Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In

#10 Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places: The Neuroscience of Daily Joy

• Sari Stone • Season 1 • Episode 10

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Feeling stuck in a cycle of waiting for your circumstances to change before you can experience happiness? Today's episode reveals a powerful truth: finding joy might be simpler than you think.

Meet one of my coaching clients-a high school junior who went from anxious and unmotivated to confident and thriving in months. The secret? Rewire your brain for joy. We will  explore how intentionally focusing on even the smallest enjoyable aspects of challenging situations can literally rewire your brain for happiness. This isn't about toxic positivity or ignoring genuine problems—it's about discovering authentic pleasure within your current reality.

I share the neuroscience behind this approach, explaining how our brains naturally move toward pleasure and away from pain, and how we can use this tendency to our advantage. 

You'll learn practical techniques for shifting your focus, including breathing exercises, keeping a joy journal, using pressure points to calm, and the powerful "Three-Day Joy Experiment" that could transform your relationship with your daily routine. 

Whether you're dreading Monday mornings, feeling stuck in challenging relationships, or simply seeking more happiness in your everyday life, this episode offers a science-backed approach to experiencing more joy without waiting for external change. Ready to start clearing your own path to happiness? Join me for this illuminating exploration of how small perspective shifts can create profound internal transformation.

Thank you for joining me!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear out. My journey to be honest with you was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. And had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said when you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change. And that is exactly what this podcast is about Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose and passion. Each week, I'm going to bring you 30 minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in Hit, subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. So what if finding joy in your daily routine was actually easier than you thought? Small shifts in focus can often help you move from feeling unmotivated and anxious to feeling more confident and energized, without even needing to change your entire life. Sometimes big changes are necessary, and when they are, we work on that too. But what if joy was possible right now, even when things stay the same? In this episode, we're diving into the neuroscience of happiness how simple mindset shifts can rewire your brain to create more joy, even in unexpected places. So if you've ever felt stuck waiting for life to change before you can feel happier, this episode is for you. Let's start.

Speaker 1:

So I got off a coaching call this week and I was just so excited because this young man has come so far in his journey, and I asked him how everything was going and how everything was going in school, and he is rocking it. He is rocking his junior year actually, and I'm just so, so proud of him and so honored to be working with him and it hasn't always been that easy, okay. So flashback to about six months ago. It was not going so well and he was battling some depression, a little bit of anxiety, some confidence, just some issues, and just one of the greatest people I know. So this hard to watch, but I also realized, which I come to realize a lot. I have to just be with it sometimes and realize that it's part of the path and part of his path right now.

Speaker 1:

That said, we wanted to try to move him towards joy and at this point he didn't associate pleasure with school at all, which he has to spend a chunk of his day there. So we work with the brain because we know that our brain goes towards pleasure and away from pain. It's a natural tendency. And we also know that the brain likes familiar. So when it's familiar to go to school and not like it which I had that myself, I was a crier for the first three years of school I understand what it feels like to get up in the morning and just not want to go where you're going, going and I know some of you have jobs where you might get up in the morning and be like, okay, counting down till Friday or okay, we love Wednesday, we're halfway there. I mean just talking your way through, bracing yourself to get through the week. So this episode is for anyone who has ever struggled with that and is curious about making the shift.

Speaker 1:

So we started by having him focus on something that he did enjoy and I said I only want you to think about things that you enjoy. Let's pretend that today all you're going to do is things you enjoy. And he said, well, it wouldn't be school. And I understood that, but it also did need to be school. So I said there's got to be something in there, you know. And he actually decided that some of the people that he sat next to he did enjoy being around and a couple of his teachers he did enjoy listening to Some of them were even funny he did enjoy listening to. Some of them were even funny.

