Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Joy: Why You Need It and How to Get It | Ingrid Fetell Lee

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

The hidden influence that your surroundings can have on your happiness. And how to tweak things in subtle but powerful ways.Today’s guest is Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. She is the former design director at IDEO and the founder of the website The Aesthetics of Joy. She holds a Master’s in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and a Bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing from Princeton University. This is the second installment in a three part series we’re running called, Mundane Glory about learning not to overlook the little things in your daily life that can be powerful and evidence-based levers for increased happiness. For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/In this episode we talk about:The physiological and psychological benefits of joy How to find joy in tangible objects and sensorial experiencesWhat Ingrid means by “faux joy”How joy can intersect with many emotions including sadness and aweHow to change your environment, at work and at home, to infuse it with joyA practice she calls, “Joy spotting” Her list of, “The 50 Ways to Find More Joy Everyday” The importance of noticing your killjoys The risks of being visibly joyful And how even on your worst day, joy can be accessible themightyfix.com/happierFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/ingrid-fetell-leeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How are we doing? Here are some compelling data points from scientific research. Small moments of joy throughout your day can reset your body's stress response, make you more productive, make you more cognitively flexible and creative, and improve your relationships. TLDR joy is not a frivolous extra, it's a non-negotiable when it comes to human thriving. But there are so many questions, of course.

What is joy? Exactly. What's the difference between joy and happiness? And how do you get joy? My guest today comes with a ton of practical strategies for integrating joy into your daily life. Ingrid Fatel Lee is the author of Joyful, the surprising power of ordinary things to create extraordinary happiness, she's the former design director at IDO and the founder of the

website, The Aesthetics of Joy. She holds a Master's in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute, an Bachelor's in English and Creative Writing from Princeton. In this conversation, we talked about the physiological and psychological benefits of joy, how to find joy in tangible objects and sensorial experiences, what she means by faux joy, how joy can intersect with other seemingly unrelated emotions such as sadness and awe, how to change your environment both at work and at home to infuse it with joy. A practice she calls joy spotting. Her list of the 50 ways to find more joy every day,

the importance of noticing your kill joys, the risks of being visibly joyful, which apparently has some downsides, and how even on your worst day, joy can actually be accessible. This is episode two of a three-part series we're doing called Monday in Glory. It'sidence-Based Look at how to squeeze more juice out of your daily life, how to derive happiness from the everyday stuff you might otherwise overlook.

On Monday, we did an episode on the Science of Art and Athletic Experiences. If you missed that, go check it out. It was really eye-opening for me. Today, it's joy, and then coming up on Monday in part three, we're going to talk about microdosing awe. Have you been considering starting or restarting your meditation practice? Well, in the words of highway billboards across America. If you're looking for a sign, this is it to help you get started. We're offering subscriptions at a 40% discount until September 3rd. Of course, nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40. That's 10% one word all spelled out. .com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription.

Angry Fetel Lee, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. How did you get interested in joy? Why did that become such a salient subject for you? I was in design school at the time, actually. I wasn't particularly interested in joy. I was interested in sustainability, in designing, ergonomic things. And I was at my first year end review and a professor said,

your work gives me a feeling of joy. It was looking at all these things I had created over the course of my first year of design school. And I thought, that's weird. Because I always thought of joy as this thing that we find inside of ourselves. It's this very ephemeral, very fleeting thing. And so how could that come from stuff? And it was a panel of professor standing in front of me. I asked them and they couldn't answer the question. And that was really what started me on this path of being curious about joy, because it was something that I had somehow done by accident I hadn't intended to. And now I really wanted to understand how that happens. What kind of stuff were you making that was provoking so much joy?

I had these little stools that kind of wobbled. They were designed to test your balance or designed to help you work on your balance. They were made out of foam. I had a lamp that was inspired by starfish. So it had all these arms to help you position it. It was for crafters. So I was always thinking about the practical side of things, testing your balance and having something

that would be the exact right position light for a crafter. And what they were seeing was, this is whimsical. This makes me feel good. On a definitional tip here, what's the difference between joy and happiness in your view? Yeah, we use those terms interchangeably a lot in our culture, but they actually mean different things. So, happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It has to do with things like whether we feel like we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, how connected we feel to other people, how we feel about our work, right?

There are so many different things that go into that complex equation of happiness in any given moment. But joy is much simpler and more immediate. And when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive motion. And that's something that we can measure through direct physical expressions, things like smiling and laughter and a feeling like you wanna jump up and down.

So sometimes I find that happiness can be a little bit big because there are so many things that go into it. And sometimes you feel like your work is going great, but you're having problems with your family. And so you're kind of, like, where am I exactly? There are very few moments in life when everything is going exactly as you want it to be. But joy is something that you can find even when things in your life are going great, because these little moments of joy are always available to us.

And your argument is that, or part of your argument is that if we build up enough joy, we can get what you call like a halo effect that would ladder up to happiness. I think it's like a feedback loop. That's the way I like to think about it, is that you have these little moments of joy, and they cause all sorts of changes. So we know that, for example, little moments of joy are helpful in resetting the body's stress responses. So they help make us resilient over the long haul.

They help reset things like blood pressure, heart rate, elevated cortisol. Those things recover more quickly when we have a tiny experience of joy. We know that small moments of joy make us more productive. Some studies show that we're up to 12% more productive in a state of joy. We know that small moments of joy help open our minds. They make us more cognitively flexible and creative. They help deepen our relationships. When couples experience moments of joy together, they increase the sense of trust and intimacy in their relationships. So all of these little things happen as a result of these small moments of joy. And it's not necessarily to say that it's just like marbles in the jar.

