Stress Is Rewiring You… So Is Joy

What actually happens in your brain under stress… and how does joy help you recover?

In this episode of Joy Unfiltered, Rachel goes deep into the neuroscience of resilience, breaking down how chronic stress impacts the brain and why joy is not a luxury—but a biological strategy.

You’ll learn:

•  How the amygdala becomes more reactive under chronic stress 
•  Why your prefrontal cortex goes offline when you need it most 
•  The role of blood flow, cortisol, and nervous system regulation
•  How stress reshapes your brain—and how joy helps reshape it back 
•  Why “pushing through” is not resilience (and what is) 
•  Simple, science-backed practices to regulate your nervous system in real time 

This is a nerdy, empowering deep dive into how your brain actually works—and how to use joy to lead, live, and recover more powerfully.

Because joy isn’t the reward.

It’s the strategy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back, or welcome to Joy Unfiltered. I am Rachel, your host, and I am so glad that you are here today. This is the space where we stop pretending that burnout is the price of success and start exploring a different way to lead, live, and actually feel good in our lives. Because here is what I believe at my core. Joy is not the reward. Joy is the strategy. And in a world that's been built on pressure, urgency, and endurance, we're doing things a little differently around here. We are choosing energy over exhaustion, regulation over reactivity, connection over competition. And we are doing it in a way that's grounded in both science and maybe a little bit of magic. So whether you are walking, driving, lifting something heavy, or perhaps taking a breath in the middle of a busy day, you are in the right place today. So let's get into it. Today, today we're gonna go full on nerd. Brain nerd, nervous system nerd, amygdala, cortisol, prefrontal cortex, blood flow, resilience. Joy is not fluff, it's biological strategy nerd. And honestly, I'm so excited. Because this episode gets to the heart of what I believe with my entire body. Joy is not the opposite of stress. Joy is what helps us metabolize stress. Joy is not pretending that life is easy. Joy is what helps us become strong enough to stay present when life is not easy. And resilience, resilience is certainly not white knuckling it. It's not becoming the woman who says, I'm fine, all while her left eye is twitching and her calendar looks like a crime scene. Resilience is your capacity to recover, to adapt, to return to yourself, to stay connected to your values, your body, your people, and your purpose, even when life gets a little bit loud. And today we are going deep into the brain science of why joy helps build that capacity. Because when I say joy is a strategy, I do not mean joy is a cute quote on a coffee mug. I mean joy changes physiology. Joy changes attention. Joy changes behavior. Joy changes how the brain responds to threat. Joy helps bring the parts of your brain responsible for wisdom, perspective, planning, creativity, and self-control back online. And that matters because stress changes the brain as well. So let's start there. Let's talk about what actually happens in your brain under stress. When your brain senses threat, whether that threat is physical, emotional, social, financial, relational, or even imagined, one of the first systems to activate is the amygdala. The amygdala is often described as the brain's threat detector. That's a little simplified, but for this case it works. The amygdala is constantly scanning. It's constantly looking for is this safe? Is this dangerous? Do we belong here? Are we about to be rejected? Is this email about to ruin my entire day? Was that tone weird? Did everyone else understand the assignment except for me? The amygdala is fast. It absolutely does not wait for a committee meeting. It does not say, hmm, let's bring this to the board next quarter. The amygdala is the smoke alarm. And when the amygdala senses danger, it helps activate the stress response. And that's not necessarily always a bad thing. Your sympathetic nervous system ramps up. Your heart rate increases. Your breathing changes. Your muscles prepare for action. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol enter the bloodstream. Blood pressure rises. Glucose becomes more available. Your body is preparing you to survive. And as I said, that is not all bad. It is actually brilliant. In short bursts, stress is adaptive. It helps you respond. It helps you focus. It helps you act. But here's where it gets a little spicy. The body is built to respond to stress. But it's not built to live there or to stay there forever. When stress becomes chronic, the brain and the body start adapting to that chronic environment. And honestly, the amygdala can become more reactive. In some studies, chronic stress is associated with an increased amygdala volume or heightened amygdala activity, especially when the brain has been repeatedly, notice that word, repeatedly trained to scan for threat. Stress exposure is also linked with changes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, which are key regions for regulation, memory, and decision making. So let me say that in plain English. If your brain lives in threat mode long enough, threat mode becomes familiar. Your brain gets good at what it practices. And if it practices scanning for danger, it becomes more efficient at scanning for danger. If it practices urgency, it becomes better at urgency. If it practices fear, it becomes quicker to find fear. And this is why chronic stress can make everything feel like too much. It's not because you are weak, it's