Balance & Beyond

If You Can’t Remember the Last Time You Laughed… Listen to This

• Jo Stone • Season 3 • Episode 104

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Remember when you used to laugh more, dance more, feel more? Somewhere between endless meetings, mental load, and pressure to perform, your joy got buried – not gone, just buried beneath layers of "should" and "must." Today we're diving deep into what makes ambitious women lose their capacity for joy and the surprisingly simple path back to reclaiming it.

Joy has been systematically replaced by control. When we're stuck in fight-or-flight mode, joy feels frivolous or wasteful. Living in our heads and disconnected from our bodies, we forget that joy is fundamentally a feeling, not a thought. And in our overscheduled lives, we leave no room for the spontaneous moments where genuine joy flourishes.

This isn't just about feeling happier – it's about reclaiming your power. When you're operating without joy, you're functioning at half capacity. Contrary to burnout culture's messaging, joy doesn't make you flaky; it makes you magnetic and followable. It unlocks creativity that bullet points and spreadsheets never could. In an age of AI and automation, your uniquely human capacity for play and spontaneous connection becomes your greatest professional asset.

To view the Transcript from this week's episode, visit our Balance & Beyond Podcast webpage: https://www.balanceinstitute.com/podcast/2025/104

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Thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Balance & Beyond Podcast!

Jo:

Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here we're committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive and where you have the power to define success on your terms. I honor the space you've created for yourself today, so let's take a breath and dive right in. You used to laugh more, dance more, feel more, but somewhere between the meetings, the mental load and the pressure to be on all the time, your joy got buried Not gone, just buried. These days, joy might feel like a luxury or something that you have to engineer a weekend away, a spa voucher, a well-planned holiday that you hardly enjoy because you're still mentally ticking things off your list or exhausted from trying to get there. You tell yourself there's no time, that it's not urgent, that maybe when things settle down then you'll come back to yourself and have some more fun. But here's what I've seen in every high achieving woman I work with. Joy has been replaced by control, with performing, proving, earning, and so many women don't even know what brings them joy anymore, because they've outsourced it to approval, achievement or aesthetics. So if you've been feeling flat, numb or like the real you is buried somewhere under there. If you don't know the last time that you smiled, today's episode is going to help you find her again. Let's talk about what makes us lose our joy, because in some recent data I've crunched from clients and women coming into my ecosystem, this is the thing that they miss the most and the thing they're most looking for.

Jo:

When we have a dysregulated nervous system, joy feels unsafe. What do I mean by that? If you are in constant fight or flight mode, if your cortisol is spiked, if you're stressed, if you're overwhelmed spiked if you're stressed, if you're overwhelmed then joy is a threat or, more often, joy is a waste. Don't have time for joy. Joy is frivolous. I will do joy when I've got through my list. Joy is something to be planned and particularly if you're a perfectionist or you're a people pleaser or you're procrastinating, then your body is likely in a state of fear constantly, and fear says no time for joy. Have to be hypervigilant, have to be on the alert. You never know who's going to come and throw you under the bus or say this about you, or this ball is going to fall, and so we start to suffocate it and we don't allow it to come into our lives.

Jo:

Another reason that we have lost access to joy is because so many women are stuck in their heads and have numbed their bodies. By this I mean, when your dominant emotional home becomes guilt, resentment, shame, all we end up doing is numbing out. We don't actually want to feel, because what there is to feel is heavy and dense, and we don't want to do that, even though these emotions are actually hijacking us. So we spend time in our heads because it becomes safe. We dance with logic, we want everything to make sense, we forego our intuition or what we feel we might even need, and it's more about what we should need, what's okay for us to need, what's acceptable for us to need. These are all areas and indications that you're living in your head. When we've numbed our body, there's no space for lightness because, believe it or not, joy is a feeling. It's not something that you think, and so if you're completely disconnected, then there's not going to be any space for that lightness, and then one of the biggest reasons that I see us losing access to our joy is that joy comes when you least expect it, and joy also typically comes in small doses.

Jo:

I don't know about you, but I used to spend a lot of time trying to engineer joy let's go, have a big family outing. And then wondered why it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. And yet I used to squish a lot of the silliness. Or, you know, we don't have time for that. Come on, let's go. These overpacked calendars and the life that we lead of relentless juggling means that there's no time for spontaneity, there's no time to watch a kid do a silly thing, and so many women I know feel terrible and harbor guilt and resentment because they can recognize that they're actually squashing joy in their kids.

Jo:

We are usually born with quite a large capacity for joy. You see kids and you see their unbridled laughter at something so insignificant. You watch them smile constantly and they bring joy to so many other people in their lives. But yet when there's no room for any of this silliness for fun, for a dance party before school or watching a silly video from someone, because no, no, no, no, no, come on, come on, come on. Got to get to bed or get in the shower, or no, no, no, no, I've got to go to a meeting. Well, you're not making room for those little, tiny, micro doses of joy, which is what our nervous system and, to be honest, our souls actually need to make life worth living. Otherwise, what on earth is the point?