You're just adding it up and then one day you're happy. But rather that there are these changes happening in your life as a result of seeking out these smaller moments of joy that build to those deeper and bigger factors that contribute to our happiness. Let's just go back into the benefits of joy because a lot of what you said there is really interesting and I don't want to let it just slide by. I didn't catch everything in your list but in my notes in front of me based on your work. I have on the list of benefits bringing you into the here and now, broadening your mind, attracting other people, improving your health, and then,

of course, the notion of joy, beginning more joy. Right. So, we can take a few of those and go a little bit more deeper. So, improving your health, I mentioned that it helps to reset the cardiovascular responses to stress. That's a really big one because that's a big contributor to our long-term well-being. But there's also research to show that little moments of joy influence our immune system for the better. That people are less likely to catch a cold. So they've done studies where they have exposed people to cold viruses after they've been

prompted with a, you know, a small moment of joy. And they find that people who are in that joyful state of mind are less likely to catch a cold than people who have not been exposed to that little moment of joy. So we can see that joy can contribute to both in the moment well-being and then be a contributor to our long-term well-being as well. The attraction thing is really interesting too. Studies show that when we are in a state of joy, we are more magnetic, we're actually more physically attractive to others. So scientists take these computer generated faces and they show them to people,

there are pictures of people who are smiling and people who just have stony faces. And when they compare them side by side, they compare average looking faces to computer generated faces that are supermodel, good looking. People, of course, say that the really good looking faces are the more attractive ones. But when they take the supermodel faces and they make them neutral expression, and then

they take the average looking faces and they make them smiling, people actually say that the smiling average looking faces, the joyful average looking faces, are more attractive. So we're more drawn to people in a state of joy. And it makes sense because our emotions are contagious. If we know on some unconscious level that we're going to catch the emotions of the people around us, that makes sense that we're drawn toward people

who are exhibiting and expressing joy. It's a solid case for joy. And your argument, again, you'll correct me if I'm mistating it, is that we can get this joy from physical objects. It doesn't have to be from intangible inner insights or anything like that. It can be actually from the sock that you just put over your microphone to improve the sound, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the way that I've come to see it is that so much of our experience of the world is sensorial. It's the things that we interact with every day, the things we touch and smell and hear and see, and these things are influencing our mood on a deep level, whether or not we realize it. And I think even so many of the things that we think of as intangible have a tangible component. So we think about our loved ones and that seems like love seems like a very intangible source of joy. But the smell of your child's hair, the way that they feel when they snuggle up next you, those are physical experiences.

And so for me, this work is really about calling attention to the things that we can see and touch, the things that are in our surroundings, that we can use to buoy our spirits on a regular basis. It's interesting. You said this before that that this runs contrary to some of our cultural conditioning. I mean, even in Buddhism, as you've pointed out in your writing, you know, Buddhism, Buddhism were taught that happiness comes through non-attachment. So how is it that physical things to which we can become attached on one level or another can be such an important source of joy and by extension happiness? For me, a lot of it comes back to this idea that we're just not here for very long. And so much of what brings us joy is

deep, rich experience of the moment while we're here. And so the more that we engage with the sensory things that are around us, the more we engage with what the light felt like and what the smell was in the air when we were having a particularly joyful experience or memory. The deeper I think those things sink into our being, the more joy that we are able to feel from them.

I used to think that those were kind of opposed. The idea of finding joy from something tangible was opposed to the idea that joy is intangible and that we're supposed to practice non-attachment. I think we can practice non-attachment while still soaking in all of that experience. I don't know if you feel that way, but to me, I think you can be entirely present for it while recognizing that at the end of the day,

we can't take any of this with us. It reminds me of a story that I've heard my friend who's a great, not only a great psychiatrist, but also a great author. His name is Dr. Mark Epstein. He's written a bunch of books about the overlap between modern psychology and ancient Buddhism. And he has a story about going to see this great Buddhist master over in Asia. His name was, I believe, Ajahn Cha, Thai, forest master. And they asked Mark and his compatriots. I think they were young at the time, quite young, traveling in Asia. And they asked Ajahn Cha, who's no longer with us to give them a teaching.

And I guess my apologies to Mark from mangling this story, but he reached over. Ajahn Cha did and grabbed like a glass or something like that off the shelf and said, I love this glass. It's beautiful. But to me, it's already broken. You know, if I dropped it on the ground, it would break in a thousand different pieces. But I relate to this thing that gives me joy through the lens of impermanence that it's already broken and everything's already broken.

But I enjoy it while it's still here. I thought at least that's what I took from it as the moral. I'm rambling now, but does that rhyme with the point you were trying to make? I think so. I think if it's already broken on some level, it's also always whole. Does that make sense? Like, if it once was whole, then it can always be whole in your memory, in your experience of it. And so, I think, for example, for many parents, the analogy is like, your child is constantly growing and changing. And there is this constant joy in watching what they are becoming and loss of who they were. And you can look at photos from a year ago and think,

oh my God, they were so small, they were so precious, I miss that. And if we get bogged down in the loss of that, then we're just in a constant state of mourning, whereas if we recognize that I will always have that one year old, I will always have that two year olds because I was so present to it at the time that I really let it sink in and I really experienced the joy of it. I think that's my approach. To me, not the tweak your approach your approach is your approach and I want to learn much more about it, but I guess the way I think about it is just a slight tweak on that. I think what Ajahn Chow was saying was it's not so much about memory

