5 Ways To Live With More Joy Everyday

Wishing you could experience more happiness, laughter, and joy in your life? Yea, me too! That’s why I recorded a podcast on 5 ways to live with more joy. Things to add to your everyday.  

Joy and happiness. I used to think there was something different about the two. That joy held some divine power over happiness. That happiness was fleeting, a moment feeling rather than a lasting emotion.

I thought happiness was a quick joke on the radio, snuggles with my girls, date nights in watching Netflix and game nights with friends. Joy, on the other hand, I struggled with. I thought joy was just a desire emotion, lifestyle, feeling that I always wanted but failed to achieve.

Instead, I found myself so caught up in fear and anxiety, frustration and disappointment that I couldn’t even grasp how you could achieve such a sought after thing.

What’s funny is that joy isn’t some fleeting thing, here one moment and gone the next. Joy isn’t some supernatural power and it’s not a divine calling. Joy is there, right now and always. It’s been there the entire time but fear and worry have just blinded me from seeing it.

Now I know the truth if you want more joy you just choose to get it, feel it and live it. On the podcast today I’m sharing 5 ways to experience more joy in your everyday.

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what is joy?

Joy is happiness and happiness is joy. They’re the exact same thing with the same feelings, emotions, and actions to back it up.

My mind has blown.

I’m still soaking this in as I’ve always believed that joy came straight from Heaven like a call that some got and others didn’t. Okay, maybe not that extreme but I really did struggle with grasping joy, wondering when I too could get a taste of it and questioning if only a few in life actually experienced it.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Joy is happiness and happiness is joy.

Of course, there is some divine intervention that helps you to experience more joy but this takes accepting. Accepting that Jesus, the hope of eternal life and being eternally forgiven without working brings joy. Because in Jesus there is hope of a better life. A place with no more pain, tears, suffering or loss.

While anyone can experience joy in their every day, Jesus can bring it to a new level and new heights.

my joy

Now that I’ve fully been able to grasp that happiness and joy are the same things I can start to grasp how to get more joy. As I’ve put this into practice, I’ve realized that good emotions can knock out bad emotions. Choosing more positivity crowds out the negativity.

On the podcast, I give you five ways to experience more joy.

Then it just boils down to making a list of what joy is to you. Here is what joy is to me.

• Joy is family hikes
• Joy is snuggling in bed
• Joy is a hot bath
• Joy is a good book
• Joy is friendship
• Joy is a midday text from my husband
• Joy is nature
• Joy is working out with my friends
• Joy is my community group
• Joy is my dad’s breakfast
• Joy is the laughter of my kids
• Joy is my kid’s knock-knock jokes {that aren’t even funny}
• Joy is recognizing how deep Jesus loves us
• Joy is journaling
• Joy is creating
• Joy is shopping dates with my mom
• Joy is my quirky sister
• Joy is my extended family, who isn’t even family and become family
• Joy is this community
• Joy is being able to run
• Joy is good, wholesome food
• Joy is…..

what is your joy?

Start making a list, mine could continue for hours but I didn’t want to bore you. Once we stop looking at joy as a fleeting thing we may never be able to achieve and start to recognize joy as a choice we can make, it changes things.

Then we can still have joy and live in joy even though hard things are around. We can still find joy in death, in an unhealthy weight, in hard diseases and bad days. Joy can be found in changing the one-millionth diaper, in our kids fighting, in the scary low bank account.

We can find joy in the storm, in the rain, and in the sunshine.

We can find joy through it all.

The question becomes, what brings you joy? Start making your own list and even write ways you’ve seen joy in the storms. Joy comes from remembering, seeing and believing that joy isn’t something we have to chase but something we get to live.

In fact, joy is what we’ve been called to live.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

What does your joy list look like? Fill in the blank – joy is…..

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