8 Ways to Find Joy When Everything Feels Heavy
There are seasons in life when the weight of the world feels particularly heavy. Maybe you're navigating personal challenges—health issues, relationship difficulties, or financial stress. Perhaps the state of the world itself feels overwhelming. Or maybe there's no specific reason, just a persistent heaviness that makes joy seem distant and inaccessible.
During these periods, advice to "just think positive" can feel dismissive and impossible to follow. The truth is, finding joy during heavy times isn't about forcing happiness or denying reality—it's about creating space for light to exist alongside the shadows.
This guide offers eight gentle, research-backed approaches for accessing moments of joy even when life feels overwhelming. These aren't quick fixes but rather compassionate practices that acknowledge your struggles while creating small openings for meaningful relief.
1. Lower the Bar for What Counts as Joy
When everything feels heavy, we often make the mistake of believing only significant positive events "count" as joy. But during difficult times, joy becomes more accessible when we deliberately adjust our expectations.
How to Practice:
- Notice tiny pleasures that might normally go unregistered: the perfect temperature of your shower, a moment of connection with a stranger, or the comfort of clean sheets
- Create a "microscopic joys" list with extremely small positive moments from your day
- Say aloud "This counts" when you experience even the smallest pleasant sensation
Scientific Support: Research on hedonic adaptation shows that our brains quickly adjust to both positive and negative circumstances. By consciously registering small pleasures, you counteract this adaptation and maintain sensitivity to the good that exists even in difficult times.
2. Engage in "Flow-Inducing" Activities
"Flow" describes the state of being so absorbed in an activity that you temporarily lose track of time and self-consciousness. These experiences provide valuable mental and emotional respite during heavy times.
How to Practice:
- Identify activities that have previously caused you to lose track of time
- Choose activities that are challenging enough to require full attention but not so difficult they cause frustration
- Start with just 15 minutes of engaged activity
- Notice how your relationship with time and worry shifts during these periods
Potential Flow Activities:
- Creating art or music (regardless of skill level)
- Physical activities like dance, yoga, or running
- Cooking a new recipe
- Working with your hands (gardening, building, repairing)
- Learning a new skill that requires concentration
Scientific Support: Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research shows that flow states reduce anxiety, increase resilience, and provide meaningful respite from rumination and worry. These states temporarily interrupt the stress cycle, giving your nervous system valuable recovery time.
3. Practice "Both/And" Thinking
Our minds tend toward binary thinking—either everything is terrible or everything is fine. Learning to hold seemingly contradictory experiences simultaneously creates space for joy alongside difficulty.
How to Practice:
- When noticing something pleasant, mentally acknowledge: "This joy exists AND things are still difficult"
- Replace "at least" statements (which minimize suffering) with "and also" statements (which make room for both realities)
- Create sentences that honor both your struggles and small pleasures: "I'm going through a tough time AND I can enjoy this cup of tea"
Scientific Support: Research on psychological flexibility shows that the ability to hold contradictory emotions simultaneously correlates with greater emotional resilience and reduced anxiety. Dialectical Behavior Therapy uses this principle to help people navigate intense emotional experiences.
4. Connect Through Service
When personal suffering feels overwhelming, small acts of service create meaningful connection and purpose that can transcend your own difficulties.
How to Practice:
- Choose extremely manageable acts of kindness that match your current energy level
- Focus on direct, concrete actions rather than abstract helping
- Notice how helping others creates moments of connection that interrupt isolation
Simple Service Ideas:
- Send a genuinely appreciative text to someone
- Leave a specific, thoughtful comment on a social media post
- Buy coffee for the person behind you in line
- Put a neighbor's trash bin away
- Share a resource that helped you with someone who might benefit
Scientific Support: Multiple studies show that acts of kindness activate pleasure centers in the brain and release oxytocin and dopamine—neurochemicals associated with positive emotions. Service creates a "helper's high" that can provide emotional relief even when your own circumstances remain challenging.
5. Create Physical Joy Pathways
Our bodies often carry the tension and heaviness we feel emotionally. Creating intentional physical experiences of pleasure provides direct access to joy that bypasses intellectual resistance.