as it is extracting the joy from an object right now while not being attached because you realize nothing lasts. So it's very much right now and not about like I'll always have this because there's no always. Right, that's true. That's true. I suppose it depends on how much weight you want to put on memory. But I definitely, I think where we are aligned is in this idea that the joy of the moment is so profound

and so available if you are attentive to it. Yes, I want to get pretty seriously tactical with you in a minute or two about how do we access this joy. But let me ask some sort of questions on a higher altitude for a minute. One thing that you make clear is that you are not talking about what you call foe joy. What is foe joy? I think when people think about joy, often they have in their minds this idea that it's all circus colors and it's very bubblegum and a little cheesy, a little twee. And I think that can be a part of it. But joy encompasses so many different kinds of experiences in our lives. It doesn't have to be the sort of always put on a happy face idea that we've come to associate

with joy. And I think it's really important this idea that has entered the mainstream now about toxic positivity. When I talk about joy, I'm not talking about this idea that you have to be happy all the time or that you have to find joy all the time. Joy is something that ebbs and flows. It comes and goes in waves. That's how we're wired biologically to feel our emotions. So we're not made to feel joy all the time and we shouldn't force ourselves to feel it. This is more about creating the conditions so that we can find joy more often

as opposed to forcing it or smiling our way, faking our way to joy. I hear a lot in there. One thing that's just coming to mind as I listen to you is like back when you said it doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns, like I can get joy looking at, you know, art that is dark or listening to music that is dark or looking at a Rembrandt of a Stormy Sea. So it's not necessarily the same sort of joy I might get if I look at something stereotypically joy-provoking. And yet it is real dopamine. For sure, the way that I conceptualize it is that joy can intersect with many different emotions.

And so there is the classical pure unfettered joy, the maybe more childlike version of it. But sometimes joy intersects with sadness and we have this feeling of bitter sweetness, right? The Japanese Manonou Owarai, this idea that you're experiencing something joyful that you know is going to pass in the moment, what you feel when you look at the cherry blossoms,

you can feel how fleeting they are as the petals drift off the trees. Sometimes joy can intersect with awe, and we feel this sense of joy and power at the same time. And it's almost a sense of the sublime. There can be a touch of darkness in it. So sometimes things can feel conflicting. And actually, those conflicting emotions are really interesting, especially for anyone who does anything creative in their lives because there's research to show that when we experience conflicting emotions at the same time, it actually stimulates our creativity. And the reason is that when two emotions that don't feel like they go together coincide, it tells the brain that something weird is happening. And when something weird is happening,

the brain needs to get into a mode of figuring out novel solutions. So it primes us to look for unusual explanations, be more flexible, be more open-minded and are thinking to the idea that something different is happening. That's super interesting. An important word for you, as I understand it, is aesthetics.

I wonder if you could define that because I think it will play into some of the rest of the discussion. When we hear the word aesthetics often, we think about art and about beauty, but aesthetics comes from a much simpler root, comes from the same root as the Greek word, asthenimae, which means I feel, I sense, I perceive. So when I use the word aesthetics, what I really mean are sensations. And so when we talk about, I use the term aesthetics of joy, the sensations of joy. When I'm talking about aesthetics as a designer,

I'm not just talking about what makes something beautiful, I'm talking about specific sensory qualities that bring out the feeling of joy in us. And that can happen on a range of different levels. So that can happen on a very personal individual level. You see something that reminds happen on a very personal individual level. You see something that reminds you of a childhood friend or a place that you loved when you were younger. That's a very individual personal feeling of joy and that might not resonate for someone else.

Someone else could see the exact same thing and not feel anything. Then we have cultural aesthetics of joy. We have things that broad groups of people recognize as joyful based on where they grew up. And what a lot of my work relates to is universal aesthetics of joy. So things that the world over seem to bring joy, seem to elicit this feeling of joy. And my work tries to understand why those things, why are certain things so consistently joyful across lines of age and gender and ethnicity, why do we see these things pop up again and again?

That will teach us a little bit. What are those things and why do they seem to work? Okay, well let me take a step back. So after that review, when I was in design school, I thought, okay, I need to understand what are these roots of joy? What are these seeds of joy that we can use to design it?

And so I started asking people about the things in places that brought them joy. And I noticed that certain things came up again. And again, there were things like bubbles and cherry blossoms and tree houses and rainbows and rainbow sprinkles, polka dots. There were certain things that seemed to just anywhere you go in the world, they caused joy. And so I started pinning pictures of them up on my studio wall and looking at them.

And every day I would just try to make sense, but I would move them all around. And then one day I noticed all these patterns. The first one I noticed was round shapes. So so many of the things that we see bring joy the world over are round. You can think of bubbles and balls and balloons, ferris wheels and merry go rounds, hula hoops.

