I recently had the pleasure of participating in a 10 week class that today's guest Alyssa Vogelwede, taught about the science of building joy. My mind was blown on so many levels during the course that I just knew I had to have Alyssa on to share her wisdom with us. I had never really given joy much thought, other than holding the belief that it was not much different than "happiness", but boy was I wrong! Alyssa shares with us the distinctly different traits of joy, where it's housed in the brain, how it operates much like a battery charger to the rest of the brain, and it's relationship with desperately needed skills in recovery like emotional regulation, maturity and character development.
Alyssa shares with us the brains capacity for building joy, the basic ingredients necessary to begin the process, and how to start exercising your joy muscle so you can build more joy into your life. She highlights the especially important topic of relationships, and how joy fertilizes the soil for healthy community development. She also gives us practical tips on how to amplify joy throughout the day, so we can build our emotional resilience and capacity for big feelings. Alyssa and I discuss the concept of "joy camp", how we can map our brains back to joy, and how we can make joy our default emotion. Lastly, Alyssa takes us through a 5 step process of how information comes into our brains, and how our brain uses old and or updated files to process that information. She also shares where the brain can short circuit, potentially leading us to use "pseudo joys" like processed foods, substances or unhealthy behaviors in place of true joys, and how we can begin to recognize where pseudo joys may be taking up space in our lives.
This was truly one of my favorite episodes so far. This discussion was so incredibly helpful to me, and I know it's going to bless so many of you who may be looking for ways to increase your own joy. I hope you'll give it a listen and feel as inspired as I did to start implementing some of the easy tools that Alyssa shared with us in this episode. If you would like to learn more about Alyssa or what she has to offer you can learn more about her here: https://www.claritygroup.org/alyssa-voglewede or you can reach out to her private practice at Rising Oaks in Castle Pines Colorado https://www.therisingoaks.com/
Slide of the 5 levels of information processing:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rionybmye3j2wvv/5%20Levels%20of%20the%20Brain%20%283%29.pdf?dl=0