because your brain has been doing Olympic level threat gymnastics. Tiny things feel huge. Neutral things feel suspicious. Feedback can feel like rejection. A full inbox feels like a saber toothed tiger. A delayed text feels like abandonment. A hard conversation feels like danger. This is not drama. This is biology. Now let's bring in that prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain right behind your forehead. This is your executive function center. The prefrontal cortex helps with planning. It helps with decision making, helps with impulse control and emotional regulation, perspective, problem solving, moral reasoning, self-awareness, long-term thinking. Basically, the prefrontal cortex is the wise CEO of the brain. Where the amygdala says, fire, the prefrontal cortex says, Let's check if that's a candle, a bonfire, or perhaps someone's burnt toast. But under high stress, the prefrontal cortex does not always get full access to the room. Stress shifts resources toward survival. Blood flow and neural activity can become prioritized towards regions involved in threat detection and immediate action, while higher-ordered thinking can become harder to access. Acute stress can impair free frontal pre-frontal cortex-based functions like working memory, cognitive flexibility, and decision making, although the exact effects depend on timing, intensity, and context. This is why when you are stressed, you may know better, but not do better. You may know that you should take a really big deep breath, but you snap instead. Under stress, your brain becomes less interested in thriving and way more interested in just plain surviving. And survival is not subtle. Survival says, react now. Protect now. Defend now. Control now. Escape now. And this is why chronic stress affects leadership so deeply. Because leadership requires the pre-frontal cortex. Leadership requires discernment. Leadership requires listening and creativity and emotional regulation. Leadership requires the ability to pause before reacting. Leadership requires the ability to hold tension without becoming tension. And if your nervous system is living in this threat mode, you can still perform. Women are especially good at performing under pressure. We know this, right? We've all been there. But there is a cost. You may perform while disconnected. You may be able to do the thing. You may achieve while exhausted. Again, we've been there, right? You may lead while still bracing. You may look successful on the outside while your nervous system is quietly screaming, um, ma'am, we're not okay in here. That is endurance. That is not resilience. And this is the distinction I want to make today. Endurance is the ability to keep going. Resilience is the ability to recover, adapt, and return with more wisdom. Endurance says, I can take this, I can certainly do it, but resilience says I can process it. Endurance says, I'll push through. Resilience says I'll regulate, repair, and move forward. Endurance, and this is a big one, often ignores the body, while resilience listens to the body. Endurance can be useful in short bursts, but resilience is what keeps you whole. And this is where joy enters the chat wearing sequence and carrying peer-reviewed studies. Because joy is not just a feeling. Joy is a nervous system cue. Joy tells the body there's safety in here. There is connection here. There is meaning. There is something worth noticing here. There is life beyond the threat. Positive emotions have been shown to broaden attention and build psychological resources over time, which is central to Barbara Frederickson's broaden and build theory, which we have talked about in the podcast before. But let me let me just refresh our memory. The basic idea is that positive emotions can help widen perspective and support the development of durable resources like social connection, creativity, and coping capacity. That matters for resilience because when we are stressed, our attention narrows. Threat narrows us. Joy. Joy broadens us. Stress says, focus only on the danger. But joy says there's something more here. Stress says, this is the whole story. Joy says, this might be a hard chapter, but it's certainly not the whole book. Stress says, close in and protect yourself. While Joy says, let's connect. And connection is one of the most powerful resilience builders that we have. So now let's go a little bit deeper into the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex relationship. When the amygdala is highly activated, the brain is more likely to prioritize emotional salience, meaning what feels threatening gets amplified. The prefrontal cortex helps to regulate that response. The prefrontal cortex can help interpret or reinterpret that situation. It can help inhibit impulsive reactions. It can help us choose a response aligned with our values instead of our fear. Practices like cognitive reappraisal, which means changing how we interpret a situation, are associated with increased prefrontal engagement and decreased amygdala response in emotional regulation research, which we all love to research, right? And let me let me explain that's brain science for the story you tell yourself matters. The story you tell yourself matters. Not in a fake positive way, not a slap on a glitter sticker on a broken system way, but in a real way. Your brain responds not only to what happens, but to what it believes is happening. There is a difference between I am failing and I am learning. There is a difference between this is way too much, and this is a lot, and I can take one step forward today. There is a difference between saying, I'm behind, and I am building. Again, there is a difference