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He enjoyed some of his classes when we actually poked around and dug around for a while. And he enjoyed the creativity that he was given in some of his technology and engineering classes, the opportunities for creative thinking. He also enjoyed just the fact that he knew he had to get up and get out of the house and he knew that that was good for him. So there were some some things that he actually enjoyed. I've had some students in the past enjoy doodling while they were taking notes. They take a break from taking notes and they draw and they enjoy that. So anything that we can equate at this point is a positive. He also enjoys being able to listen to music. So he has one earbud in and one where he's listening to the teacher and that's worked really well for him. So he's got that feel good coming on with his music at the same time that he's sitting in school. So the more he practiced it he likened it to.

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He lives in a state in Colorado where there's a lot of snow and he thought about his dad using the snowblower and making a path for their dog and their family to go to the car, the driveway and I've been to their house, it's a long driveway their family to go to the car, the driveway and I've been to their house, it's a long driveway and that every time somebody goes on that path and every time his dad gets it blown with the snowblower, it gets a little bit easier. And he said that's like what I'm doing with my brain. And I said it is exactly what you're doing with your brain with those new neural pathways. So very often we can take a situation where we might feel stuck and we might feel that it wasn't a choice and we can see the opportunities to enjoy part of it and it shifts us towards joy. It shifts us to that experience and then, as a result, we start aligning ourselves with a more joyful vibration and seeing more opportunities to feel joy in our lives because we want to be where we are, we want to wake up and want to go where we're going during the day. We want to be around the people that we're going to be around. So if we could just focus on the parts of them that we actually enjoy, they will bring those parts to show us because they'll be a match for us.

Speaker 1:

So I listen a lot to Esther Hicks and she talked about doing a three-day period where you just are going to do what makes you happy and what you enjoy, and the first thing I thought of was I wonder how many people are going to lose. I love my job, but I wonder how many people are going to lose their jobs over this. But then she clarified it and she said it doesn't mean that you stop going, it just means that you go and you can just say hey, you know, this is something that I just wanted. I want to enjoy coming here. So I'm only going to focus on the parts of my job that I enjoy just for today, and see what happens. So I thought this was kind of interesting.

Speaker 1:

So I'm doing a little spring reset because, although I love my work, there are some things that I have to do that are my adult responsibilities, domestic things that really I'd rather not do and I would enjoy doing other things. So I tried to figure out ways to make this work for me, and I'm on day one now and I can say that it can't be long term that the food shopping didn't get done, but I didn't feel like going. But, to be honest, actually, actually, the house got really clean. I took a lot of joy out of cleaning the house and it was awesome, and so I can say that when we give ourselves permission to just do what we enjoy, you might actually surprise yourself and find that you like something that you didn't really think was going to be on that list, something that you didn't really think was going to be on that list. So I was wondering why are we so hung up about choices?

Speaker 1:

So I did a little research and I realized that I learned, actually, that our survival instinct tells us that we're going to survive if we have control, okay. And so our conscious keeps us seeking control and our desire for control is what keeps us seeking choices. So that helped a little bit, because I thought, okay, it's the old control thing, and now I understand where it's coming from. So I can remind myself when I get into my control freak mode which I recover from quite often, it's periodic that I'm surviving and I am just fine. Okay, these are not choices that are keeping me alive, necessarily.

Speaker 1:

And then I realized that, in the body, enjoyment and happiness and satisfaction and bliss and positivity all work in your brain and they're attributed to the left hemisphere of your brain, like the good, the more pleasant emotions live there and the harder emotions live on the right side. So that's what's happening brain wise. And your amygdala plays a pretty crucial role in how we deal with situations. We all know what that is when it gets hijacked and we lose it. So having good control and having clear pathways, familiar pathways and strong pathways, strong neural connections to pleasure and pain, I think give us a little bit of insurance that we're going to have proper regulation of the frontal cortex and it's going to be better suited to deal with challenges when they come up.

Speaker 1:

The other benefits of enjoyment and doing what you enjoy and choosing the parts that you like are that all of those things, the like and the interest, and then amazement and bliss. If you're doing a gradient for it see last week's episode for the gradients that make a healthy memory. It's like a recallable memory that we can pull up at any time, like a thing of beauty, is a joy forever and we can pull that up during hard times and it becomes a part of us. We integrate that into ourselves. So physiologically our body can respond to that enjoyment so many times over once we've put it into our long-term memory and our bodies respond, we know, by feeling peace and health. And then we grow neural connections and strengthening the existing pathways and we all know that neurons that fire together wire together and it also benefits our immune system. So, again, deepening that path, making that path easier to go on from the house to the driveway when it snows by making the trip more often is just going to be a win-win situation going to be a win-win situation.

Speaker 1:

So one of the things that I suggested was that to one of my other students is that she keep a joy journal. Just little things, little things that she was happy about, because we've done gratitude journals and she loves doing that and gratitude journals are great, but this is just pure selfish joy, just joy and maybe posting. She was very big on tiktok then, so posting something on social media, so your assignment is just to post joy for the next 21 days, and she loved it and it really shifted her life. Last year as a senior in high school, in my yoga class when I teach, I tell people and I practice this myself to remember to breathe as though everything is going to be all right, and my yoga teacher, matt, used to say that we'd be in this really challenging position and I have a, you know, love-hate relationship with yoga. I love it, I'll, I'll always be a yogi and I also fight it sometimes. So breathing when you're in those challenging positions as though everything is going to be all right, because really it's not going to kill you to hold a pose keeps me in practice.

Speaker 1:

When I'm not on my mat, when I'm feeling out of control or a little anxious or I'm going down a bad road with my thoughts, if I remember to trick my body into thinking everything is okay by taking a few deep breaths, I start to calm down. It starts to turn on my nervous system. Another thing that you can do is apply pressure points. There's a space in the V between your thumb and your forefinger and if you press in there you'll feel a little bit of a sore spot in that L part of your hand. And actually our kinesthesiologist taught us about this and she said that that helps your meridians before muscle testing. It helps to regulate things. I don't know enough about this to give you the research on it, but I can say that it does work with muscle testing. And another place that calms you down are the acupressure points.

Speaker 1:

If you take your earlobes from the front of the earlobe, that hard cartilage part, and just kind of pinch it and go all around your ears and I actually taught principals this in a workshop once. It was pretty cool to watch them pinching their earlobes. It was just because they're usually a pretty serious bunch. So another thing that I also suggest is grounding. And now there's this whole movement going barefoot, you know, rubbing your feet in the grass, going barefoot at the beach. It's, luckily, the way I grew up, but then got away from it for a while as an adult, and now they're proving the benefits of that again, as well as exposing your eyes to direct sunlight for a few minutes after the sun first comes up.

Speaker 1:

I know we were taught to not look into the sun, but for the first few minutes I don't think that research is showing that there's really not any harmful effects and it does help your serotonin levels and it helps your melatonin levels to actually set you up for a better night's sleep levels, to actually set you up for a better night's sleep. So I know this is a little mini-sode, but I thought we would just take a look at this and maybe do a little spring cleanse, a little spring renewal, where you just choose to do what you like to do or keep your focus on the parts that you like about where you are and the parts of the people that you're around, just for three days, and just do it as an experiment with me. I will let you know when mine is over with and let's see what happens. Let's see if it actually calls forth more of this in our life and we can bring more joy into our lives. So, as always, thank you for joining me.

Speaker 1:

In this episode, you learned how a student focused on the small joys in his life and in doing so, he actually rewired his brain for more happiness. He proved that joy doesn't come from changing our circumstances always, but from changing our perspective. And he's not alone. Great teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, even ancient scriptures, remind us of this truth. Modern brain research is only now starting to catch up to what wisdom traditions have long understood.

Speaker 1:

If this episode had resonated with you in any way and you'd like to explore how to bring more joy into your own life, dm me. I'm offering special spring renewal coaching packages and I would really love nothing more than to support you on your journey. Thanks again for joining me. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you liked this episode, please let me know. Stop by at social media, on Instagram or my Facebook page, just count me in, and please leave a comment. If there's anybody that you think could benefit from this episode, please forward it to them and I look forward to seeing you next time. We're all in this together.