional. Every single day we need to be intentional. Not just looking for gratitude or looking to be positive, but, intentionally, trying to find joy in our lives. I have some ideas that I'm going to throw at you, but I also want you thinking, as you move through this week, where do you find your joy? What are the things you do that give you joy? What're the ideas and places where you can add more joy to your life?
Here are some of the ideas that bring me joy and bring people I know joy and might be a place for you to tap into the joy of the holidays. My first one is, throwing a dance party. I love to dance, personally. It's my thing. Often we think we have to have some big event, a wedding, or a party, or someplace to be dancing. You can dance in your kitchen. You can dance in your living room. Put on some Christmas music or just regular old dance music and throw a dance party. Grab your kids or your cat or your husband or whoever and let out some fun and joyfulness of dancing. Just throw yourself a dance party.
Along those same lines is the idea of planning a family game night or a silly movie night. We need to be intentional about gathering our family around us. We are all busy and running from thing to thing. Planning ahead of time, we are going to be doing this event and having this time. We always have these ideas of stuff we want to do around the holidays, but we never really make a plan. We talked about that in the first week of really being intentional. This week we're implementing that plan. What is some of the stuff you want to do that brings you joy? For me, I want this year to be about enjoying some of the Christmas lights. Our zoo does a big wild lights event. I want to go to that this year. I want to walk along our downtown riverfront and enjoy the lights. To get Christmassy and embrace that holiday period with my spouse and enjoy being outside and be in that moment.
It's not just about planning the event. It's about being present in the moment when we plan the event. We may decide, "Oh. I want to go look at Christmas lights." Then, we go to look at the Christmas lights, and we're so busy thinking about how many gifts we still need to buy that we're not present to the Christmas lights. That's hard to find joy when you're not present. If you decide to do a family game night or a silly movie night, or a Christmas movie night, to be present at that time where everyone's gathered around and your laughing and being joyous, that's where joy comes from. One of the pieces we miss about joy is we're not present to joy. We are always, in our heads, onto the next thing or onto the drama that's taking place around the table. We're not present to our joy.
Another idea for adding more joy into your life is making a date with someone who brings you joy—spending time and being intentional about finding that person. Maybe it's your spouse (hopefully, if you have a spouse, they bring you joy), maybe it's your kids or your aunt or a relative or your best friend. I don't care. A co-worker. It doesn't matter. Make a date with someone who brings you joy and savor time with them. Get a cup of coffee or a cup of hot chocolate. Look at Christmas lights or go out to dinner. It doesn't matter, but be intentional and make a date with someone who brings you joy. That's such an easy one. We miss these opportunities for joy. To be savoring that time with that person.
My next tip in bringing joy is to write a handwritten letter. You take some time, again, we're into that savoring and write a handwritten letter to someone. You could write to a service person. You could write to a friend or a co-worker, your mom or your dad, letting them know how much you care about them or even if this person isn't even around anymore. If they're gone, and you're missing them during the holidays. Writing a letter to them, letting them know how much you miss them, can tap into that grief, but it can also tap into the joy of the memories of having that person around.
In the show notes above, I'm also going to be including a link to a wonderful website called moreloveletters.com. Every day they have a story of someone who needs a handwritten letter and then the address of where you can send that letter. This is a brilliant idea to bring more joy into someone's life, simply by writing a letter. Check out the show notes, and you can find a link to this moreloveletters.com program, which is amazing and a wonderful way of bringing in more joy.
My final tip, which is really about dealing with stress, sometimes joy is hard to come by when we're running from thing to thing to thing, and we're having a hard time staying in the moment. For me, letting out a big sigh, just one big deep sigh, allows me to release some stress. It allows me to be present. I find myself, during the holidays, letting out a lot more deep sighs than other times, which is fine. Just allowing your body to completely relax and letting out that deep sigh gives our bodies some more oxygen and a chance to regroup and a chance to tap into that joy. Letting out a sigh is my weekly ritual challenge for the week of joy, but it's a way for you to tap into, "How can I be more joyful?" One of those ways is recognizing when you're stressed and taking a counteractive measure to that.