How to Be More Joyful (W/ Ingrid Fetell Lee) | How to Be a Better Human | TED

And I'm starting to get really nervous because for a long time no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy. " Joy? I wanted to be a designer because I wanted to solve real problems. Joy is nice, I guess, but it's kind of light, not substantial. I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible intangible joy? " They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said. And this launched a journey, one that I didn't know at the time, would take me 10 years to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious quicksotic emotion we call joy. Hi, I'm Ingred Fatelli. I am a designer and a researcher who studies the relationship between our emotions and our surroundings. I am the author of a book called Joyful and I wrote a blog called The Aesthetics of Joy. Ingred, so let's get started with something that you actually mentioned right before we started this interview. You said I'm not like 100% in the joyful headsp space. It might take me a minute to get back into it. — Well, it's funny. So, I was talking about how I am researching something new and it's very heady. I'm very in my mind. And I think one of the things that always brings me back to joy is getting back into my body somehow. In this case, like it literally for me was putting on like a colorful, you know, something brightly colored, going for a quick walk or, you know, jumping like doing a few jumps in the air like a kid would do. Um, or spinning around like some physical movement I think often helps to get me out of that rumination headsp space or your, you know, worrying or thinking over problems and back into um, you know, your joyful body. Something that Aesthetics of Joy, the blog that you wrote and continue to write, has made me think a lot about is the way in which these things like putting on a colorful piece of clothing or like having polka dots in your house that there are these ways that we can kind of like structurally put more joy into our lives. And I had never thought about it that way before I started reading your work. — You know, as a kid growing up, I always thought of joy as this thing that you stumble upon, you know, if you get lucky. um you get a few moments of joy in a day, but you never really know where they're going to come from. Um and it wasn't until I became a designer where I was actually, you know, learning to create things something out of nothing, right? You know, you have an idea and you actually literally turn it into physical matter. Um that I started to think about could we actually create things that give this feeling of joy? And if we could, wouldn't that be amazing? because it would take some of the pressure off having to do it for ourselves. If we can put more of it on our surroundings, then you know we have chances we have these repeatable chances to experience joy in our daily lives. — Before we go too much further, I think maybe we should just go back to square one and say what is joy? — We often use the words joy and happiness interchangeably. There are so many words in our culture that we use for positive emotions. Um, and yet they kind of all get mixed up. And I think it's for me it's most helpful to define joy in relationship to happiness because those are the two that I think get most uh conflated. So when psychologists use the word joy, what they generally mean is an intense momentary experience of positive emotion. And this is something that we can measure through direct physical expressions. things like smiling and laughter, feeling of wanting to jump up and down. You know, you watch a kid and if they're in a moment of joy, you know, um because they don't mask it, they don't hide it. It's this very um physical visceral feeling. I think this is a really powerful distinction because we spend a lot of our time pursuing happiness, you know, trying to figure out what is the precise combination of things to put into place in our lives that's going to create that perfect state of happiness, that kind of happily ever after from the fairy tales. And yet these little moments of joy are happening all the time. They're always available to us. And when we start to gather them up, lots of positive changes start to happen in our lives. — Little kids are so full of joy and it's very natural. You are very much an adult and you are a joyful adult. So can you talk about like how you bring joy in to the phase of life that you're in? I love that you brought this up because I think this is such a deep cultural bias that we have, right? That joy is for children um or we associate it with childhood and therefore it must be juvenile. The idea that

that we can retain joy as we age, it often isn't modeled for us, right? I think a lot of us have seen joy be pushed off to the sort of edges of our lives. And so to me, it's less about, you know, how do I bring joy into this phase of life, but how do I um remember that that's actually my natural state? — It feels like a lot of this comes from um being a designer and you having a background in design. So kind of seeing how joy is created through curves or through um a you know a window that's an unexpected shape or through color or through the design of an interaction or an event. Um I think of that as like a much a nuanced sophisticated view of joy that's not just like kids love bubbles and that's great but I think you kind of think about but why what is it about bubbles that we love? For a lot of us, when we think, oh, we're going to make something joyful, we think about what is joyful, and then we just do that. So, it's like, oh, kindergarteners are joyful. Okay, we're just going to put brightly colored bean bags everywhere and we're just gonna, you know, put Legos everywhere and bubbles and that's just going to make it joyful. And you're right, as part of my work, what I was trying to understand was, you know, what makes these things specifically joyful. And it's understanding that there are sensorial qualities to those joyful things that are