How to Find Joy Again When the World Feels Overwhelming

Content Warning: This introduction includes a brief reference to suicide, grooming, and an eating disorder. If this feels triggering to you, please skip ahead to the section A Steady Joy in an Unsteady World. 💖

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or has experienced sexual violence or abuse—including grooming—please contact one of the organizations listed below.

Joy Was My Lifeline

I used to think I had a happy childhood that most people would’ve envied.

That changed when my parents separated about four years ago. Being a go-between throughout the final years of their marriage uncovered a box of painful memories that I had buried under highlight reels of joyful moments.

When I left home, I held on to precious memories such as:

Playing with my siblings in the clear blue waters of the Pacific Ocean

Dressing up to see my first opera, Carmen, with my mom

Riding to school on the back of my dad’s motorcycle just to feel cool for a moment

Being piled up to my nose in fragrant leis by my “aunties”, “uncles”, and friends on graduation night

Ready to leave the negativity behind, I tucked away my memories of:

Going to therapy at five because a concerned neighbor overheard me threatening to jump off a balcony over a dispute—in imitation of things I observed at home

Listening to explosive arguments between my parents

Being groomed at fifteen by a man who stepped in to “mentor” my brother while my dad was deployed on a naval sub with the United States Navy for six months

Eating bowls of cereal under duress every morning after my pediatrician warned my mother that I was two pounds away from being hospitalized for anorexia

Looking back, I realize that I inherited generational trauma because my parents just didn’t have the support they needed to be healthy together.

It amazes me that it took thirty-five years to finally see how much all of this has impacted my life.

Why did it take so long?

As a child, my mind protected me by pulling all the joyful memories to the front and nudging all the painful memories out of sight until I felt strong enough to confront them.

In other words, joy got me through the tough times. It cleared my path to a life full of love and purpose.

The joy that got me through the difficult parts of my childhood came not from the happy moments themselves, but from a deep appreciation for what I did have—like the privilege of growing up on Oahu with its lush valleys and the time spent exploring the island with my family.

Even so, I could only coast on joy for so long before losing momentum.

Sadly, as I grew older and learned more about how the real world works, joy became less instinctual and more laborious to maintain. This realization inspired me to dig deeper into the true meaning of joy, its connection with mental health, and ways to increase it.

A Steady Joy in an Unsteady World

The further I went into adulthood, the easier it became to take the positive aspects of life for granted. Instead of enjoying the full vibrancy of life, I would anticipate problems and fixate on them when they surfaced. Over time, my focus shifted from joy to pain.

Thankfully, gratitude journaling has nudged me back in the right direction.

Pausing to express gratitude puts my negative thoughts into perspective by drawing my attention to simple pleasures. This helps me find joy even in the face of challenges.

As a society, we need gratitude now more than ever. Economic disparity and political clashes fuel widespread discontent and a sense of hopelessness. Though rooted in valid concerns, these doom spirals often compound our personal problems.

I struggle with anxiety and depression at the best of times, so these last few years have really tested my limits.

Greed, hypocrisy, and hatred deeply disturb me, so the constant wave of ragebait headlines only amplifies my anxiety and stirs up pessimism. I know I’ve overdone it with my news intake when my conversations default to society’s worst traits.

In these moments, I need to reframe my thinking for the sake of myself and everyone around me. Though things appear dire on an international scale, I still have so many good things happening in my personal life.

For one thing, I have a joyful marriage. We don’t expect every moment to be perfect, but we do our best to take care of each other. We also accept each other’s quirks—especially my chaotic executive functioning and his deeply introverted nature.

We disagree on things all the time, but we try to avoid the explosive arguments I observed growing up. They happen so infrequently that my eight-year-old once asked me, “How come you and Dad never fight?”

Taking time to appreciate the stability of my marriage keeps me grounded in my present circumstances. My family and I have love and emotional safety at home, even in uncertain times.

Less bad news and more gratitude means a calmer nervous system. When we focus on what’s right in front of us, we no longer carry the weight of things we have little control over. This leaves us energy to deal with the things that directly impact our lives as they come instead of using it all on things that may or may not affect us later.

Nonetheless, this isn’t an invitation to become emotionally detached or uninformed about the world’s problems. Joy and awareness are not mutually exclusive. I still care very deeply about people affected by hatred and inequity, but we can’t let doomscrolling rob us of the joy right in front of us.

Examining Our Assumptions About Joy

Gratitude and boundaries keep us present, but we can’t fully enjoy our experiences if we cling to rigid ideas about what joy should look or feel like. For example, the belief that happiness depends on wealth often leads to burnout when people work long hours to acquire more.

Last week, I introduced Marianne Dashwood from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. While her sister keeps her emotions steady, Marianne tends to run hot or cold.

She begins the story with an overly romanticized view of relationships, declaring, “I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music, must charm us both.”

I held similar views as a teenager and, like Marianne, let my heart lead me to men who were emotionally unavailable.

My marriage is a textbook example of opposites attract, but we’ve managed to blend our differences into something harmonious.

I love all kinds of music. He prefers audiobooks.

I enjoy psychology. He’s more of a physics guy.

I work with children. He works with machines.

I had always anticipated fireworks when I met “the one,” but truthfully, our first date at a coffee shop felt pretty anticlimactic.