between I have to survive this, I have to grit through, and I get to support myself through this. That shift is not fluff. That is not just language, that shift is pre-frontal cortex work. That shift helps bring your wise brain back online. And joy, joy helps us access that shift because joy creates enough space for perspective. Joy interrupts the threat loop. Not by denying reality, certainly not that, but by expanding reality. That's why the macros of joy, which I've talked about before that I came up with are so important. Noticing, allowing, sharing. Noticing, allowing, sharing. Let's break those down through the lens of resilience. First, noticing. Noticing is the practice of paying attention to what is good, beautiful, meaningful, funny, tender, or alive. And before anyone says, but Rachel, noticing joy does not fix my problems. I agree. I agree it does not fix everything. It does something else. It trains your attention. And attention is one of the most powerful tools that your brain has. The brain, and I've said this before, has a negativity bias. It is wired to notice threat more quickly than neutral or positive information because that actually helped us survive. The ancestor who noticed that berry was delicious had a really nice snack. The ancestor who noticed the tiger survived. So the brain prioritizes danger. But when we intentionally notice microjoys, we are gently training the brain to scan for safety, connection, and possibility as well. This matters because resilience is not just about reducing stress. It's also about increasing access to resources. A beautiful sunrise. A warm cup of coffee, a text from a friend, a laugh that makes your shoulders drop. A song that gets you to get up and move. A moment when your cat does something deeply unhelpful and somehow spiritually necessary. These moments are not small to the nervous system. These moments they are cues. They say you are still here. There is still beauty. There is still connection. There is still something to receive. And over time, this builds capacity. So noticing. The second macro of joy, allowing. Allowing means we stop using joy as a performance mask. Joy does not require us to be happy all the time. Joy is not emotional censorship. Joy is not pretending that grief, anger, fear, and exhaustion are not real. In fact, resilience requires emotional flexibility. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as a process and outcome of adapting to difficult life experiences through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility. Flexibility is the key. Not perfection, not constant positivity, flexibility. Can I feel what is true without becoming trapped inside it? Can I be angry and still grounded? Can I be sad and still connected? Can I be afraid and still take one brave step? Can I feel joy without guilt even when life is complicated? That is allowing. And allowing is powerful because suppressing emotion often keeps the nervous system activated. When we deny what we feel, the body still carries it. The body still keeps score. The amygdala still detects it. The body still braces. But when we name what is happening, we begin to integrate it. And this is why language matters. A simple phrase like, this is stress. This is grief. This is fear. This is disappointment. This is excitement. This is joy. Naming, naming helps the pre-frontal cortex participate. It gives the brain a map. And a mapped experience is often less overwhelming than an unnamed storm. So the second one, allowing. Third is sharing. Joy grows when it is shared. And this is deeply connected to resilience because humans are not designed to regulate alone all of the time. We are relational creatures. Social connection is one of the strongest buffers against stress. When you feel seen, supported, loved, or accompanied, the nervous system receives information that says, I am not alone with this. That changes the stress response. That changes the body. That changes what feels possible. This is why one joyful text a day is not just a cute little activity that I thought of. It is nervous system activism. It's a microconnection. It's a daily cue of belonging. When you send one joyful text, you are not just being nice. You are interrupting isolation. You are creating a small moment of co-regulation. You are saying, I see you. You matter. There is good here. Keep going. And sometimes that one text lands in someone's day like pure oxygen. Now, let's go back to blood flow because this is such an important piece. Under stress, under stress, your body redistributes resources. Under stress, your heart pumps faster. Your blood pressure rises. Your muscles prepare. Your body is trying to help you act. But the more your body stays in survival physiology, the harder it is and the harder it can be to access the calm, creative, integrated parts of the brain. That is why you cannot shame yourself into regulation. You cannot yell at your pre-frontal cortex to come back online, please. You have to create the right conditions. Your breath helps. Movement certainly helps. Sleep absolutely helps. Connection helps. Nature helps. Laughter. Laughter helps a whole big bunch. Music helps. Gratitude can help. Play helps. Joy helps. Not because any of these are just cute, but because they send biological signals. Slow breathing can support parasympathetic activity. Movement increases blood flow. It supports brain health. Laughter can shift physiology. Gratitude can redirect attention. Connection can calm threat. Joy can broaden perspective. These, my friends, these are not luxuries. They are resilience practices. And for leaders, they are leadership infrastructure. Because a dysregulated leader spreads dysregulation. But a regulated leader creates capacity in the room. Let me say that again. A dysregulated leader spreads dysregulation. A regulated leader creates capacity in the room. Your nervous system enters the meeting before your strategy deck does. Your team. Your team feels your urgency. They feel your defensiveness. They can certainly feel your fear. But they also can feel your presence. They feel when you are grounded. They feel when you can hold complexity without spiraling. They feel when you are listening instead of bracing. And that is why joy-led leadership is not about just being cheerful at work. It is about building a nervous system that can lead. It is about creating enough internal safety that you can stay human under pressure. It's about choosing practices that restore blood flow, restore perspective, restore connection, and restore agency. Now, let's talk about chronic stress and why it can stay in the body. When stress is repeated or prolonged, the stress response can become sensitized. Your body starts anticipating threat. Your baseline changes. You may wake up already tense. You may feel tired but wired. You may struggle to concentrate. You may become more reactive. You may find yourself overthinking simple decisions. You may feel like rest is unsafe. You may feel irritated by the people that you love. You may lose access to joy. But not because joy is gone, but because your threat system is just way too loud. Long-term activation of the stress response and prolonged exposure to stress hormones can disrupt many body systems and is associated with issues like anxiety, depression, sleep problems, digestive problems, high blood pressure, and trouble with memory and focus. So when someone says, I just do not feel like myself, that may be exactly right. Their brain and body are operating in a different state. And the work is not to become a different person. The work is to help the body remember safety. This is where resilience becomes a practice, not a personality trait. You are not either a resilient person or not resilient or not a resilient person. You build resilience. You practice recovery. You create rhythms that tell your nervous system we do hard things and then we repair. We lead and then we restore. We stretch and then we soften. We care for others and we also receive care. We hold responsibility and we also hold joy. This is a different model of power. Not power as constant output, power as capacity, power as regulation, power as integration, power as connection, power as the ability to stay awake to life without being swallowed up by it. That is joy-led leadership. Now, and again, I said we were getting super nerdy, so let's now talk about the hippocampus for a minute, because that matters too. The hippocampus is deeply involved in memory and context. It helps the brain understand where am I? When is this happening? Is this the same as before or is this different? Under chronic stress, hippocampal function can be affected, which matters because when context gets fuzzy, the brain may respond to old pain as if it's happening right now. This is part of why stress can make us overreact. Not because we are irrational, but because the brain is connecting patterns. The brain is saying, this feels like danger. This feels like that other time. This really feels like rejection. This feels like failure. This feels like abandonment. This feels like not being safe. And once again, joy helps by creating a new context. A joyful moment says this moment is not only threat, this room is not only pressure. This day is not only hard. This body is not only braced. This life is not only survival. Joy gives the brain updated evidence. And this is huge. Because resilience depends on updated evidence. If your brain only has evidence that life is dangerous, it will keep protecting you from life. But when you collect evidence of beauty, support, laughter, strength, movement, love, and meaning, your brain gets more data. Joy becomes evidence. Evidence you are not only what happened to you. Evidence that your body can return. Evidence that connection still exists. Evidence that delight is not irresponsible. Evidence that you are allowed to feel alive now, not someday when everything is fixed. This is why I talk about microjoys so much. Microjoys are small enough to be accessible and powerful enough to be cumulative. They are brain bread crumbs back to aliveness. So now with all this science, let's actually get practical. How do we use joy to build resilience in the brain and body? I want to give you five practices. The first one, the 90-second threat pause. When you feel activated, pause and name it. Say, my amygdala is doing its job. My body is trying to protect me. This is a stress response. I do not need to obey every alarm. Then breathe slowly. Longer exhale than inhale. Relax your jaw. Drop your shoulders, feel your feet on the ground. This is not about magically becoming calm. This is about creating enough space for your prefrontal cortex to re-enter the room. Number two, the joy scan. Ask, what is one thing here that is not wrong? Not perfect, not amazing, just not wrong. Maybe your coffee is warm. Maybe the light coming in the window is pretty. Maybe your dog is snoring. Maybe one person was kind. Maybe you handled that one thing better than you used to. This trains attention. And attention trains the brain. Number three, move your body. Stress can make us freeze. Movement helps us shift state. Walk. Dance, stretch, lift, shake out your arms or your hands. Roll your shoulders back. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Movement increases circulation and gives the body a way to complete stress energy.