Jo:

I know, when I was at the peak of my burnout, I had almost lost connection to what joy meant for me. I was doing all of the things that I thought should make me happy. I was, you know, going to the park with my kids, and then I was like why does not pushing a child on a swing 500,000 times, five days in a row, make me happy? Why don't I feel happy at these things that everyone's telling me that I'm meant to feel happy in? But it was because they weren't things that actually brought me joy. I was so numb to it that, even if it was something that brought me joy, I was never able to access it. That brought me joy. I was never able to access it. So all that ended up happening was I stacked my life with more and more shoulds, with more and more things that Google what makes me happy. But they weren't mine. And it was when I had this moment, when I caught up with a girlfriend and we were out to dinner. I probably had a couple of wines by this point in time.

Jo:

And can you remember a moment, whether it was something that you experienced recently or at any point in your life, when you are laughing so hard that you almost wet your pants, that you are literally giggling for hours and you get called getting the giggles, when you literally can't stop laughing, you just look at your friend and you burst into laughter again and this laughter becomes contagious. And this evening that I had lasted for hours and I came home and my cheeks hurt they literally hurt from smiling and laughing. And it was like my soul was so delighted and happy because when that first happened to me, I couldn't remember the last time that I laughed like that. That laughter that I had wasn't just joy, it was relief. It's like, oh my gosh, you can be human again, you can soften.

Jo:

There was also this realization that came with a lot of grief, that I had no idea how long it had been since I'd felt like me, because the beauty of joy is it's one of those emotions that you have to be in the moment for. You think of those moments where you are giggling or in uncontrollable laughter. You're not thinking about your to-do list. In that 10 seconds. You're not worrying about what happened in last week's meeting, you're not future pacing this is what might happen in the future. You're not worrying about all these things, you're simply in the moment, and that is a muscle and a skill that so many women have not learned how to access, because they're spending the bulk of their time ruminating and marinating on the past, usually from a beat themselves up perspective, but also a worrying about the future.

Jo:

We have seen clients do this all the time is having complete mind-blown moments of realizing that they don't actually know what makes them happy. Because when they strip back, yes, you know hanging out with their kids makes them happy, but does it really make their soul happy? And, and it can be confronting when you're there going, oh, where do I begin? But through the work we've done with clients in learning to be present, step one, in putting down the shoulds and this is what's meant to and not actually knowing what makes you happy and find joy. Then, when they unlock this box, like oh my gosh, it almost comes this complete reclamation of, oh, this thing brought me joy. And we've had clients take up tap dancing, I've had people go back to horse riding, picking up painting, doing crafting, maybe even as you're learning how to do a cartwheel again just doing small little things that they used to love. And then you get to go on this beautiful journey of I used to love that when I was a kid. Do I still love it? And very often the answer is yes, and you never regret or you never will look back once you've unlocked this side of you that has been buried for so long. So what happens when you begin to unlock joy?

Jo:

An important caveat is that initially your nervous system's like oh my gosh, I've been starving for this, this is amazing. And then all the old thoughts come back of you don't have time for this, you're going to be late. What are they going to think of you? You sat there and had a dance party with your kids, but now, look, you're late for work and you just got a look when you walked in the office and this person and now you're behind. And then you spend all day behind and you beat it out of yourself. That shouldn't have done that. There was no time for that. That one little moment ended up having a huge knock-on effect to the rest of your day, and then you're grumpy. And then the next morning, when the kid says to you, let's have a dance party, you're like no, not doing that, get in the car, we're moving.

Jo:

So it's really important that you understand, as you start to walk on this journey of unlocking a side of you that is desperate to emerge, that you also can recognize when those old patterns, those old nervous system processes that have been designed to keep you safe, you have to have the tools and the skills to be able to put them to the side and go. Yep, I hear you doesn't matter, I'm present in this moment. Don't worry about the rest of the day and learning to let go, so that if, let's say, you have had a moment of fun and you were being silly in the morning, whether you have kids or not, you just this thing brought you joy and maybe you stopped and you're walking, and you stopped to pick up a beautiful flower that you saw. Well, how do you let go of any potential knock-on effects and go? You know what? I'm five minutes later than I wanted to be, but think of the joy that you did by finding this beautiful flower, or looking at a drop of rain on a leaf that you cannot imagine, or seeing a lady beetle somewhere. These are these little moments of wonder that you are craving, and it's what makes us human. It's what makes us whole.

Jo:

You are not a human doing. You're a human being, and it's only when we're really able to step in and unlock this part of us that we start feeling free again, we start feeling whole and this joy that we have becomes infectious. This joy makes you magnetic. It makes people want to be around you. It's really important that you understand that your joy isn't an indulgence. It's an intelligence leaning you towards what makes you feel good and, believe it or not, despite the guilt, the shame, resentment that you're sitting in, you're meant to feel good. That's right. You're not meant to feel heavy. You're meant to feel light. You're not meant to feel resentment. You're meant to have fun. You're meant to laugh. You're meant to be playful. There's a reason that children learn through play. The brain works in different ways and you as an adult spoiler alert still have a very big inner child in you, so you also can learn through play. You can learn through creativity.

Jo:

With the advent of AI, the opportunity and the importance of us accessing these incredible parts of our brain that are locked under bullet points and to-do lists and action items cannot be underestimated. And if you are trying to lead at work, at home and in your life without joy, with it being buried, you're only operating at half your power. Can you imagine what's possible if you unlock another 50% of what you're capable of? Not to mention how great you're going to feel. Joy does not make you flaky, it is not frivolous, it makes you followable, it makes you magnetic, and when women start to reclaim their joy, we change the world.

Jo:

women avoid burnout and create a life of balance and beyond. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time on the Balance and Beyond podcast.

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Jo Stone

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