We had a pleasant conversation, but neither of us left thinking, “This is it!”

We hadn’t gone into the date with any expectations. Still, things went well enough that we didn’t see a reason not to have a second date.

It wasn’t long before we felt the “spark,” and here we are now—joyfully married twelve years and counting.

Joy doesn’t always make a splash when it enters your life.

Love found me when I ignored my blueprint and focused on how I felt in the moment. Still, we tend to overlook other meaningful possibilities when we equate singleness with misery.

Joy exists outside of romance.

I feel nothing but gratitude for my husband and children. Nonetheless, I regret giving so much weight to society’s expectations around marriage and motherhood.

I’d tied my worth to being dateable and allowed unrealistic beauty standards to shape my self-perception. My bathroom scale determined how good I felt about myself on any given day.

When my weight was down, I felt like I had endless opportunities to find love and live happily ever after. Fears of dying alone would ring in my head when the number crept up by just a few pounds.

I’d gotten stuck in a mindset that blinded me to the possibility of finding joy within myself.

It saddens me to think about how much that mindset held me back from finding joy sooner. Embracing solitude as a time for introspection and growth would’ve put me on much more solid ground before settling down. Yet this regret has taught me a profound lesson.

If we want a life of joy, we need to examine the things we want and understand our motivations. It helps to recognize the fixed judgments we bring into different situations and learn to challenge them with openness and curiosity. This gives us space to find joy in unexpected ways.

This free Fixed Idea Inventory printable walks you through choosing an area of life that feels out of alignment, identifying the fixed ideas you bring into that space, and exploring the emotional patterns that follow.

When Misalignment Steals Our Joy

Joy also comes from living in alignment with our values.

When we drift away from our core beliefs, we leave room for nagging guilt to take up space in our mind, crowding out moments of joy.

For example, I tend to value meaningful experiences with family and friends over material things. Yet in the year leading up to my hospitalization, financial stress drove me to put in long, lonely hours of tutoring every day.

We had just bought a home and put brand new appliances on credit cards, and we hadn’t anticipated the exorbitant cost of homeowner’s insurance.

As our household budget shrank, I became anxious about how I would pay my student loans and make it to my cousin’s wedding a few states away.

Not one to wait around for pieces to fall into place, I took on a bunch of tutoring gigs with students from all over the world. This created a steady stream of income but a nightmare of a schedule.

4:30 AM — Wake up for tutoring sessions with students in Asia

9:00 AM — Sign off and shift into Mom mode for my own children

4:00 PM — Leave the kids to my exhausted husband and tutor students on the East Coast

6:00 PM — Sign off to cook dinner

8:00 PM — Tutor students on the West Coast

11:00 PM — Sign off for bed without spending any time with my own children

I earned more than enough money to pay my bills and make travel arrangements. I’d even been able to buy myself and my kids things we’d wanted for a long time.

Unfortunately, my full-time side hustle had serious consequences for my mental health and my family life.

For one thing, the house spiraled out of control. Mountains of clothes, toys, and dishes piled up everywhere.

My children lived in chaos, but I never had any time to make it right.

That’s when my inner bully started laying into me.

I felt guilty all the time. The triumph I’d once felt from taking matters into my own hands morphed into a constant feeling of failure. Over time, it spiraled into a depression so deep that I needed professional help to finally escape.

I lost sight of the things that mattered most to me, and it nearly cost me my mental health.

This experience highlights the importance of staying true to our values.

We need to regularly evaluate how we use our time, energy, and resources, making sure that our actions align with what we want most out of life.

If our pursuits leave us feeling emotionally drained, it’s time to shift our focus back to the things that bring us joy.

This free Bringing Joy Back Into Alignment printable can help you uncover where joy is being blocked by mismatched values or habits.

Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey

If you’re ready to explore what joy looks like in your life right now, start with this Joy Readiness Toolkit. I designed it to help you understand how you experience joy, regulate your emotions, and stay aligned with your values in daily life.

Meaningful Actions to Try:

Start your day with gratitude by noticing something that brings you joy. This Daily Joy Check-In offers guided reflection.
Choose an area of your life that needs more joy, and look for fixed ideas and judgments that may be overshadowing your joy. This Fixed Idea Inventory supports you through the process.
Identify habits that don’t align with your values. This Bringing Joy Back Into Alignment printable includes gentle prompts to help you reflect.

Book Recommendation:

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, explores the theme of steadiness through adversity. (Download a free copy through Project Gutenberg.)

Cultivating Lasting Joy

Joy gets us through really difficult seasons, but it takes effort to find it and maintain it. To keep a positive outlook, we need to take time to notice joyful moments in our day and express gratitude.

Fixed ideas and judgments can steer us away from experiences that could bring happiness and contentment, so we need to live with openness and curiosity.

It also helps to check in with ourselves regularly to make sure our habits and routines align with our core values. With self-awareness and an open mind, we can cultivate lasting joy that stabilizes us in turbulent times.

Thank you so much for joining me this week! If this post resonated with you, share it with anyone who could use a little more joy right now, and subscribe to receive an email notification when my next post goes live.

Self-Love Isn’t Selfish: Daily Practices That Transform Mental Health