So many of the objects of childhood, in fact, are round. Also pops of bright color are joyful, the world over. We see celebrations associated with joy. We also see in children's drawings that they use bright colors to represent joyful scenes, and they use dark or deep colors like brown and black and purple to represent sad or angry scenes. Another one is elevation or lightness. You see that a lot in language where we talk about feeling light-hearted, feeling heavy-hearted. So joy has a spectrum, a vertical spectrum. It goes up and sadness goes down. We also see things like abundance, a sense of abundance and multiplicity or variety. It's like the kid in the candy store feeling. So you can think of, you know,

walking into a candy store and just seeing so many different things, we get that little sense, this little rush of joy. But you can also see that in things like polka dots, which are repeating pattern. So often when we see repeating patterns, those things bring joy. And then also symmetrical shapes. So a sense of symmetry and balance is often joyful. You can think of hunting for stones on the beach and you find a perfectly symmetrical rock. That's always something to remark on, even though there are probably many of them out there,

but it just feels like this burst of joy. So those are the kinds of things I notice and those are the things I call the aesthetics of joy, and altogether identified 10 of them, and they're kind of like a palette that we can use to start not just noticing more joy in the world around us, but then putting more joy back into our surroundings. Your initial question was,

why do these work so reliably across so many different cultures? Do you have a sense of what is it about circles or symmetry or color that seems to do it for us? Well, all of the explanations we have are going to be speculative because they're evolutionary, right? So we can't go back in time and know exactly why we have this universal preference, but there are some clues. So for example, if you look at round shapes, there are studies where neuroscientists have placed people into FMRI machines and they've shown them pictures of angular objects and round ones.

And what they find is that a part of the brain called the amygdala associated with fear and anxiety. It lights up when we look at angular objects and it stays quiet when we look at round shapes. And so the researchers speculate that because sharp angles could be dangerous to us in nature, we evolved in unconscious sense of caution around these shapes and curves naturally set us at ease. So it makes sense that when we're around curves,

we feel relaxed, we feel easeful, we feel playful, we can move toward those shapes, whereas angles we have to be on our guard. So my overall view is that these aesthetics signify things that over the course of our evolution were beneficial to our survival and our thriving. So bright colors were often signs of nutrients or energy, even though now if I see a bright yellow mini-cooper,

I can't eat that. It's not going to give me physical sustenance, but it's tapping into the same circuits in my brain. It's giving me this sense that there's energy there. There's vitality there. A sense of abundance in the environment is a kind of lushness. It's a sense that this environment has enough going on to help me survive as opposed to being bare and barren and a place that I'm not going to be able to survive.

So there are certain circuits, and some of these are outdated, right? They don't necessarily apply in the modern era, but many of them still hold true. Coming up, Ingrid Fattel Lee talks about how to change your physical environment to include more of the aesthetics of joy. How certain built environments can negatively affect vulnerable populations. How optimizing your environment for joy can make you more productive, and a practice she calls joy spotting. So let's get practical now. How do I take these insights that you've just shared with us and put them to work in my daily life? these insights that you've just shared with us and put them to work in my daily life. One of the things that I found in the course of my research is that the built environment is often pretty stripped of these aesthetics of joy. A lot of that has to do with

modernism and the movement to strip things back to remove ornamentation, remove decoration. This was philosophy of the modernist designers and architects. They believed in using bare materials and very geometric forms. And so a lot of the things that we find in the natural environment that are so joyful, a sense of lushness, a lot of sensorial variety when you're out in nature. You hear a lot of little sounds, you have different air flows, you have a sense of touch and tactility, all kinds of things make a natural environment joyful, and of course lots of color. And we don't have that in a lot of our think of your office environment, your standard gray

cubicles. A lot of our spaces are not built for that. And so there is some work to do to reintroduce these things. And so you can kind of look at your own environment and think, like, is there anything in here that brings me joy? And some of the easiest places to look are color, of course. So if you work in one of those gray cubicles, a bright coffee mug on your desk, a lamp, and a fun color, something textured or soft that you can bring into your space, just thinking about the sensory quality of your space and bringing some of these joyful sensations into it. And your point is that this is not just like frivolous. Not at all, because what's happening as you sit in your office or as you're in your home

is that your unconscious brain is processing all this information and it's coming up with an idea about how your environment feels, how safe or how dangerous, how energizing or how draining your space is. And so the more that you can put some of these little things into your space to give yourself a lift, you're influencing your mood in a very unconscious way in the background. I asked this question out of curiosity, not sort of contrary

ness. Some of these stripped down simple, you might say Zen, although not sure it's a proper application of that word, environments, sometimes they can produce their own kind of minimalist joy too, right? I mean, for example, my wife and I, we now live in the suburbs, and we have a house that's quite modern. It's a big box of glass, and all the furniture is white. It's a big box of glass and all the furniture is white. It's like P. Diddy's summer party. And every time I walk into that room,

it gives me a lot of joy. I love the simplicity, the monochromatic nature of it. But maybe that's because the glass is looking out at all the nature surrounding me and has nothing to do with the white. It's a complicated question. I will say, I think on one level true imagine your space transplanted into buildings all around it, no light coming in and you're just looking

through your glass box at break walls. Yeah. Probably you'd have a different impression. What I will say though is that there are ten aesthetics of joy for reason, and so for example, some people find a ton of joy in transcendence in this idea of elevation, being up high, having a view, lots of light, and it's not really about color. They may not have a huge attraction to bright colors, and so having 10 different aesthetics allows you to construct a space that brings you joy. And by tapping into any of these aesthetics, it's going to be better than if you just left a space bear. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does point well taken. And one of the points I believe you make is that there's some politics here that are often

quoting you back to you here that the most vulnerable people in our society have the most drab environment. For sure, look at hospitals, nursing homes, look at housing projects, look at homeless shelters. We build these spaces either for pure functionality in a utilitarian way, or we build them almost in a punitive way. We build them as if joy is something we have to earn, something we have to do something special to deserve, as opposed to something that helps us thrive, something that we're all entitled to simply because we're human.