How to Practice:
- Identify sensory experiences that reliably feel good in your body
- Deliberately engage these senses for brief periods throughout your day
- Notice physical pleasure sensations without demanding they change your emotional state
Physical Joy Channels:
- Warmth (hot shower, heating pad, sunshine on skin)
- Taste (a single piece of high-quality chocolate, a sip of favorite tea)
- Touch (soft blanket, pet therapy, self-massage)
- Sound (nature recordings, favorite music, pleasant ambient noise)
- Smell (essential oils, fresh air, favorite scents)
Scientific Support: Research on trauma and the nervous system shows that positive sensory experiences directly impact our physiological state, activating the parasympathetic nervous system and creating brief but meaningful relief from stress responses. These sensory pathways remain accessible even when cognitive approaches to joy feel blocked.
6. Practice Tiny Appreciations
Gratitude practices are commonly recommended for increasing happiness, but during very difficult times, traditional gratitude exercises can feel impossible or inauthentic. Tiny appreciations offer a more accessible alternative.
How to Practice:
- Look for things that are "working" rather than things you're "grateful for"
- Notice small systems or conveniences functioning as intended
- Acknowledge basic needs that are currently met, however incompletely
Examples of Tiny Appreciations:
- "The heat came on this morning"
- "My lungs are working to breathe without my conscious effort"
- "This chair is supporting my weight"
- "Running water is available when I turn the tap"
- "The sun rose today"
Scientific Support: Research shows that even small shifts in attention toward what's functioning well activates cognitive pathways associated with resource recognition and psychological safety. These micro-shifts can temporarily interrupt cycles of scarcity thinking that often accompany difficult times.
7. Engage in Purposeful Nostalgia
Deliberately engaging with positive memories can provide emotional sustenance during periods when creating new joyful experiences feels difficult.
How to Practice:
- Create a "joy bank" of specific positive memories you can revisit
- Use sensory cues to enhance memory recall (music from happy times, scents associated with good experiences)
- Share memories with others who were present, adding their perspectives to enrich the recollection
Scientific Support: Research by Dr. Constantine Sedikides shows that "nostalgia serves as a psychological resource that people can draw on to increase their well-being and combat threats to their sense of self." Unlike rumination about the past, purposeful positive nostalgia has been shown to increase optimism and social connectedness.
8. Befriend and Care for Your Pain
Counterintuitively, making space for your difficult emotions often creates more capacity for joy. When we fight against pain, we inadvertently block positive emotions as well.
How to Practice:
- Set aside 5-10 minutes to fully acknowledge your difficult feelings without trying to change them
- Speak to your pain with the compassion you would offer a friend
- Ask your pain what it needs, and offer small, doable forms of comfort
- Notice if allowing pain creates small openings for other emotions to exist alongside it
Scientific Support: Research on emotional processing shows that acknowledgment and acceptance of difficult emotions actually decreases their intensity over time, while avoidance prolongs and intensifies them. Self-compassion research by Dr. Kristin Neff demonstrates that treating yourself kindly during suffering reduces anxiety and depression while increasing emotional resilience.
Creating Your Personal Joy Practice
During heavy times, it's important to approach these practices with gentleness rather than treating them as another set of demands. Consider these implementation suggestions:
- Start extremely small. Choose just one approach from this list that feels most accessible, and try it for three days before evaluating its impact or adding another.
- Release expectations. The goal isn't to eliminate heaviness but to create small pockets where joy can briefly coexist with difficulty.
- Notice resistance. If you find yourself thinking "this won't work" or "my situation is different," simply acknowledge this natural protective response without judgment.
- Honor your timeline. There's no "right pace" for finding joy during difficult periods. Trust your own process and recognize that even being open to the possibility is meaningful progress.
- Seek support when needed. These practices complement but don't replace professional help. If heaviness persists without any breaks, consider reaching out to a mental health professional.
Remember that joy during difficult times might look different than joy during easier periods. It may be quieter, briefer, or tinged with other emotions. This doesn't make it less real or valuable. Each small moment of relief matters and contributes to your capacity to weather the current storm.
Which of these approaches feels most accessible to you right now? Have you found other ways to experience moments of joy during heavy times? Share your experience in the comments below.