repeatable that we can find throughout cultures all over the planet. Um so things like bright color, um round shapes, um a sense of abundance and multiplicity as a feeling of lightness or elevation, repeating patterns. And it's that level of abstraction of being able to understand what is the essence that's actually making this joyful from a neuroscientific perspective that allows us to then say okay well what's really doing the work of creating the joy is the repetition. It's the repetition of the circular shape and those two things together are what's creating that feeling of joy. And so we can apply that idea somewhere else and it doesn't necessarily have to feel — Let's do a quick exercise. What are three things in the last week that have given you joy? — You know, they're pretty mundane, but um but I think that's the nature of it, right? Is often we're finding joy in these like really mundane things. Um the first is so my son has not been wanting to go to school. Maybe I'm a little bit like too like, you know, get your shoes on, let's go in the mornings. I'm not in the joy mindset. So he started playing a different artist every morning in the car, a different artist from, you know, my childhood, my growing up. And that's been so just watching him get so excited for like what is the artist of the day and what we're going to pick. That has been a really joyful thing for me. — Oh, I love that. — Yeah. So maybe that one's not — It's joyful even just to hear about secondhand. — Yeah. It's like it's like, oh, we can take this thing that we've sort of we've settled into this kind of slump around and we can actually turn that into something um that's joyful. The second is just the sun coming out. It has been really gloomy and we've had like a couple of sunny days and it has just been like giving me so much life. And the third is um I've been planting and so I've been back in the garden. Just really great feeling to be out in the sunshine, hands in the dirt. It's also interesting to note that just remembering and listing those three, I started smiling, you started smiling. There was kind of this second wave of joy of just remembering and reexperiencing a joyful thing. — Absolutely. Recounting joyful moments is one of the ways to extend and deepen our experiences of joy. And so telling someone about it, a lot of us are taught to sort of downplay our joy either because we're afraid of seeming like we're bragging. Uh silly or frivolous because we're sort of in this very cheerful, joyful state. So sometimes it can be helpful to overexpress because our brains are sort of reading our bodily state. And when we do a happy dance, when we get a good email or, you know, something like that, it sort of sends that BOF feedback that you're in a joyful state and it tends to sort of reinforce that idea of an upward spiral where you're looking now for more joy and you're more attuned to it. — I love that. And I'm going to deliberately overemphasize how much I love that as a thing. That's so good. Someone tells you something good or you tell them something good and then you both celebrate it together. That feels so good. — Yeah, it feels good and it's also really important. There are all these like viral red flags posts going around or green flags like maybe we'll stay in the green flag but like a green flag in a relationship is someone who will celebrate your good news with you and be actively celebrating with you and they are like you know wanting to build on that. You know you say hey like I got

this promotion and like the they are just like so excited. They want to talk about it with you. They want to hear all about it. They want um you to tell the story over and over again. Go out to dinner with someone else, they're like, "Tell the story, tell the story. " Right? Like those kinds of that kind of encouragement is, I think, a really positive green flag in a relationship. — There's lots of things that I like about comedy. But one of the biggest ones is just this not just license, but requirement to walk around the world looking for strange, hilarious, odd things that make me laugh. — Well, so I call it in my line of work, I call it joy spotting. this idea that you're attuning your senses to what's joyful in your surroundings and you're picking that stuff up. You're sort of collecting it, but you become kind of like this joy or humor collector because you know you have a responsibility to pass it on. — Like that's what you signed on for is to pass that on and to help other people laugh. And so you're looking for those things with a very generous eye, right? It doesn't necessarily have to be something that is big or momentous. It can be literally like I saw this car and it was your favorite color. — I had to send it to you. You know um they can be very trivial but I think we forget you know what's great about joy and humor as well is that they're just such great excuses to connect. — What would you say to a person who is listening and they are saying I got nothing. It is hard to find joy. I do an exercise in my talks where I ask people to close their eyes and I give them prompts um to sort of think of something that might have brought them joy recently. And every talk I often get people come up to me at the end and say, "I got nothing — and should I be worried about that? " Right? It's not that there's anything wrong with you if you can't come up with something. Right? We go through seasons of life where joy is hard to find. Um, but we also sometimes fall out of the habit of it because we went through something hard and we've forgotten to put joy back into our lives or we've forgotten that we're entitled to joy and we know that everything that gives us joy we will lose eventually. So if you've experience that loss, you may struggle to find it. And to me, the simplest thing is just um starting this practice of joy spotting or noticing joy around you or trying to pay attention when it just comes over you. Catch yourself smiling, right? Be the observer who catches yourself smiling or catches yourself laughing