And so if you think painting in a color doesn't cost any more than painting in beige. But why do we always paint these spaces, beige? Why do we just use harsh brick and cinder block walls instead of adding just a modicum of something that might bring joy. And so often the reason is because as a society, we believe that joy is some kind of luxury. And we don't feel that it should just be given away for free. And so that I think is a mentality that needs to shift. And it needs to shift in our own individual lives as well, because a lot of us don't feel entitled to joy

unless we've been productive enough, or unless we've eaten the the right foods today or unless we've worked out, right? There's so many things we do to make our joy conditional. And so understanding that joy is actually a signal of thriving, it is not a frivolous extra is essential to actually allowing ourselves to integrate this into our lives. And just to pick up on the point you made about, yeah, we deserve joy once we've been productive or once we've done next Y&Z, I think your point is that the causalities off there, that the joy will help us be productive. You have some factoids. I'll just read them to you. People working in more colorful offices are friendlier, more confident and more alert than people working in

drabspaces, kids who go to schools around a bike color and curves feel happier and safer. So again, it seems like the causality is off there. The causality is absolutely off, and joy is valuable in its own right. We shouldn't have to justify it by saying it's going to make us more productive, it's going to make us more productive, it's going to make us more creative, it's going to make us healthier.

Those are all wonderful outcomes. But I also think there's value in just being able to feel joy. Again, we've started on this path of the practical here. You write a lot about how we can do what you call joy spotting, and you've got a whole list of tactics. Let me just pick a few of them at random and get you to talk about them. The first two on your list are look up and look down. Right, so look up is especially helpful because we know that elevation brings joy and so

often when you look up you see things that are unexpected. Your gaze goes up, that may allow more light into your eye, which also influences your joy on a biological level. It helps regulate your circadian rhythms and your energy levels. So there are lots of good reasons to look up. But they're also often joyful things up there, like birds and things in the tree tops, strange things on rooftops that you wouldn't expect.

So they're often surprises looking up. And the same with looking down, even though looking down doesn't necessarily give you that same sense of elevation. They're often surprising things on the ground. So a lot of joy spotting is about changing your perspective to be able to notice things in your environment that might give you that little spark of joy. So it's about creating the habit of looking at the world through a certain lens to, you know, increase your joy quotient and by extension, you're having this quotient on the regular. Exactly. I think it's a kind of mindfulness practice that is focused specifically on tuning your

attention to the sensory qualities of your environment that bring joy. And it also helps you discover and notice things that might bring you joy. So it's often a great first step. If you feel like joy is kind of gone from your life or you haven't been feeling it lately, I remember a reader of mine told me that when she first heard of the concept of joy spotting, she was very skeptical, but she said, well, it's free, and no one has to know I'm doing it. It's something I can do without having to let anyone know that I might be doing this joy improvement thing.

And she said it did suddenly start to unlock things for her. She did start to notice things. And in her case, it actually helped her understand all sorts of things about her eating habits and things that she had overlooked throughout the years. Yes, there's something about waking up in any aspect of your life that can help you wake up in other aspects of your life. Exactly. So this is a list of 12 tactics for joy spotting. You've got a lot of lists that works for us because we're heavily influenced by Buddhism on the show and there are lots of list of Buddhism. So I don't say that in any way as a criticism, but I don't want to exhaust this particular list. We're

not going to be able to go through all 12. But let me just pick a few other items on the list before we move on to some other lists. One of them you right here is notice the invisible. What do you mean by that? Oh, yes. Okay. So one of the aesthetics of joy is magic. And magic is all about the invisible. It's all about the invisible forces that surround us that we don't take notice of on a regular basis. Things like wind, things like temperature, magnetism, things that are happening around us, these forces that influence our lives, gravity is another one. All of those things are acting upon us, but we're not noticing them. And so when you can notice those things in action, you can notice a

pinwheel spinning or a sail laughing in the wind, or you can hear wind chimes, or you can watch the effects of magnetism. Those kinds of things can be a source of joy. So tuning your senses to notice the invisible is a really fun one. It's interesting because the invisible, even though it's manifesting on physical objects, often these forces we're talking about are laws of nature rather than physical objects. Right. There are laws of nature that act on physical objects. Yes. But they often have an aesthetic component, right? So the wind has a sound and it makes things happen. It makes movements happen. The same with magnetism, magnetism creates movements. So

noticing traces of things that have happened or forces that are acting on things, those are aesthetic traces of sources of potential wonder in our midst. One more item from this list. Use all your senses. Right. So I think so often when we think about aesthetics, people think we're talking about vision, people think we're talking about looking at things because that's how we've been conditioned to see it. And this is just a reminder that joy is a multi-sensory experience and that aesthetics can be in any sense. I mean, in fact, some scientists believe that we have 21 senses, right, that we don't just have five senses. And so I'm always interested in looking at what all of these other senses might be, understanding, for example, the way that the hairs move on your arm when you,

when the wind changes, when you feel air flow or humidity, how do we know that humidity is changed? But we do know that humidity is changed. When we move into, you know, when you walk through a patch of damp air in the city, you feel that, how do we feel that? So noticing all of those different senses can be a really an even deeper way to engage with our surroundings. I keep coming back to this point we landed on earlier about how deep this is. You know, it's easy to write it off as superficial, but the more you can generate mindfulness, self-awareness, being awake, not being on autopilot, not asleep walking, whatever terminology you want to

use, even if it's for something seemingly mundane or simple or superficial, it helps you wake up in a more holistic way to all of the things going on in your life. I think that's true, and I think that it's always a dialogue. You know, the way that it's often conceived is that there's inner and there's outer, and that those two things are, you can either be paying attention to outer trivial material, superficial things, or you can be paying attention to lofty, rational, interior, spiritual things. And for me, so much of my own spirituality is in nature, is in what I see around me

out in the wild. So it's always a dialogue. It might make me think of something or it might move me in a way that is extremely deep and extremely interior. And that might move me to go do something in the world that impacts the world in a way that is not superficial at all And so I think there is a dialogue. There's always a dialogue between those two things In my understanding the Buddha would agree with that he would exhort his students to be mindful internally externally and both internally and externally. I love that Coming up, Ingrid talks about her list of the 50 ways to find more joy every day, shocks about the importance of noticing your kill joys, and the risks of being outwardly joyful.