unknown 36:47

Right?

SPEAKER_00 36:47

So you have to go through the cycle of completing that stress energy. You do not need to do a full workout to change your state. Sometimes two minutes of movement is the doorway that you need. Number four, choose a regulating relationship. Text someone. Voice memo someone. Ask for support. Send encouragement. Let someone know just that you are thinking about them. Connection is not extra. Connection is biology. And number five, make meaning. Ask, what is this situation teaching me? What value do I want to practice here? Who do I want to be in this particular moment? What is the one next right step? Meaning. Meaning is a resilience builder because it helps suffering become integrated instead of just random. Joy and meaning are deeply connected. Joy often appears when our lives feel connected to something larger than immediate survival. Now, I want to be really clear. Joy does not erase trauma. Joy does not replace therapy. Joy does not mean systematic problems are now your personal mindset project. Joy does not mean you breathe through injustice and call it growth. Joy does not mean any of that. Sometimes, sometimes resilience means leaving. Sometimes resilience means setting clear boundaries. Sometimes resilience means telling the truth even when it is hard. Sometimes resilience means asking for help. Sometimes resilience means refusing to normalize what is harming you. Joy is not compliance. Joy is not silence. Joy is not spiritual glitter over real wounds. Joy is power. Joy says, I will not let stress steal my whole nervous system. I will not let urgency become my identity. I will not let fear be the only voice in the room. Joy says, I will not abandon my body to prove my worth. I will not confuse burnout with leadership. I will not call survival success. That is resilience. That is joy as strategy. And now let's bring this back to leadership. I want you to imagine a leader whose amygdala is running the meeting. Just imagine. Everything feels urgent. Questions feel like criticism. Different opinions feel like disloyalty. Mistakes feel absolutely catastrophic. The team learns to protect themselves. They stop taking risks. They stop telling the truth. They stop bringing ideas. They wait. They comply. They shrink. Now, imagine a leader whose prefrontal cortex is online. She can hear hard things. She can pause before responding. She can distinguish discomfort from danger. She knows how to regulate her body. She invites truth. She creates space. She can laugh and maybe even be silly without losing authority. She can say, I don't know yet. She can say, let's think about this. She can say, we're gonna solve this without sacrificing our humanity. That is not soft. That is advanced leadership. That is the kind of leadership the future requires. Because the old model has told us be tougher, push harder, maybe care less, compartmentalize more. But I'm telling you, the brain does not work that way. Our bodies do not work that way. Teams do not work that way. You cannot build sustainable performance on chronic threat. Eventually the system pays. Joy-led leadership, joy-led resilience offers a different path. Energy over endurance. Regulation over urgency, integration over compartmentalization, community over competition. This is not just a philosophy. This is biology. This is neuroscience. This is organizational strategy. This is how we build people and cultures that can bend without breaking. So today, I want you to remember this. Your amygdala is not your enemy. Your amygdala is trying to protect you. Your stress response is not a character flaw. It is your body trying to help. And your prefrontal cortex, it's not gone. It just may need safety, oxygen, blood flow, breath, movement, connection, and a moment to come back online. And joy. Joy is one of the ways we can build that bridge. Joy is the bridge between survival and leadership. Joy is the bridge between reaction and response. Joy is the bridge between bracing and belonging. Joy is the bridge between enduring your life and actually living it. So here is your practice. is for today. Send one joyful text. Send one joyful text. Just one. Tell someone that I am thinking of you. I am grateful for you. You made my life better. You've got this. I saw this and I thought of you. Thank you for being you. That tiny act matters. It matters for them and it matters for you. It matters for the nervous system of the world. And yes, I just went there. I just said that the nervous system of the world. Because when one person chooses joy, it changes their day. When a community chooses joy it can change the world. So go sign the pledge. Let's be part of the one million texts that get sent every day. The link is in the show notes. And then leave a comment and tell me who you are texting today. And subscribe to the podcast. Share this episode with a leader, a friend, a sister, a colleague or anyone whose amygdala deserves a little vacation. And remember, from my heart to yours I am celebrating you today and every day. So have fun, live well, enjoy