Ingrid Fetell Lee Says We Can All Have More Joy in Our Lives—Even When Things Are Tough. Here’s How.

Ingrid Fetell Lee admits joy was once elusive to her. “I used to think of joy as this ephemeral, fleeting feeling,” says the joy expert, designer, and author. “It was a bit like luck: If you get some, great. But then it goes away, and you wait for it to come again.”

To experience Fetell Lee’s work, including reading her uplifting book Joyful and watching her Ted Talk (which has more than 17 million views), is to assume she was born with a superhuman ability to feel endless joy. Almost like she holds magical receptors that attract it like lightning.

The truth is, Fetell Lee learned how to cultivate joy as an adult. While in design school, a professor casually said that Fetell Lee’s work offered a sense of joy. “I thought that was weird,” she tells me about the comment. “I didn’t think joy came from stuff.”

The comment set Fetell Lee down a path. She began exploring joy: What creates it? How do you feel it? Where is it? Poring over research and anecdotal insights, Fetell Lee noticed reoccurring qualities—from a sense of abundance to feelings of lightness “when you’re lifted in a hot air balloon or gazing up at the clouds”— evoked from experiencing certain things. Joy is universal, she realized. It’s “not limited to a gender, ethnicity, or age.” Things like bouncy puppies and marigold sunsets evoke joy across the globe.

Fetell Lee’s epiphanies inspired her mission today. Through her design work, writing, and website The Aesthetics of Joy, she helps us see that we all hold the power to experience more joy. In fact, we’re wired to do so. We just need to bear greater witness to the beautiful, bright, giggly, fluffy moments around us. 

Once we understand this, she says, we don’t have to wait for joy to find us. “We can cultivate it in our daily lives.”

A Conversation with Ingrid Fetell Lee

In your Ted talk, you say that the drive toward joy is the drive toward life. In essence, there’s a deeper reason why we’re biologically driven to seek joy. Why and how is this?

If you blow bubbles and you watch how babies react, it’s always with this joy and wonder. We can’t agree on politics, but we can agree on bubbles. That’s a kernel of shared understanding. 

That turned into a much deeper exploration for me. I started to discover that the reason we’re attracted to these things isn’t by chance. We evolved to move toward the things that would most likely aid our survival and thriving. It seems random that we’re attracted to bright colors, but our color vision evolved in part to help our primate ancestors find the ripe fruit and young leaves in the treetop canopy. It makes sense that over thousands of generations in evolution, we’re continued to be attracted to bright colors. It led us to be more likely to survive and thrive because there was energy there to be found. We’re not necessarily going to eat a brightly colored car or painted wall, but those things still give us that pop of joy because they tap into ancient circuits. It has a connection to our lives in our evolutionary history. 

Joy and happiness often get used interchangeably, but you feel they’re unique to one another. How so?

Happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It has to do with a lot of different factors. Whether we feel like we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life. How we feel about our health and our work. How connected we feel to other people. All of those things go into this complex equation of happiness, and it can be different for different people—and it can be hard to know if we’re happy. The pursuit of it can make us miserable because we spend so much time thinking, I’ll be happy when I get this promotion, or I’ll be happy when I find a partner, or I’ll be happy when I buy that house. We tend to see happiness as this big thing. We attach it to milestones, which means we put it in the future. 

Joy is simpler and more immediate. When psychologists use the word joy, they mean an intense momentary experience of positive emotion. And that’s something that we can measure through direct physical expressions, like smiling, laughing, and feeling like we want to jump up and down. The power of that is that if we are wondering whether we feel joy, we can immediately tell by just understanding that it is something that we feel in our minds and in our bodies. We don’t have to question it. So instead of it being this thing that we’re measuring over time, joy is happening right now. 

And you believe there’s a power in that… 

Those little joyful moments can seem trivial. It can be easy to overlook them, but when we start to add them up, and if you can find one more moment of joy a day, that’s really powerful. 