Alright, here's another list that we're not going to be able to do all of it, but let's do whatever feels right to do. The 50 ways to find more joy every day. I'll let you take the lead here. What are your favorites on this list? I love jumping. I think that's a really good one. Just literally jumping for joy.

The photographer, Philly Paulsman, he was like a celebrity photographer in the 50s, he photographed, you know, everyone from Prince of Wales to Marilyn Monroe to Audrey Hepburn, and he always made his subjects jump. And I love that he did this because the collection of photos that exists as a result is just so wonderful. But the reason he did it is he said that jumping drops the mask. That when you jump, it drops the full mask that we wear and it returns you to this purely joyful state. And so when you look at all these different jump photographs, you see the real

essence of these people who are often so constructed otherwise. So jumping, I think, is a really good one. I mean, if you have a trampoline, even better, but even just jumping up in the air is a great one because it gives you that access to something inside of yourself that you might not even realize is there. All right. What else is on the list? Another one that I love is bring the outside in, get some plants, nature, some even bird song can be a good source of joy that you can bring into your space, the sounds of nature, but research has shown that just having plants in your indoor space can make you more generous, it can restore your ability to concentrate and focus, and of course it brings joy. That's a really simple, really easy

one. So I love that one. Another on your list is move your art around. Yes. So I'm a really big fan of the idea that you don't need to go out and buy things to create more joy. And often just bringing some change into your space, bringing something different into your space by moving things around can help shift your perspective. Every time you come down the stairs, you'll see a different, something different, which will jog you out of your days, right? It's again all about that becoming awake. So things in your surroundings that can help you be more present and moving your art around is a good one. Also on your list and this as the father of an eight year old boy strikes me as highly

highly questionable is to let a kid decorate. You know, I made this list before I had a child. I now have a two year old. So but that said, I do think that allowing children some say in their environment, some influence over their environment can be really powerful. And my son did choose the wallpaper in our kitchen, so he has very good taste. So I think, you know, it's funny when he first chose it, I thought, God, that's too much. It's too bright. I don't know if we can do that.

And we move past it very quickly. And then we came back to it two days before we were supposed to start the project. And it brings us all so much joy. It does have a lot of bright colors. It has red, which is his favorite color. But I think just listening to the ideas that children have for the space can be eye-opening. It can help you see the space

in a different way and in a much more playful way. Wearing bright clothes on a tough day is another one. Yes, so every time you look in the mirror, you'll see something that feels energizing. It's also often a really great conversation starter. So when you're feeling isolated, when you're feeling kind of run down and you wear something bright, even if it's just a bright scar for a bright coat, often that will draw someone to comment

or compliment what you're wearing. It also often acts on people without them realizing it. One of my readers sent in a really great story about how she had toned down her clothes as a new college graduate to fit in to a very serious industry that she was working in. And one day she just decided that she was tired of wearing all these great clothes

and she wore these loud, patterned, brightly colored pants. And she was do that day to visit a really intimidating office where the receptionist was supposedly very scary. All of her colleagues talked about how scary this guy was and how intimidating, how he never cracked a smile and he was so brusque and he was brusque when she walked in. But then he noticed her pants and he was like, wow, did you make those? Those are cool. And he's totally softened.

And from that point on, she had sort of melted the icy front desk guy and it of course made her job much easier every time she then had to go visit that office. But it sort of speaks to this idea that you don't really always know what kind of effect it's going to have on people. And just putting it out there often can be a way to spark joy. Another item on this list of 50 is to sit in the sunshine. Yeah. So sunshine is a powerful stimulant for joy. Of course, you want your sunscreen, but getting bright light has been shown to influence mood for the better.

People who work near sunnier desks have been shown to sleep better at night and are more active during the day. Another study of acute care nurses working on either a very brightly lit ward versus a dimmer one found that the nurses on the Sunnier Ward laughed more spontaneously and had lower stress levels. So sunlight getting out into the sunshine is an easy way to get more joy. Any other of these 50 ways to find more joy

every day that you want to talk about before I move us along? I think we got it. I don't know if there's one specific one. You make good use of my lists. Okay. Well, I give all the credit to Lauren, who's the producer of this episode and prepared me. So you use the term conversation starter when we were talking about wearing bright clothing. And actually, there's a whole list of conversation starters that you created. You call them joyful conversation starters. And so some examples are like, there's a whole list of conversation starters that you created. You call them joyful conversation starters. And so some examples are like, what's a simple pleasure that you never grow tired of or what's your favorite thing in your home?

We can go through more of these. But let me start with a question of like, how did you come up with these? And why do you think it's so important to have them in your arsenal? I started creating a list of joyful conversation starters when a few years back the news was particularly dire and it was before the holidays and I knew people were going home to spend time with their families and I thought let me just put together a list of joyful conversation starters, put it out on our website so that people have something to talk about that gives them a break from talking about the news.

