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Neuroscience Discovered a Clever Trick for Squeezing More Joy Out of Everyday Pleasures
In difficult and uncertain times, it is often impossible to make the larger world less crazy. But you can learn to squeeze more joy out of your everyday life.
This is a lesson author Sasha Chapin learned young. “My childhood was unpleasant, and as a coping mechanism, I tried to love, hard, the passably pleasant moments,” he wrote in his newsletter recently.
This lesson applies equally well to adults living through periods of political and economic upheaval. You can’t make those in charge behave better (until you vote them out) or stop artificial intelligence advancing. But you do control your immediate environment and your reaction to it.
Why not leverage that to maximize the amount of happiness you can squeeze from everyday pleasures?
In his newsletter, Chapin offers a long list of ideas on how to do just that. It’s 100 percent worth a read if you’re looking for some more joy to balance out the stress of an unstable world. But one idea in particular struck me as not only easily actionable, but also rooted in cutting-edge neuroscience.
Better words lead to more joy
As a writer, I am a committed word nerd. So perhaps it’s no shock that I particularly…
