Steven Petrow is known for his columns and essays about aging, health, and civility in The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is an award-winning journalist and a contributor to NPR, among other news outlets. His TED Talk, “Three Ways to Practice Civility,” has nearly 2 million views. He’s the author of six previous books, including the bestselling Stupid Things I Won’t Do When I Get Old.
Below, Petrow shares five key insights from his new book, The Joy You Make: Find the Silver Linings—Even on Your Darkest Days. Listen to the audio version—read by Petrow himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. We don’t understand what joy is.
That included me at the outset. Like many, I conflated joy with happiness, its shinier first cousin. Over time, I came to understand that joy is more self-sustaining and gratifying than happiness. Think of happiness as a sugary treat, whereas joy is like a whole wheat muffin. The treat boosts your glucose level, resulting in a sugar high, and then you crash. The healthier muffin is metabolized more slowly, with no big highs or lows, leaving you satisfied for longer.
The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu shared a similar perspective in The Book of Joy. Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as dependent on external circumstances, joy starts within. Happiness is eating a fudge brownie. Joy is making a pan of brownies to share. Happiness is learning you’ve gone into remission or been cured. Joy is holding the hand of a loved one going through a challenging illness, even if they don’t get well.
2. You can cultivate joy.
One of my nicknames is Eeyore, the gloomy donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh series. I’ve long been a half-glass-empty kind of guy. I’ve long felt something was missing from my life. I’ve struggled to feel and be more joyful, sometimes chasing it, sometimes despairing over ever finding it, other times too lost or in the dark to see it right in front of me.
Then, amid the pandemic, a study was published by the University of Michigan showing that a whopping 83% of adults over 50 had felt some or a lot of joy since the beginning of the shutdown. Wow—that number knocked me in the head. One of the study’s researchers, Jessica Finley, acknowledged her surprise at the findings and explained to me that the pandemic is not a monolithic story of decline or loss. People found silver linings in that time and were resilient. She said joy is always present—in our memories, relationships, and within ourselves. I remember telling myself: if the people in this study can find joy in the darkness, I can too.
For starters, it takes a mind shift—becoming more of the outgoing and cheerful Tigger from the world of Winnie-the-Pooh rather than Eeyore. At least, that’s what many of the experts I interviewed told me. They included psychologists, social scientists, religious leaders, and ethicists. Shifting perspective can help us see anew. This starts with creating an awareness of the good things in our lives. If you’re at all like me, it’s much easier to focus and obsess over challenges, troubles, or failures. However, when I began making a conscious effort to focus on the positive, I began to see myself differently. I began to see my relationships differently. Sometimes, even the larger world around me looked different, more hopeful.
Scholars like Robert Emmons, a psychologist whose work is in the field of positive psychology, have produced a body of research supporting how we can change our mindsets. Rather than let my awareness of the bright and beautiful evaporate, I followed the advice of Emmons. He suggests keeping a record, such as a daily gratitude journal. When I first started my gratitude journal, I feared I’d come up empty-handed, but even on the day my father died, I found three things to jot down in my little brown notebook: the support of my siblings, the peace I hope my father had found, and the chocolate ice cream the neighbors brought over.
The most important step, however, is sharing your gratitude. Like saying thank you to the person who holds a door open for you. Calling a friend to tell them why you’re grateful for them. Or just doing something for someone, like baking muffins, buying flowers, or sweeping their steps.
3. Sharing joy can have unexpected consequences.
Several years ago, I was waiting in line at my favorite bakery for my favorite pastry, a peach scone. On this Sunday, I joined a long line that reached the sidewalk. Finally, with just one person ahead of me, I noticed that only one peach scone remained. I heard the woman in front of me say, “I’ll have a chocolate croissant.” Relieved, I quickly advanced and pointed to the lone scone, saying, “I’ll take that.” Not one second later, the stranger behind me, a cyclist wearing tight Lycra shouted, “That’s my scone! I’ve been waiting in line for 20 minutes.”
I stood there for what seemed an eternity but didn’t claim ownership or tell him to piss off. Instead, after that pause, I turned, looked him in the eye, and asked, “Would you like half?” I shocked myself. I had been practicing the technique of taking what’s sometimes called the sacred pause, which is meant to help a person who has been provoked to wait and settle before speaking. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield once explained, “In a moment of stopping, we break the spell between past result and automatic reaction. When we pause, we can notice the actual experience, the pain or pleasure, fear, or excitement in the stillness. Before our habits arise, we can become free to act wisely.”
Once I’d made my offer to the scone cyclist, I saw befuddlement cross his face. He took a moment before responding (a pause of his own) and accepted my proposal. He sweetened the deal by buying another pastry so we could share both. We took our goods and sat on a nearby bench, where we chatted for about half an hour. At first blush, I’d say we had nothing in common, but that would be wrong. He had woken up early, hoping to get to the bakery before the scones ran out but had a flat tire on the way. I realized we had shared a sweet moment of connection, but more than that, we’d recognized each other. By that, I mean we saw and listened to each other. Instead of saying, would you like half? I might as well have said you matter.
4. Joy is contagious.
At the bakery, I experienced a helper’s high, or what Melanie Rudd, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Houston, calls the boost we get from being kind. Rudd told me that once we experience that high, we want more of it. As she wrote in Scientific American, volunteer work is associated with more joy and less depression. Even people who spend money on others rather than themselves experience greater feelings of joyfulness.
I remember waiting to buy coffee the week before my scone-sharing interaction. The customer in front of me told the barista, out of nowhere, that he’d pay for my beverage. He told me he just does that occasionally because it makes him feel good. I thanked him profusely, feeling like I had been given a much more expensive gift than a $3.24 cup of coffee. I also wondered if my willingness to share that scone was related to this earlier gift of coffee. Possibly. Joy is often contagious.
5. Joy and sorrow can exist simultaneously.
My earnest search for joy began the year Julie learned she had cancer. It wasn’t a conscious decision but one born of necessity. How could I deal with her suffering? How could I prepare to let her go? I had to find some crumbs of joy if only to make it through 2000-plus days. Remembering what Thomas Aquinas said long ago, “Man cannot live without joy.”
Three months before her death, Julie asked for a birthday party. We told her of course, although 61 is not a traditional milestone birthday. Four days before the party, we learned that Julie had exhausted all legitimate treatment options. Our planned celebration quickly morphed into a combined birthday bash and going away party. Joy and sorrow, celebration and grief. How do we simultaneously hold such seemingly opposed emotions? Returning to the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu, they recognize that it’s possible to be joyful in the face of struggles, big and small. Tutu noted, even as he was suffering from prostate cancer, that we are fragile creatures, and it is from this weakness, not despite it, that we discover the possibility of true joy.
During Julie’s illness, I interviewed Charles Mathewes, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. I asked him about the mystery of experiencing joy and sorrow simultaneously. He told me that joy is not only an emotion that leaves you particularly giddy but that it renders the world more vivid and vibrant. Joy can be amplified when other people are experiencing the same thing as you. Reverberating or communal responses can help us experience joy at a time when we might ordinarily think there is none.
The evening before Julie died, my brother, sister, and I texted each other from within the same house. I started: goodnight, sibs. Jay: goodnight. Then Julie: goodnight to the best big brothers in the whole world. Then Jay, again: love you to the moon and back. And me: and to the bestest sister ever. As I fell asleep, I thought, how lucky am I? How awful is this? Joy and sorrow, each so vivid, each amplifying the other, each holding me.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.