Before I understood all this, if was having a bad day, I would write off the day. Then things would continue to spiral. But now, if I recognize that this day is not going my way but I can hold two things at the same time and there might still be moments of joy on this bad day, then I remain open to the possibilities.  

What do you say to someone who may feel guilty experiencing joy when so many others are suffering in the world? And also to someone who may not feel worthy of joy?

Denying yourself joy never gave it [the missed joy] to anyone else. This speaks to the guilt and to the idea: How can I be feeling joy when so many others are suffering? How can I feel joy when this looming threat of climate change threatens all of us but particularly those less fortunate than me? Not allowing yourself to feel or experience joy in your daily life does not fix any of those issues. It only leaves you more burnt-out and less able to contribute to the actions that are going to address those big issues. It’s not a zero-sum game. That if you deny yourself joy and then that equals things out. It only means that there’s just less joy in the world. The goal should be: How do I allow myself to fully experience the joy of my life and use that energy to continue to make it fairer and more just for others? 

The worthiness of joy is a deeper one, which has ties to the fact that we see joy in our society as an extra or as a luxury. We’ve come to see joy as something we have to earn. We made it conditional. If we want dessert, we must earn it by working out or by eating healthy. If we want to enjoy the weekend, we have to work hard and be really productive during the week. So when we make joy something that we have to earn or deserve, we turn it into a conditional, and then the question becomes: When is it enough? Am I good enough? Am I virtuous enough to have deserved joy? We must break that tie and stop seeing joy as a conditional thing and recognize that joy is hardwired into us because it helps us thrive. We don’t need to do anything to be worthy of it. 

What are the benefits of joy?

My goodness, this list is long.

• In terms of productivity and work: There’s research that shows that doctors come to a correct diagnosis more quickly when they’re in a state of joy. That joyful negotiators reach more win-win agreements. Business leaders make better decisions when they’re in a state of joy—and part of the reason is that they consider a broader range of scenarios in the process of coming to a decision. Some studies show that we’re up to 12 percent more productive in a state of joy. A lot of people view joy as a distraction from success, but, in fact, it’s more accurate to see it as a catalyst that when we bring joy into our work, we perform better. 

• In terms of creativity: Research shows that positive emotions like joy help increase our cognitive flexibility, which means we’re less likely to see things in rigid categories and more likely to see them as flexible, which is one of the preconditions for creativity thinking. 
• For our physical health: Joy helps to reset the body’s cardiovascular responses to stress, which reduces the risk of burnout long-term physically. 
• Emotionally: Studies in the wake of 9/11 show that people who allowed joy into their coping actually recovered better from the tragedy than they were before. They experienced what psychologists called post-traumatic growth as opposed to continued post-traumatic stress. 
• And exhibiting joy makes us more physically attractive to other people. It’s not hard to believe. Sharing moments of joy strengthens our relationships with other people. It deepens our sense of trust and intimacy.

That’s why I say that these little moments may seem small, but when you start to add them up, they start to look a lot like happiness, because it’s not just about the moment. It’s about a cascade of effects that happens after. 

 What are some tricks to cultivating more joy?

Joyspotting is a great one to start with. It’s a mindfulness practice that is focused on going out into the world and noticing the things that bring you joy. What happens a lot of times is we stop allowing ourselves to feel joy, so the signals stop coming in. We’ve maybe been told that the things that bring us joy are silly or childish, so we start to shut down the incoming pathways around joy. Joyspotting is a great way to open that up. It allows you to start to tune your senses to what brings you joy. 

You can start by taking a walk and noticing what gives you a little lift. 

• Is it certain colors? 
• Is it patterns of light? 
• Is it seeing cute, funny dogs on your walk? 

Notice what gives you that little lift and start to seek out if you can bring more of those things into your life in an intentional way. If pink gives you a burst of joy, but then you look at your closet and you don’t have any pink, well that’s a great moment to realize that’s one way you can bring in more joy.