When it comes to joy, it's what you do everyday that counts

this essay first appeared in my newsletter, The Monthly Pep Talk. if you’d like to subscribe for a big old dose of positivity in your inbox every month, you can sign up here.

I’ve spent the last few weeks heading around the UK on a little book tour, visiting bookshops and beautiful venues to talk about Choose Joy. Despite being very pregnant and very tired, it has been perhaps the loveliest few work weeks of my year, and that’s because I’ve been doing what I love - talking about joy and how we can find more of it with brilliant humans.

On Thursday night I found myself in Nottingham for the last night of the tour. As I sat sipping tea at the beautiful Co-Working Clubhouse, I was asked a question that inspired this newsletter: “when it comes to joy, are we better of investing our energy in the big life goals, such as a dream holiday or a promotion, or the smaller, everyday habits?”.

It was a question that stuck out to me, because for so long, I got the answer wrong. I thought that joy existed in the big moments, and so I chased them relentlessly. I booked holiday after holiday, I worked overtime trying to reach the next promotion. I thought that happiness would arrive once we finally bought a house, or when we got engaged, or when I ticked off some big goal like running a marathon.

And yet, despite doing all of those things (and enjoying some of them to a certain extent), my life never really felt more joyful. I’d experience a high while I was boarding the plane, or sharing my next big milestone with friends, but within a couple of days or a week, I’d find myself back where I was before - soulsearching, feeling deeply unsatisfied, craving the next hit. 

I know now that what I was experiencing was arrival fallacy. Arrival fallacy, generally defined as the false belief that reaching a valued destination can sustain happiness, is what causes us to think “I’ll be happy when…”. It keeps us in constant pursuit of the next goal or milestone, sacrificing joy along the way, because we believe we’ll have a big happiness pay off when we get there.

But the research tells us that happiness pay off never comes. We experience a surge of joy or happiness, one that might last for a few days or a couple of weeks at most, and then we return to the exact same baseline level of life satisfaction that we had before. We see this, for example, when people get married - they report feeling really happy the weekend of the wedding and they might experience some sort of honeymoon bubble, but research shows that getting married doesn’t drastically improve someone’s baseline level of happiness if nothing else in their life changes.

And so, to go back to our question of whether it’s better to invest our energy into big life goals or smaller habit changes, here’s my answer: it’s what you do everyday matters. Those big special milestones moments make up so little of our lives - they account for 3-4 weeks of the year at most. What our lives are made up of are the things we do everyday - the things we prioritise on a soggy Thursday, the activities we make time for week in week out, the people we’re surrounded with day to day.

It’s not that we want to erase those milestone moments from our lives - we still want to go on holidays, and fall in love, and achieve the things we’ve always dreamed of. We just can’t rely on them to sustain our joy - because science tells us they never will. Instead, we need to pour our attention into raising our happiness baseline - making our everyday so good that we don’t have as far to fall when we return from our holiday or experience a post-achievement come down.

So today, I wanted to remind you all that when it comes to joy, it’s what you do everyday that counts. Stop forgoing the little things that light you up in order to achieve something that won’t make you feel any better in the long run. Stop believing that your happiness exists in some far flung future state - it’s available to you right here, right now. You just have to start choosing it. 

And I think that’s especially important to consider at this time of year, when so many of us are sacrificing daily joy in the hope that Christmas will be so great it’ll make up for it. Christmas is such a special time of year - but it’s also just a couple of days or a couple of weeks at most. Killing yourself to hit a work deadline or achieve some sort of “festive perfection” (no such thing) won’t make you any happier come January - but making tweaks to how you enjoy your everyday will. 

Put your effort there instead.