It's important to read the news, it's important to be aware, it's important to talk about those things, and having joyful topics of conversation can help deepen those bonds and help connect us to those people who are going to be our support networks. It's not an either or. And so I started gathering these questions just to give people something to connect with other people on. And a lot of these questions are also helpful journal prompts. So if you are trying to find more joy in your life, feel more connected to this notion of joy, reflecting on some of these questions can be a way to notion of joy, reflecting on some of these questions can be a way to start to understand where that joy went and how to get it back.

Some of the other questions are when you were a child, what adults showed you, what it meant to find joy in life, how do they do it, what something you value or appreciate about someone close to you but haven't told them what something you'd love to wear but are afraid you couldn't pull off. Yes, any of these is likely to get people talking. What's your answer to the question about something you'd love to wear but you're afraid you couldn't pull off? At 22? I've always had a thing for two twos. I don't really live in a place where I think I could pull off a 22 right now but I'm hoping. I'm hoping someday I get invited to some fancy galah type place where I think I could pull off a tutu right now, but I'm hoping. I'm hoping someday I get invited to some fancy galah type thing where I could have kind of a grown up tutu situation.

What's a simple pleasure that you never get tired of? Gardening, being out of my garden, that never gets old. And is this joy spotting, this being available to sources of joy in your environment? Does this constitute the whole of your contemplative life or are you pairing it with other things? Yeah, so I'm a mom of a toddler. So not a lot of time for leisurely yoga practices or things like that. I do journal and I spend a lot of time reading. So those, I think, are things that bring me

into deeper connection with myself. I do weekly therapy and have for a long time. I think that's a really important part of my own growth, movement, physical movement in different forms and being out in nature. I think those are all pieces of it. Joy spotting, I think, is a feeder to so many of those other practices. It's a noticing practice. But I think, of course, you need noticing practices and then you need deepening practices and assimilation practices.

Hey, man. You mentioned journaling and one of the things you write about is a joy journal. And I was interested to see that you argue that you can use a joy journal to connect you not only to joy, but also its opposite, the kill joys. Yeah, kill joys are really interesting because often you learn about something from its opposite, right? And so understanding what are the forces that hold us back from joy can be really powerful. I've come to see that I think most of us start out joyful. I think for most children joy is very close to the surface. And as we get older, we get pressured to grow up and put play aside, focus on work,

be serious. We have a culture that reveres delayed gratification, you know, that classic marshmallow study where the researcher comes in and offers the kid a marshmallow, but if when they go away and come back, if they can wait that long, they'll get another marshmallow, that's like held up as what, the kids who waited for the second marshmallow or the ones who were supposed to be like the most successful in life. So we live this life of delayed happiness,

delayed gratification. That's supposed to be what makes us successful. So we learn to defer our joy. We learn to say, oh, not yet, after that presentation, after I pass that test, after I get through this semester, we learn to push our joy. We learned to say, oh, not yet, after that presentation, after I passed that test, after I get through this semester, we learned to push it off. We also get judged for our joy as we get older. We get ridiculed in middle school for the shoes

that we loved or the music we listened to or the movies we watch. We get ridiculed by our friends. We get ridiculed culturally. Women, for example, are often ridiculed for the things that they find joyful, or they're made to feel less than or dismissed, rom-coms or chick-flicks or romance novels or whatever it is. There are so many genres that appeal specifically to women that happen to be seen as less than. And so there are so many ways

that we become disconnected from joy, either because we're putting it off, or because we're told it's not important, or because we're made to feel ashamed or guilty, right? We file these things under guilty pleasures. That's the thing I do only when I'm alone. That's the thing I wouldn't let anyone see about me. And I think that coming back to joy is about unwinding a lot of that.

And picking up the threads where we lost it. So understanding what kills your joy, if you, for example, get excited about things and there's someone in your life who's always just raining on your parade, or you find that you have that I'll be happy when phrase that runs through your head. I'll be happy when it's perfect. I'll be happy when it's just right. I'll be happy when the timing is just right. Those are good things to be aware of

because those are things that can hold you back from joy. And so noticing what kinds of kill joys you have. I actually have a kill joys quiz that you can take and that will help you sort of pinpoint which of those inner voices is the one that is most salient for you, which one is holding you back from joy the most. So, when you talk about kill joys, it's not necessarily just other people or unpleasant

meteorological phenomena. It can be like your ancient storylines and neuroses that are kill joys as well. For sure, absolutely. I mean, perfectionism can be a kill joy. We can kill joy because we are afraid to lose control. That's a big one. We're afraid to really be in the moment. We're afraid to dance.

We're afraid to let people see us as we really are because we're afraid we'll be rejected or ostracized. So there are lots of different things that are killing our joy. But getting to the root of that, I think, is key because it helps you understand what what deeper work you need to do to allow yourself to feel joy more often. It kind of reminds me of that phrase you used about people jumping before and how it drops the

mask. And it gets me thinking of a point you make that there are risks, there are pitfalls and perils to being outwardly joyful. And you've talked about them a little bit, but I'm maybe worth saying a little bit more about that. Well, when you are outwardly joyful, people can call you frivolous or childish or trivial or self-indulgent. I think because exactly where this conversation started, we do have this misunderstanding that so many of these things that bring joy are trivial or superficial.

