Creating a Joyful Life with ADHD
Nikki Kinzer and Pete Wright aim to explore the meaning of joy, the differences between joy and happiness, and practical ways to cultivate more joy in daily life living with ADHD.
This episode dives into the essence of joy, including surprise moments as well as practices that help align us to experience joy more frequently. Nikki shares insights from a recent retreat focused on sound, music, and vibrations for generating joy and harmony in life.
Key points covered
Defining joy as moments of transcendent happiness sparked by surprise, versus the overall state of happiness. "Joy involves changes in visual perception. Colors seem brighter, motor behavior, physical movements feel freer and easier, smiling happens involuntarily."
Happiness as a constant state, while joy represents fleeting peaks within the state of contentment. An analogy: "Happiness is a 100-story building, and joy is the elevator that takes you to higher floors briefly."
The importance of letting difficult emotions move through you rather than ruminating endlessly. "Feel the storm, and then let it move through you."
Questions we answer in this episode
What is the difference between joy and happiness?
How can we cultivate more joy in daily life?
What are tools for moving through grief or trauma to regain joy?
Key Takeaways
If seeking joy, focus on aligning practices toward joy.
Turn toward positive thoughts, music, and sights that spark joy. What you focus on grows.
Meditation, journaling, and talk therapy help stop rumination loops.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello everyone. Hello Pete Wright.
Pete Wright:
Oh, hi Nikki Kinzer. Welcome to recording of the podcast. It's good to have you here. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, creating a joyful life.
Pete Wright:
We're creating a joyful life. This is a follow-up a little bit to our optimism show last week, the ever dancing twins, optimism and joy, and we are going to be talking about joy this week. What is it going to take to make Pete feel joy while his stomach hurts?
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
I know this could not have landed on a worst day when Pete does not feel very good and does not feel like he has much joy in his life.
Pete Wright:
That's okay.
Nikki Kinzer:
So my work is cut out for me, for sure.
Pete Wright:
I feel the show buoys my spirits, so I'm excited to be hanging out and talking about this stuff and seeing what you have come up with since the last time we talked about joy, which was now years ago.
Nikki Kinzer:
A couple years ago, a couple of years ago. Yeah, three years ago, I guess.
Pete Wright:
Before we dig into joy, head over to takecontroladhd.com and get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to the mailing list, and we will send you an email each time a new episode is released. You can connect with us on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD. But to really connect with us, join us in the ADHD Discord community. We love Discord and we love seeing you in Discord, and it's super easy to jump into the general community chat channels. All you got to do is visit takecontroladhd.com/discord and you will be whisked over to the general invitation and login.
Now, of course, if you're looking for a little bit more, and if the show has touched you or helped you understand your relationship with ADHD in a new way, we invite you to support the show directly through Patreon. Patreon is listener-supported podcasting. With a few dollars a month, you can help guarantee that we continue to grow the show, add new features, and invest more heavily in our community. And it unlocks all of the various and sundry super secret and triple super secret Discord channels in the community. The whole world opens up when you visit us on Patreon. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more. All right, Nikki, it's time to get joyful.
Now, some of this was inspired by your, famously by your wellness retreat.
Nikki Kinzer:
Oh, yes.
Pete Wright:
In the desert.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. And that is why I was so happy to come back from the wellness retreat and talk about optimism. And then, when we were talking about what kind of show do we want to do after that, I'm thinking this class that I took would be a perfect, like you said, twin, I like that to optimism.
So yes, the wellness retreat that I went on, there was different classes that you can take along with different meditations and a lot of fitness classes around yoga. They had this drumming or cardio with drums thing. I mean all kinds of stuff. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Cardio drums.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, where you get to drum.
Pete Wright:
Exotic.
Nikki Kinzer:
Like how fun is that, right? I didn't get to do it, because the class was full of course.
All right, so one of the classes that I took was called Creating Joy and Harmony with Richard Noel, and the workshop focused on, I suppose what you would call sound therapy. He is an author, producer, and keynote speaker, and he's the CEO of jam2grow.com, so you can learn more about him at jam2grow.com, and that's the number two.
And as soon as you walk into the room, this man had such a presence to him that just shouted joy. He had this big, huge smile and he just was lovely. And he welcomed each of us by looking at us in the eye, shaking our hand and saying, "Welcome. Welcome to this session."
And immediately I felt welcomed. I felt seen. I felt like, okay, this is going to be a good time. I could just tell, because the room was dark, but there was candles lit everywhere and they had these flashing kind of lights and it was going to this music that was kind of like an affirmation kind of music with loud drums and things like that.
And it was just really awesome. It was really fun. And he had a great sense of humor.
He actually before he even started, he gave each of us an essential oil on our wrist, a little tap of essential oil that was joy. He's like, "Look, you're already joyful. You have it on your wrist now."
Pete Wright:
What was in the oil?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, it's joy oil, right? He knew how to start it right. Before we get into it, I mean the mission of the workshop was to give us tools to overcome negative and self-sabotaging thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And he's a character. So a lot of the things that he would say rhymed. So he definitely made a show out of it.
But before I talk about the takeaways and some of the things I learned, I want us to go back a little bit to when we did a presentation on joy for the ADHD International Conference, and this was in 2020.
So Pete, what is joy? What do you think is the definition of joy?
Pete Wright:
Okay, so for me, joy is that transcendent experience of happiness that is sparked by an immediate, surprising act of goodness or kindness or humor, something that happens unexpectedly. For me, quintessential to joy is the surprise part of it. I read a whole bunch of different definitions, and that doesn't appear to be super consistent.
Nikki Kinzer:
No, no.
Pete Wright:
But that to me is a big part of it.
Nikki Kinzer:
So it's something you're not expecting necessarily.
Pete Wright:
Something I'm not expecting. And I went and I looked at the Oxford Companion to Emotion and Effective Sciences, and Oxford says, "Joy is a pleasant state that shares conceptual space with other positive emotions such as elation and happiness." Whatever Oxford. "Feelings of joy arise in circumstances appraised as safe, familiar, and requiring little personal effort." Yeah, I get that on my couch. "Joy is the pleasant state experienced when people have made progress toward important goals, especially when progress is better than expected." That is the first time we get anything related to surprise, and I can jam with that.
The other piece I just wanted to add when we're talking about definitions of joy is the thing that maybe surprises me positively, that Matthew Kuan Johnson wrote in the Journal of Positive Psychology that "joy involves a state of positive affect in which one experiences feelings of freedom, safety, and ease. Joy involves changes in visual perception. Colors seem brighter, motor behavior, physical movements feel freer and easier, smiling happens involuntarily. And there are characteristic changes in cognition. Thinking and attention are broadened and exercised in creative ways."
I think that is a lovely attachment to a definition of joy-
Nikki Kinzer:
I do, too-
Pete Wright:
... that reminds me that joy is physiological as much as it's psychological.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
For me, I agree with all those things. I do think that joy can come from being surprised or not expected, but I also believe that you can create it yourself. I don't think it has to be a surprise. I think it's moments in time that we're aware that we're feeling this joy, that we're feeling this type of feeling. So for me, it's like when you come home from a long day and your dog is so excited to see you. That's just a moment of joy, that moment. Or when you haven't seen somebody for a long time and you get to see them and you give them a big hug.
But it can also be moments when you're traveling and you notice something's just really beautiful. Maybe it's a landscape of mountains, the nature, something like that. It's like it just gives you that moment of, "Wow, this is such a beautiful place," and it's that moment of joy.
So I think a lot of it is being aware of what you're taking in and how you're processing it and not just ignoring it. And it's kind of like mindfulness. If we're more mindful about what we're doing, then we see more, we feel more, we experience more because we're not just going through the process or the motion of, "Oh, I'm going to take this hike and all I'm focused on is getting to the top," but you're not really looking at everything that's around you as you're getting to the top.
Pete Wright:
Right, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. We did this in our presentation before too, where we talked about the difference between happiness and joy because they're two different words, but do they actually mean the same thing? What do you think?
Pete Wright:
Well, and to a lot of people, I imagine they are. They're fungible words, just replace them. But I do think, as part of the slate of emotions, so much of it ends up being really cultural. The Inuit people have a bazillion words for snow. I imagine there are cultures that have a number of different words to describe this sensation that we encompass in this body of language, joy and happiness. It's this sort of Western convention or this sort of English convention of what joy is. And I think that's an interesting area of exploration.
Are they the same to me? No. To me, happiness is the overarching state of feeling of contentment, and joy represents the peaks that exist inside of that overarching sense of contentment.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I agree, because you're not asked very often, "Are you joyful?" But sometimes you will be asked, "Are you happy? Are you happy at your job? Are you joyful at your job?" Not so much a question, right? Yeah, so I do think that they are different as well.
And when we did this presentation before, we had this great analogy, and I wanted to share it again, that happiness is a state. Think of it as a 100-storey building and each level corresponds to a happiness value, so that happiness will persist over time. So eventually you might get to 70 or the 80th floor. Joy is that sudden burst of excitement. Joy is like the elevator in that building that takes you up to higher levels of happiness only for a small amount of time and back. So you can maybe shoot to 100 with joy, but because it's kind of a fleety moment, it can also take you back a little bit too. So good way of thinking about it.
So he attached a word into his presentation that we haven't talked about, and that's harmony. I'm curious what you think about what harmony is.
Pete Wright:
Well, I'm a musician, and so harmony is simultaneously presented musical notes that provide a pleasing sensation when presented in chords and chord progression.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
So I'm big on that. But I know that harmony also represents vibrations, and that is what music is, vibrations. And so understanding vibrations mean you can understand alignment when things are in alignment, when chords are played in alignment, where their vibrations are in alignment, they are pleasing. And I think maybe in the context of joy, we're looking at harmony as a way to describe our alignment with the space around us and our actions that are ahead of us. I don't know. Am I getting close?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, you're absolutely close. Because when he asked that question, I think everybody said something about music because that's what it is. And so much of his work is around music. So it kind of makes sense that he put this in here, for the exact reason what you're saying. And it's a positive description. Because when you think of, if you're in harmony, you just feel like, "Okay, you've got this flow. You're making this beautiful music." And what he is saying is that harmony allows components in our life to receive the necessary focus and attention necessary for the moment. So is your life in harmony? Is it in sync to where you want it to be? So that's how he is merging the two.
I have some key takeaways that he teaches and some of the things that I want to talk to you about Pete, and also get perspective too. I think it's not just telling you, "Oh, this is what I learned," but also have us kind of talk a little bit about it. First thing is, if you seek happiness and joy in everyday life, you must create it. What do you think?
Pete Wright:
I don't know that I completely understand it, because again, as I said at the beginning, sometimes the joy that I find in life exists without me.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Sure.
Pete Wright:
It exists without me first because it's a surprise. I think that the operative term is to seek happiness and joy in everyday life and to be open to being joyful, be open to the constant state of happiness. And that goes into what we were talking about last week. It is a practice to be optimistic. It is a practice to seek the good and not the ill effects. The glass is always full of something.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right. Do you think you can choose happiness or choose joy? Is it a choice?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. No, I mean, it's an alignment. It's an alignment. I have begun to resonate against that term, that phrase choose happiness the same way I resonate against ADHD as a superpower. ADHD is not a superpower, but it can manifest that way if you happen to be in alignment, in harmony with your hyperfocus on a project that needs to be done and you get it done, right? Then it can look like a superpower. Can I choose happiness?
If I have made a constant practice of every day doing the work to find the good, then maybe I've chosen happiness when I'm confronted with ill. Maybe it's easier for me to laugh through the difficult parts of grief. But does that mean if I am dealing with significant emotional dysregulation and someone says, "You got to choose to be happy," that I don't want to punch them in the stomach? Those things don't align for me. And so I want to be really careful about saying choose happiness, because I think that's doing false service to the work it takes to be positively aligned in the world.
Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I think that that is a very good point, especially if you're in the middle of some kind of storm. It's hard to go there and say, "Well, it's not that simple." And we know that it's not that simple.
Pete Wright:
And if somebody tells you to choose happiness, you're not going to choose happiness.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Right? That's not a good advice.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's timing. I think it's timing. I do believe that there's a choice there, but I think it also depends on where you are in this current situation. It may not be immediate, but at some point you do get to choose how you want to deal with this and how you want to-
Pete Wright:
Well, that's what I mean by alignment though. Because if you're going to use the word choice, the choice starts when you're not in the storm. When you're saying, "Okay, I've decided I'm going to be a person who finds the glass full all the time. I'm going to be that person. And then I will be, if I do the things that are a part of a practice, then when I'm confronted with a storm, I might have an easier way out of it."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Do you know what I'm saying?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
I think that's the nuance.
Nikki Kinzer:
Well, and I think it's letting go too. So I don't want to say it's just a choice, but it's also letting go. I feel like let's say that you are really bothered by a work evaluation. You just had a conversation with your boss. It really bothers you. You're not going to choose happiness from that conversation, but at some point, if you stay stuck in this conversation, it's going to keep ruminating. And we're going to talk about rumination in just a few moments. But it's going to stay there. And so if we don't want to stay there, then how do we let go and then choose to let that go, and then how do I move on?
Pete Wright:
Well, I think we answered it last week.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
We absolutely answered it last week. Because you've developed a practice now of understanding, of being able to approach anything that is challenging to you in the frame of that model, of the model that we talked about last week. Is this personal or global? Is this ... Go back and listen to that episode if you're wondering what I'm talking about, because it's really important. That's the practice. And that answers the question, how do you allow yourself to move on when confronted by change? You've already made the choice to understand how negative events can impact you, and now you get to use that to move on.
Nikki Kinzer:
So next one was focus on your thoughts, which we talk a lot about. What is your internal conversation? What are you saying to yourself? I think that's pretty ...
Pete Wright:
Totally agree.
Nikki Kinzer:
Relevant, right?
Pete Wright:
And I think research is showing that the more and more you can focus on your language and visualizing, these visualization tools deeply impact your lived experience.
Nikki Kinzer:
Absolutely.
Pete Wright:
Don't take that for granted kind of stuff.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Yeah. Life is not what you make it, but how you take it. How are you response ... These are his rhymes. Right?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
This is how he likes to rhyme. But how are you responding when things come before you that steal your happiness and joy? And I'm going to go a little further with this. So what he started to say is that we don't have control on what happens to us, but we do have control on how we respond. And how one phone call can change the rest of your life that can evoke emotions of sadness, anger, disappointment, grief. And these things happen. But what he's saying is he doesn't want that to be your resting place. Allow yourself to feel those emotions, feel that grief, be in that storm, and then let them move through you so you can go back to finding joy.
And we specifically talked about grief. My friend who was with me has lost two very close family members in the last ... well, one in just this last year, the other about five years ago. And this was a really important message for her to listen to because she had so much that she was holding on to around guilt and grief. So it was really interesting to just hear how, and it's all stuff we know, but maybe it's just good to hear it again, that you allow yourself to feel those things, but don't stay in it because it can kill you if you stay there.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. And I think Dr. Dodge has told us in the past and is a big proponent of this, you can't sit in it. You have to move through it, and sometimes you have to feel it very, very intensely. And once you feel it intensely, you have no choice but to move through it. Right? That's the interesting sort of paradox of navigating grief and trauma is exploring it, experiencing it, moves you through it. Does not allow you to be there. It's the act of protecting yourself from it that prevents you from moving on. And that's the paradox.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. So interesting.
Then the other piece that he was talking about was mood. And this was really fascinating to me because we talk about happiness, we talk about joy, we talk about all of these choices, everything we just talked about, but we don't really talk about our mood that much.
When he brought it up, I was just like, "Wait, what? What's that? What do you mean?" I thought that was a really important piece, is that your mood comes from your thoughts and emotions. So where your feelings go, this is his rhyming, your emotions follow, which leads you to your resting place, which is called your mood.
And really checking in with what is your mood? If you're not in the right mood that you want to be, asking yourself, what do you need right now? What are you feeling? What is the emotion that is bringing about this mood?
And you know what? Sometimes it can be you're hungry. We would go back to Sharon, Dr. Saline, it's, "We're hungry. I'm in a bad mood. I'm cranky. I'm tired. I need a nap." Or, "I need better sleep because I feel awful." But recognizing what is happening and what's causing this mood, and is there something you can do to, again, move through it to get to the feeling and the emotion that you want to have, that you want to show up for in the world.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a wonderful father-daughter duo, Fernando and Gloria Flores, and they have done some extraordinary thinking on moods. And Gloria actually wrote the book Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods: The Meta-Skill for the Acquisition of Skills. And her perspective is if you want to incorporate anything new into your life, you have to understand how your moods impact that experience.
And I think I've incorporated a little bit of it. The big one is to think about when I'm in the mood of provocation, right? That's a mood stance. And you can say, "I'm provoked right now." That means I'm curious. That means I'm ready. I'm ready to learn. I'm ready to ask questions. But if I haven't achieved that sort of mood state, then I'm not ready to learn, I'm not ready to change.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's like the changes. It's the levels of changes. It's the exact same thing. Yeah, that's so interesting.
Pete Wright:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
What's that called again? What's the book called?
Pete Wright:
I'll put it in the show notes. Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods. Gloria and Fernando Flores, they're awesome and brilliant thinkers on this subject. A lot of their work is in business and higher education, and that's why I came across it through higher ed. They don't do a whole lot in the space of neurodiversity and ADHD is not mentioned, but it is interesting if you're curious about this subject matter, it's worth exploring.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. That's great.
Okay, so then I found this fun fact, but it's not really a fun fact, and this is from his book. So the manifesto process begins once a single thought has been held for 17 seconds. So it has been proven that if a negative thought remains longer than 17 seconds, it takes residence within the mind. If you allow a negative thought to remain for longer than 17 seconds, the rumination process begins. And this is the tendency to repetitively think about the causes, situation and consequences of a negative emotional experience. So anyone with probably ADHD and especially anxiety, understand this situation.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I don't love hearing 17 seconds. That's not long enough.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't either.
Pete Wright:
Don't love that at all.
Nikki Kinzer:
That's not enough time.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't care for it.
Nikki Kinzer:
I don't either.
Pete Wright:
I don't care for it.
Nikki Kinzer:
He has some ideas, but I also threw in some of mine, too, that I wanted to share, some ideas to stop the rumination. We talked about those transition treats, those dopamine hits, and this is a perfect time to look for one. It's really hard to do when you're in bed and it's in the middle of the night and it's 3:00 AM and you can't stop thinking about something. But let's say that you're not and it's not in the middle of the night and you just had a terrible work meeting, and you can be in a situation where you can find a dopamine treat. So that can help. That can help.
Pete Wright:
Yes. For sure.
Nikki Kinzer:
There is a book by Mel Robbins who also has ADHD that's called five, four, three, two, one. And-
Pete Wright:
It's called the 5 Second Rule.
Nikki Kinzer:
5 Second Rule. Oh, you're right.
Pete Wright:
The fastest way to change your life. Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you. 5 Second Rule.
Pete Wright:
You're welcome.
Nikki Kinzer:
You see, I'm already doing the process.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, you're already doing the process.
Nikki Kinzer:
I have the book. I've read parts of it. I've had a couple of clients who've highly recommended it. Look it up on Google. I'm not going to really explain too much about it just because I don't quite understand enough about it. But there is this thing about when you count down and you know that at one you're going to do whatever it is that you want to do, and maybe that is to stop thinking about this, it stops that train of thought. So check it out. It's another resource that might be of value to you.
And then when I was thinking about rumination, I had to think of one of our most common guests, James Ochoa and all of the-
Pete Wright:
James Ochoa Hall of Fame, ADHD Podcast guest?
Nikki Kinzer:
Yes, James, that James Ochoa.
Pete Wright:
That James Ochoa?
Nikki Kinzer:
His book Focused Forward is wonderful. It has a lot of different strategies and breathing exercises. And so if you go back to any of our conversations with James, he is a big advocator for stopping and breathing and how that stops the train of thought and really re-centers our nervous system. This is something that you can do in the middle of the night, and it's also something you can do in the middle of a work meeting, and no one's going to know what you're doing, but it's calming you down.
Are you a journal writer? Do you write in a journal pretty consistently?
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
What are the benefits for you when you do that?
Pete Wright:
Internalizing new learning, helping my challenged memory, being able to attribute more of my memory to search, which allows me to kind of stay on top of it, and feeling balanced at the end of the day because my biggest challenge is to go through a day where I feel like I'm productive, but not having a memory of what I've actually accomplished. And when I ascribe those things to a daily kind of journal entry, then I'm able to look back and say, "Oh, you know what? I know my brain is not telling me lies, that I was accomplished. I did finish some things." So yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. I am not a consistent journal writer, but when I do, I think that one of the things that it does for me is that because you're not thinking about what you're writing and you're just free flowing whatever comes out, it's amazing to me what comes out. I didn't expect I was going to say this, but now that I've written it or think this, and now that I've written, it allows you to go in a little bit deeper of what's going on and questioning yourself a little bit more. Not in a negative way, in a non-judgmental way, but it's giving you insight that maybe you didn't have before you doing this practice.
So journaling, writing it down can definitely be a way to, for rumination especially, because I can imagine if you're writing down, this is what's bothering me, this is da, da, da, da, da, just the act of writing it down and getting it out of your head might be enough to be able to close the journal and then go back to sleep.
Pete Wright:
The biggest change to my journaling life was when I realized I didn't have to write in complete sentences.
Nikki Kinzer:
You could do bullet points or pictures or whatever, yeah.
Pete Wright:
I could just write stream of consciousness words because I had to forget, who am I writing this for? Who am I writing this for? I'm not writing this to be found someday in my end of the world bunker for someone to publish later. They were my thoughts, my last sort of story of my life. My life isn't that important. So what am I doing this for? I'm doing it for me. I'm doing it to retune, rewire my brain, and that's a big deal.
Nikki Kinzer:
But your life is very important. I just want you to know that because that can't go. Yeah, that's-
Pete Wright:
Well, it's something.
Nikki Kinzer:
It's a lot. It's a lot. Very important.
Okay. Meditation. I practiced meditation for a long, long time in my life, and then it stopped. It just stopped for about three years, and it was all around COVID, and it's been about three years. Going back to the wellness retreat brought me back to meditation, and I'm so glad it did because it is such a powerful tool for inner peace and just acceptance for what is right now.
Meditation is not just about focusing on your ... I mean, it is a lot about focusing on your breath, but I think some ADHD people fear that, "Oh, I can't do that because I can't focus on my breath. Why would I want to do that? That's crazy." And there's so much more to it than just the focused on your breath. If you haven't tried it, I definitely recommend doing some guided type of meditations. I think that's a lot easier than just trying to sit down and think you're going to meditate. Learn about it, learn about what it is, how it benefits you. Talk to other people who meditate. They'll tell you what difference it makes in their lives. But check it out. I think it's a good thing to check out.
And then the last thing I would say with the rumination is verbally processing with someone you trust. This is why talk therapy works, right? You've got somebody that you trust that's not necessarily in your life that you can talk about these situations and experiences. But it doesn't have to always just be therapy too. It could be anybody. But that verbal processing, it's why we need to vent. It's that thing. It's like we need to vent. I don't need you to solve my problem, but I just need you to listen to me. Just hear it. And that makes a huge difference.
Pete Wright:
Before we wrap up, can I just share one more resource that I really liked that was new to me and it just dropped October 16th of this year?
Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
I listened to the Huberman Lab Podcast and it's generally really great. So long. They are very long episodes. But they're really great. And just as we put this episode of talking about optimism and joy on our calendar, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is a wonderful neuroscientist and also the author of How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, which has been described as the first beach read for neuroscience nerds, she was on Huberman Labs. He asked the question specifically, "Is it a myth that if you smile a lot, you'll feel happiness, you'll feel joy?"
And I've always wondered. We hear that a lot. That is kind of one of the tropes. And she said to him, "I don't like your question." I think she said specifically, "I feel like your question is poorly stated, if I may," and went on a 10-minute discourse about something that I learned something from, and I wanted to share it.
Emotions in the face. If you smile, hard to feel. If you smile, it's harder to feel sad or anxious. She said, "Look, movement is movement. Your face has lots of muscles. And when you move your face, it sometimes is communicating legitimate emotion, but sometimes it's not. And if you are looking at someone who is smiling, you're not just taking in their face, you're taking in a bazillion other signals that they're communicating and you're taking in all the signals of the air and the smells and sights and light. And all of that is defining your interpretation of how they're feeling right now."
And in fact, she talks about this study where they take people and they take their heads away and just present eyes and a mouth and show them to people, and the eyes and the mouth might be in a shock face, and the respondents have no idea what emotion that is. No idea how to interpret that emotion, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
Interesting.
Pete Wright:
Right, there's no question. But then she said this, and this is where she dunks on Huberman. She says, "Look, the brain is a magnificent predictive mechanism. The smile-joy connection is not special in so far as the brain is being wired by all kinds of motor signals that you're giving it." Right? Pop culture has assigned and ascribed this smile equals happiness thing, but that's not really what the brain is doing. The brain is just predicting because you have smiled all your life at things that make you happy, when you smile, you are likely experiencing or about to experience something happy. It's like predictive text on your phone. It knows what word is coming next because you've typed all these words before or because the world has typed words before. That's how your brain works.
And so her guidance was, look, beware of western stereotypes presented as scientific fact because it's not fact that smile equals joy. The fact is your brain is being wired for previous signals. That's the trick. And that's the thing I learned because if what she's saying is accurate as neuroscientist, then what comes next can also be negatively interpreted, right?
This goes back to exactly what you just said about the 17-second rumination fact. Then if you repeatedly do something negative or you constantly sort of wire your brain in rumination and you frown a lot, then maybe the brain learns to expect frowns as your constant state, and it starts to predict what comes next there. I don't know. That part is me ascribing what I'm getting from her, but I thought that was really interesting.
So to finish her point, movement is movement. Expression is interpretation. Expression does not exist without someone else interpreting what your expression means, because I can sit here and fake smile all day long.
Nikki Kinzer:
Sure. Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Pete Wright:
You're the one who interprets me as being happy. So that is, I thought a really interesting thing. Not all movements are expressions. So beware of overinterpreting somebody smiling because that's an interpretation movement. There's no movement like system the way she talks about it.
But the brain can be wired to predict what comes next depending on what you've done before. If you make a practice of joy and happiness, maybe you're rewiring your brain in some small way to expect joy and happiness to come next.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That's interesting, right?
Nikki Kinzer:
It is interesting. It also, it makes me think of the connection with being authentic. Right? The person I'm talking to, do I sense that they're being authentic and real with me, or do I feel like they're putting on a show and it actually, they don't care, or it really is fake, right? It's an interesting concept to think about.
Pete Wright:
Well, especially when, I mean, we just had that, I'm not going to talk about specifics because it's a surprise. But we just had that where you texted me and you said, "I'm getting a vibe that you're not into this." And I said, "No, no, no. You're interpreting something that's not accurate." I've given a signal, but that signal is not what you were predicting because it didn't fit into your mental model.
I think we as human beings do that all the time.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I think so too.
Pete Wright:
And I think that directly impacts our moods and our emotions.
Nikki Kinzer:
I think it's really likely to happen when you have ADHD and RSD.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right? Because-
Pete Wright:
Yeah-
Nikki Kinzer:
... it's so easy to interpret something that maybe isn't real. So it really does give you a point to kind of question this and think about it before assuming that we know what the other person is thinking.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. Oh, so good. All right.
Pete Wright:
Good stuff.
Nikki Kinzer:
Good stuff. So this is what I'm going to end on, and I'm going to be on my soapbox for a moment because I am an optimistic and joyful person, and I like being that way. I really do. But this is what I came away from with his presentation is that life is a rollercoaster, right? We're going to have good things, we're going to have bad things, we're going to have scary things, all of these things. But the one thing he said is it is still a gift. We don't know how long we have. That one phone call can change us. Every present moment matters.
And the thing that he emphasized is the past no longer counts, and the future hasn't been written yet. So today, right now in this moment is what matters. And what do you want? What do you want to focus on? What mood do you want to be in?
And nourish your mind daily. Fill it with positive thoughts, fill it with music, fill it with whatever brings you joy, because I do believe what you focus on grows. So if you create this or ask or pay attention to these things, then you're going to see more of it in your day.
But the other thing he said that I think is really important is don't put things off for later. If you want to do something, do it now, whatever that looks like for you. And he used the example of if you need a new job, if you want a new job, start looking for a new job. If you're interested in somebody at work, ask him or her out. If you want to, whatever, learn a new language, get that app that Pete Wright loves.
Pete Wright:
Duolingo for the win.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. But the moment, do it now. And I just think that that's a refreshing reminder that our to-do lists, our productivity, all these things that can get us into this ADHD shame spiral, it really, at the end of the day, doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.
And so just really being careful what we bring in to really ruminate about and catch ourselves in those times that, you know what? Maybe this isn't as important as I think it is.
Pete Wright:
Drop the mic on that one, Nikki Kinzer. I think that's, let it go, let it go-
Nikki Kinzer:
Let it go.
Pete Wright:
Let it go. Yeah. Well, good. This is a good pair of episodes. I really enjoyed talking about this stuff with you. Thank you so much.
Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
For bringing all that research. We've got all the links and notes in the show notes, so go check them out. And thank you, most of all, to all of you. We appreciate you downloading and listening to this show. We appreciate your time and your attention.
And don't forget. If you have something to contribute to the conversation, we want to hear it. Head over to the show talk channel in our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member of the show at the Deluxe level or better.
On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I'm Pete Wright and we will see you right back here next week joyously on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