and notice what's happening in those circumstances. And then you can start to work on creating more of those moments. joy is in there and it is your natural state. There is a piece of you that still remembers it. Um so and it will feel very familiar when it starts to come back. — Is there some part of the fleetingness that is also what makes it special? — I'm really glad you asked this because it's it gets at the evolutionary purpose of joy. — So we often think of joy as just this nice thing that we have and doesn't really have a purpose. And you know, for many decades in psychology, that was sort of how it was treated because there really wasn't a ton of interest in positive emotions. And so positive emotions were just kind of like this extra and everything was focused on the pathologies, right? On the mental illness and how do we, you know, remedy mental illness. And no one was really thinking about joy. Um, it was just a thing that was like this evolutionary nice to have. And then when psychologists started to dig into it, they realized that like we don't nothing is universal in human nature without a purpose. Joy is one of those seven universal emotions that is consistent in all humans. Then why is why do we have it? And the sort of consensus that emerged is that joy evolved to move us toward things that would be beneficial for our survival and the thriving of the species, right? And so when we see things that bring us joy, they are um they are signs of what can help us thrive. — In my personal experience, often people who are doing the on the ground work to address some of the most serious, least joyful problems are really joyful themselves. And I don't think that they see it as a contradiction. — Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe what we're really feeling when we feel joy when we feel guilty about joy is actually it's guilt about our inaction or our sense of detachment um from the problem and not necessarily actually the joy. Really this idea that joy can thrive even in the most um unexpected places because these are places that experience extreme hardship. Um, and yet joy can be alive and well in those places. — What are some of the things that you found have most resonated with people and have been people have been able to put into place in their own life to bring some more joy into it? — That's a big question.

Um, okay. Uh, one thing that seems to immediately resonate with people is color. This idea that having more color in our surroundings, uh, can create joy in a repeatable way. I think really tends to click for people, especially because, you know, we've many of us are working in offices that are gray and beige. Uh we come home to homes that are kind of white and beige. Um and that, you know, these neutrals have sort of taken hold and we don't really know why they've taken hold. And I think people go and they're like, "Yeah, why don't I have more color in my life? " And then they put a little into their homes. you know, they paint a couple walls or they buy something colorful and they bring it home and like even if it's like a colorful coffee mug, it's like something so small and simple or they start wearing more color. And that was my hope for the book that people would start to look at their surroundings in a different way. Of course, I'm also really excited when people who are in involved in spaces in the community start to look at their spaces in a different way. teachers when they start to look at the school environment create more joy in the school building or you know the crosswalks or the playground areas around the school. — If you were to say like describe joy all of the examples that I would have given you said give me 20 examples of joy I would have given you individual or maybe at most family and friend examples. I had would have thought of it in a much more individual way before I read your book. — Right. I it I think we have a very individualistic society. Right. So we tend to concentrate our efforts uh toward joy in the private realm. The result of that is that our common spaces often when we even have them, right? They lack joy. So like you go to Europe and you have these beautiful common spaces and piazas and places where people gather and you know we lack a lot of those in the US. Um, but even when we do have them, they tend to be focused on commercialism and economic activity rather than on the creation of joy. And so viewing those spaces through the lens of joy, I think, is a we can suddenly see what's missing. So, I'm all for the reintroduction, a reinfusion of joy into our public spaces because I think it's part of what we're trying to achieve in terms of reinvigorating our communal um our communal rituals and our communal life. — You are the author of a book called Joyful. You run courses for people about finding joy, about decorating with joy, about living with joy. Do you ever feel like pressure to be joyful when you're not joyful all the time? No, I don't think it's a pressure to feel joyful when I'm not. I think it's I have a lot of gratitude for having chosen this lens on the world. And part of that is because again, I don't expect joy to last. So I know that there are going to be crappy days. And my job on the crappy days is not to force myself to feel joy or put on a happy face. it is to feel the other feelings and stay available to joy. You know, I think the way that I used to think about it was, oh, I'm having a bad day. I just get through this bad day and then I will, you know, maybe tomorrow will be a better day. Now, my mindset is more this is really a bad day and there might be one joyful thing in this day and one day I might not remember all the stuff that was so hard today, but I might remember that. And so I'm just gonna stay available to the possibility of it. — Ingred, this has been uh such a delight to talk to you. I am always and forever a fan of your work and I'm really glad that you made the time to be on the show. It was truly a delight. — Oh, likewise. It was really fun. Thank you so much for having me.