That can come from displaying joy through these aesthetics of joy. So color, for example, is often misread as childish. I often tell people that it's helpful to unpack that spectrum between serious and joyful. I think that's a spectrum that a lot of us hold in our heads is joyful on one end and serious on the other and turn it into two spectrums and say that we can be extremely serious and extremely joyful.

And that's something I extremely serious and extremely joyful. And that's something I'm always trying to embody. I mean, often I have my nails painted in rainbow colors. I go to speaking engagements dressed in technical and I'm going to show up with research, with serious research. And those two things are not mutually exclusive. And I think people are free to label us however they want. But our best defense against that stereotype, against that bias that so many people hold is to surprise them

and to show them that those two things are not on the same spectrum, that actually they're not linked. Yeah, reminds me of the Dalai Lama, for example, it was giggling and laughing all the time. It also is, you know, an avatar of compassion. He's tuned in to wherever the suffering is in his environment and doing his best to try to alleviate it. You can do those two things at the same time. Exactly. I started this conversation with you by asking you how you get interested and enjoy

and you told the story about being a student and a design school. So just curious, how many years have gone by since then and what changes have been brought in your life as a consequence of this investigation? It's been almost 15 years since that first moment. And initially, I thought it was going to be a project I would work on for a year.

I thought I would hopefully turn it into a book, but I didn't know. And then I started to work on it and started to research it. And I realized that it was like an ocean, that it was the kind of thing that I could study my whole life. And I've always believed in living my life in terms of questions.

So I focus on a question until the question isn't interesting anymore. And then I try to find some new questions. And this question of what brings joy and how do we bring more of it into our lives has continued to fascinate me. And I think a lot of it is because I've felt the effects in my life. One of the most salient changes for me is that I have stopped asking the question, am I happy? I almost don't ask that question anymore occasionally, but it's not a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask.

I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask.

I have a question that I have to ask. I have a question that I have to ask. I have more of that? It's a much more active engagement with my own emotional well-being because I believe that joy is something we don't just have to find. It's something we can create. And so if it's something we can create, then I have the agency to go out and do that. And so if I'm not feeling joy, I'm not finding joy, I have the ability to go change that. I think that's one that's really powerful. The other is that I never see any day as kind of hopeless.

I think before this work, I used to have a bad day and you kind of feel your bad day spiraling and you just write it off, you're like, oh, this day sucks. I'm just gonna go to bed and start over tomorrow. And now, because I understand that joy comes in moments and it comes in waves and that emotions build on each other and spiral, I always remain open to the possibility of joy,

even when things are a mess. I always, even on the worst days, I remain open to the possibility that there might be five seconds of joy in my day, or there might be five minutes of joy in my day. And that isn't too willfully disregard or tune out the genuine sources of sorrow. If there's a death in the family, somebody's really sick, somebody's lost a job, whatever it is, I'm not hearing you say, like I don't pay attention to that or engage with it. It's just that the two things can exist at the same time. Yes.

I think understanding that joy is in emotion and not this massive state of being, first of all, I'm not trying to hold on to it forever, right? I'm not trying to create this happily ever after where I pin it down and I've got it and now I've got joy and I don't have to go search for it anymore and it's done. It's a continual refreshing and that means that joy can pop up even in the saddest times. I mean, I remember when we were burying my grandmother and my cousin and I were driving through the cemetery and there was a hearse, someone else's hers, and it was, it had an enormous photograph of the deceased covered with the most over the top flowers that you could ever imagine,

and we both looked at it, and my cousin said, that is so not Nana. And the two of us just burst out laughing, and it was at a funeral, it was in the middle of a funeral, and of course we were grieving, and of course we were bereft of course we were bereft and we were able to feel her in that moment of joy and feel we could see the disapproval on her face of that you know because she was so restrained in her aesthetic and it brought us a moment of joy. So the more comfortable we get holding different emotions together, I think the richer

our emotional life and the better we're able to feel joy. Because I think so often one of the reasons why we don't allow ourselves to feel joy is we are afraid of losing it. And so we think, okay, I'm just going to hold it at arm's length because it's going to go. And I don't want to I don't wanna feel this too much because I'm gonna be so hurt or sad or disappointed when it's gone. And understanding that you can feel it even when you're in the middle of loss, I think that is key to allowing yourself to stop bracing so much and actually start feeling it

even when times are good. Is there anything I should have asked you but failed to ask? I don't think so. You are very comprehensive. Really, I mean, I, I, I, I don't think there's anything that I feel we need to talk about other than what you've asked. Before I let you go, can you please remind everybody of the name of your book, anything else you've created in the world that you want the listeners to know about? everybody in the name of your book, anything else you've created in the world that you want the list of her Sonoma.

Sure. My book is called Joyful, the surprising power of ordinary things to create extraordinary happiness. And you can find me at aestheticsofjoy.com. That's my website. And also schoolofjoy.co where we teach courses to help you find and create more joy in daily life. Thank you, Igrid.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanksgrid. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for a great conversation. Thanks again to Ingrid Fatel Lee. Thanks to you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review if you've got a moment that actually really helps us with the algorithms that dictate our success or failure to a crazy extent. Thanks most of all to everybody who worked so hard on this show,

10% Happier is Produced by Lauren Smith, who by the way is the architect of this mundane glory episode, Go Lauren, Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davian, Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor and Kim Uregler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio, and we get our theme music from Nick Thorburn of the band, I-Lens. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus and then on Monday, part three of the Monday and Glory series. And we're going to talk about Mike Vodosing, awe and by the way this is another episode where my wife joined me as a co-host. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey.