How to Increase Your Capacity for Joy
Why Can't I Feel Happy?
This is for all you beautiful humans out there doing the work, showing up for yourself, and committed to finally feeling good in your life. And yet…
Something good happens and you can't quite take it in. Someone offers a compliment and it slides right off. You show up for an event you were looking forward to, finally hit your goal, and… nothing. You feel nothing.
I want you to know it’s not you, it's your nervous system.
When we've been stressed, anxious, or carrying the weight of difficult experiences for a long time, our system adapts. It gets efficient at scanning for threats and bracing for impact. That efficiency comes at a cost: we lose our ability to take in the good stuff. Joy, peace, connection, awe. They're still available to us. It’s just that our system just forgot how to let them in.
And here's something I want you to know: joy isn't something you’re either born with or not. It's an innate capacity. And it’s something that needs to be cultivate to actually experience it.
What Is "Capacity for Joy"?
Your capacity for joy is like an inner thermostat. We all have a set point for how much joy, love, and contentment we can hold before something in us says that's enough and pulls us back to baseline. Author Gay Hendricks calls this our "upper limit," the invisible ceiling on how good we allow ourselves to feel.
Here's how it plays out in real life. Imagine you wake up and your baseline for managing stress and really inhabiting your life is a 4 out of 10. When something hard hits in your day, you drop to a 2. That's a rough day with very little room to recover.
Now imagine you've been doing the work, building your capacity, and your baseline is an 8. The same hard thing hits. You drop to a 5. Still hard. Still painful. But you have reserves. You have more access to stable ground beneath you.
Increasing your capacity for joy isn't about ignoring pain. It's about building the reserves that keep you from drowning when life gets hard.
This is what the research supports, too. Positive emotions aren't a luxury, or a nice to have. They're biologically necessary. People who cultivate and experience more joy, connection, and contentment become more resilient over time, which generates more positive emotions. It's an upward spiral. Not a personality trait.
Cultivating joy is a practice.
The Part Nobody Talks About
When we're in pain, of course we want the pain to go away. We can get stuck believing that healing means making it disappear. But what if that's not how it works?
What if, instead of trying to shrink the pain, we focus on becoming bigger than it?
“The pain doesn’t get smaller. Your capacity to hold it grows.”
As we expand our capacity for feeling, the feelings of joy, love, connection, and peace can grow larger than the pain so that it can hold the pain. The pain doesn't necessarily get any smaller. It doesn't go away. But it becomes smaller in proportion to everything else we can now hold.
The pain doesn't get smaller. You get bigger.
This is a reorientation to what healing actually looks like. And it changes everything about how we show up for ourselves.
How to Increase Your Capacity for Joy
The good news is that increasing your capacity for joy is something you can practice. And it’s easier than you might think. We're not talking about overhauling your life, we're talking about micro-practices, one-minute moments that slowly, over time, retrain your system to let the good in. Because change actually happens 1% at a time, not all at once.
Notice Your Glimmers
You may have heard the term "glimmers," those micro-moments that bring a flash of peace, connection, or ease. They are the opposite of a trigger. Where a trigger brings stress and activation into your system, a glimmer brings love, calm, and safety.
Here's what makes glimmers powerful: it takes about one second for a trigger to land in our nervous system, but a full minute for the brain to absorb something good. It's both good news and bad news. But here's where it helps: it's not just you, this is how all of our brains are wired. And once you know it, you can work with it.
The practice is simple. Anchor it to something you already do. Before you get out of bed in the morning, look for one thing that brings a moment of connection, a smile, a soft exhale. Before you pick up your phone, pause and practice first. If you need a reminder, set a gentle alarm that just says "glimmer ⭐️." One moment, a few times a day. That's the whole practice.
The more you train your brain to look for what nurtures you, the easier it gets to find it. Over time, it stops being something you do on purpose and starts becoming the way you move through your day.
Breathe It Into Your Body
Noticing is step one. Step two is letting it land.
Place a hand on your heart and close your eyes. Take a slow, intentional breath for four to six counts. When something good happens, don't just notice it with your mind. Breathe it in. Feel it in your body. Let it take up space.
Another simple way to practice it to get outside and put your bare feet on the earth. You're not just relaxing. You're taking in the good through your whole system, letting the earth ground you back into your body. This is how the practice moves from the head down into the body.
Make Gratitude Come Alive
Yes, gratitude belongs here too, but maybe not the way you've been taught. Writing 'I'm grateful for my cat and the sunshine' without letting it actually touch something inside us is just words on a page.
Whatever practice you choose, let it have an emotional tone. Let it resonate. And give yourself permission for it to feel a little like "fake it till you make it" at first. If your capacity for joy is smaller right now, accessing joy might feel awkward or forced. Don’t worry, that's a sign you're doing exactly the right thing.
The invitation: Slow down. Be consistent. And learn to trust the process.
How Therapy Can Help You Feel More Joy
Therapy isn't just for when things are hard. It's also for when you're ready to feel more: more joy, more connection, more aliveness…more of the life you know is possible.
Here at The Holistic Counseling Center, we offer holistic psychotherapy that honors the mind-body-spirit connection. Through approaches like Somatic Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Brainspotting, we can help you move beyond just coping or living everyday in survival mode and expand into the fullness of who you are beneath the pain, the patterns and the programming.
If you're ready to take the next step on your healing journey, we'd love to support you.
Book a free consultation call to learn more about our therapists and how we can help.
Rooting for you.
-Kim
Takeaway
Joy isn't a destination you arrive at when the pain finally stops. It's a capacity you build, one small practice at a time. And the most beautiful part? You don't have to wait until everything is "better" to begin. You can start right here. One glimmer. One breath. One moment of letting yourself feel something good.
That's the practice. You got this.
About the Author
Kim Burris, LMFT is a licensed holistic psychotherapist, founder of The Holistic Counseling Center, Adjunct professor at CIIS and author of ‘The First 90 Days After Birth.’
Her work has been featured in Vogue, Bustle, and the Daily Om.
Kim honors the mind-body-spirit connection and offers evidence-based psychotherapy with a heart-centered approach that helps people find relief from anxiety and self-sabotage so they can live life with more joy, freedom, and ease.
Kim and her team are trained in Brainspotting, somatic therapies, and trauma-informed care. They currently offer holistic counseling and therapy in San Francisco, San Anselmo, El Dorado Hills, and online.
Book a free consultation call to get started.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or qualified mental health professional.
References
Hendricks, G. (2009). The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. HarperOne.
Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship. New Harbinger Publications.
Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.
Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience. Guilford Press.
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