Inc. Magazine
Neuroscience reveals a simple trick to boost joy: improve your vocabulary. By using more precise and personal words to describe everyday pleasures, like music or food, you can enhance your emotional experience. This simple shift not only makes life more enjoyable but can also help you cope with challenging times.
Neuroscience Discovered a Clever Trick for Squeezing More Joy Out of Everyday Pleasures
Author: Jessica Stillman
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 an entrepreneur looking for some more joy to balance out the stress of an unstable business environment. 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 liked Chapin’s advice to think more carefully about the words you use to describe things you enjoy, like that great new song, your latest TV show obsession, or even your favorite BBQ sauce.
“If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions; it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment,” writes Chapin. “Having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm.”
That’s why he suggests reading critics’ reflections on the things you enjoy and otherwise paying attention to how experts and others talk about the subtle distinctions and fine moments of craft that make one song or show or sauce stand out from the rest.
It’s also why he suggests “developing a few items of idiosyncratic personal critical vocabulary.” These are personal terms that may only make sense to you but that help you pinpoint exactly why certain events, artworks, and people move you.
“I think of certain perfumes as ‘photocopier musks’ and certain songs as ‘straight shots’ and certain people as ‘downward portals,’ and it helps me isolate categories that are internally meaningful even if nobody else would understand them,” he offers as examples.
Neuroscience agrees with the word nerds
Nerding out over specialized vocabulary makes my English major heart sing. But why should pragmatic business types take the time to expand and enrich the vocabulary they use to think about everyday pleasures?
Perhaps because fascinating neuroscience suggests the words we use to think about our emotions actually impact our experience of them.
“It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you: that they bubble up and that they cause you to do and say things that are maybe ill-advised. But that explanation doesn’t really capture how your brain is making emotions,” explained Northeastern University neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett on Big Think.
Our emotions aren’t just sensations that are produced in your mind and body and which you have no control over. Instead, the latest science shows they are a mixture of physical feelings, like a racing heart or tingle of pleasure, and how you interpret those feelings.
“What your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body in relation to what’s happening in the world. And it’s creating this story using knowledge about emotion that you have learned from your past to predict what you’re going to see and hear and feel. That’s what an emotion is,” Feldman Barrett says.
Which means that if you use different, better words to tell the story of what you’re feeling, you feel it differently.
In difficult times, squeeze more joy from your day
This insight applies in lots of different contexts, psychologists insist. Using more precise words to label unpleasant emotions, such as anger and sadness, can help you handle them better. A bigger emotional vocabulary can also help you think through tricky relationships or unfamiliar situations.
Chapin reminds people they can use the same idea to increase their enjoyment of everyday pleasures, too. The more and better words you have to describe them, the more joy you can squeeze out of them.
Sadly, you probably can’t stop the stock market from seesawing or halt the barrage of policy changes affecting your business. But that doesn’t mean your mood is at the mercy of the chaotic wider world.
One way to squeeze more joy out of everyday pleasures is simply to look at them closely and learn to talk about them in more detail. It’s a dead simple move that makes the things you already love instantly even more enjoyable.
Credits: TCA, LLC.