This psychology-based insight explains how to nurture joy without forcing it.
3 Ways To Expand Your Joy Capacity
These three approaches help create the conditions your nervous system needs to experience it naturally.
By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | Last Updated:
Joy is culturally portrayed as a permanent high-vibe state that you are supposed to reach and then, somehow, maintain indefinitely. Just one scroll through any social platform is enough to reveal how modern society has framed joy framed as something you "perform."
The issue with this understanding of joy is that it sends the wrong message: if you are not feeling good, you must not be trying hard enough. Joy is supposed to be an automatic nervous system response for when you feel safe, resourced and connected. And like any other biological capacity, it can be strengthened, but not through pressure, denial or relentless positivity.
(Take my science-inspired Philosophical Orientation Test to know if you're a glass half-full or half-empty person.)
Think of joy the way you would a muscle tissue. You do not grow muscle by simply manifesting it to be bigger or stronger. You grow it by providing the right conditions, like enough load to stimulate growth, enough rest to recover and enough nourishment to sustain the system. Joy works much the same way. It's not an attitude you adopt alone, but a response your mind and body generate when the conditions are right.
Here are three evidence-based ways to strengthen your capacity for joy, without gaslighting yourself into "being grateful" or pretending everything is fine.
1. Train Your Nervous System To Tolerate Joy
It may seem strange, but one of the biggest barriers to joy is intolerance for positive emotion, not sadness as we most often think.
Just as people have varying capacities for distress, they also have differing levels of tolerance for how much pleasure, ease and excitement their nervous systems can safely hold. For many people, especially those who grew up with emotional neglect, unpredictability or chronic criticism, feeling good does not feel safe. Instead, it might feel vulnerable, exposed or, in many cases, painfully temporary.
In a large study of young adults, people with higher levels of adverse childhood experiences reported significantly lower happiness in adulthood. But, more importantly, this wasn't just because they felt more distress. It was because their emotional systems had been shaped in ways that made adaptive processing of emotion harder.
This means they were less likely to use strategies like cognitive reappraisal (the ability to reinterpret situations in a way that allows positive meaning and emotional relief) and more likely to rely on emotional suppression, a strategy that reliably predicts lower well-being. Early adversity, in a way, shrinks the nervous system's capacity to access and sustain positive emotion.
So, when joy begins to arise, their systems interrupt it, birthing thoughts like:
- "This won't last."
- "Something bad is about to happen."
- "Don't get too excited."
- "Enjoy it now before it goes away."
These pessimistic personality quirks are actually protective reflexes built by a nervous system that is working overtime. A nervous system that learned, long ago, that good moments were followed by disappointment, withdrawal or instability. As a result, it developed the tendency to stay guarded, even in pleasure.
This is a natural consequence of the threat system (centered around the amygdala) being tuned by early stress. Since this system is designed to scan for danger even during positive moments, it pulls attention back toward vigilance. The result is a shortened, brittle experience of joy that never quite gets to settle in the body.
The goal, then, is not to create more positive experiences, but to increase your nervous system's capacity to stay with them. One of the simplest ways to do this is through positive affect savoring, which is the deliberate practice of lingering in a pleasant sensation for just a little longer than you normally would. For example:
- When you take a sip of coffee you enjoy, pause.
- When someone says something kind, let it land.
- When you feel a moment of ease, notice it in your chest or shoulders.
Even 10 to 15 seconds of sustained attention to a positive sensation begins to strengthen the neural pathways associated with safety and reward. It's a way of training your nervous system to learn that just because an experience is new, does not mean it is dangerous, and you don't have to shut down. Practice this regularly and see joy imperceptibly lasting a little longer than usual.
2. Reduce The Cognitive Noise That Smothers Joy
Joy can also feel elusive to you when it's drowned out by other mental clutter. You might be having a good moment, but part of your mind might already be rehearsing what comes next, or thinking about what you forgot to do or what you should be worrying about. What joy really requires is conscious presence.
This is not just a philosophical idea; it shows up clearly in experimental research. In a randomized controlled trial with university students, just two weeks of daily mindfulness training led to significant reductions in anxiety, stress, negative emotion and, crucially, long-term reductions in rumination that became even stronger three months later.
The intervention didn't magically remove life stressors. What it changed was the mind's habit of spinning, rehearsing and looping around them. In other words, when the rumination quietened down, their well-being automatically rose higher.
This helps explain why, when the mind is loud, joy often tends to disappear. Or when attention is constantly fragmented or pulled into past regrets, future worries and self-monitoring, positive moments pass through too quickly to register. Mindfulness, on the other hand, works by reducing the cognitive interference that blocks it.
One of the most effective ways to begin doing this is not meditation in the traditional sense, but something far more practical: monotasking.
Pick one small activity per day to do without multitasking, like eating without scrolling, or walking without listening to anything or showering without planning your day. You will notice that when the mind stops narrating for a moment, the nervous system can finally register what has been true all along: that something good is happening right now.
3. Build Meaningful Anticipation Of Joy
The brain does not become more responsive when rewards are received, but rather when rewards are expected. Core hubs of motivation and dopamine signaling light up most strongly during the moment of looking forward to something good. This is how the brain creates momentum: by leaning into pleasure.
When people are asked to imagine future activities while also picturing how they will feel emotionally, their motivation rises significantly more than when they imagine the same activities in a neutral, factual way. Anticipated pleasure or affective forecasting, is one of the brain's most powerful drivers of engagement and well-being. The mind begins to organize itself around what is coming next.
However, in a world of instant access and instant gratification, with no waiting on the horizon, there is very little anticipation. The brain's reward circuitry gets flooded with stimulation but starved of forward-looking excitement. Pleasure becomes something you consume rather than something you move toward, and, ultimately, joy is flattened into mild distraction.
One way to reverse this is not to seek bigger thrills, but to deliberately create small, predictable sources of future pleasure. These are predictable pleasures your nervous system can begin to look forward to. It could look like a weekly coffee ritual, a monthly solo date, a favorite show you only watch on certain days or a creative project you return to every weekend.
These rituals work because they create predictable positive expectancy. They're not extraordinary, but they can still give the brain something to anticipate and simulate, which can be looked forward to.
Over time, this shifts your emotional baseline; in turn, your future might start to feel less like a threat and more like a series of invitations. Joy, in this sense, is not just about what you feel right now, but about where your mind is pointed next.
Is joy already a capacity you carry? Take the science-backed Self Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire to find out.
Take my fun and science-inspired Inner Voice Archetype Quiz to see if your inner chatter is blocking you from savoring joy.