joy as an act of resistance
HARRISON LANE
The idea of joy, the feeling of joy, and the experiences with it are something I am deeply interested in and I have a feeling that you all might be, too. I also have this feeling that as we are wading through it all — the wake of the pandemic, major social injustices, the world on fire, my dog peed on the carpet, am I killing all the bees by not having wildflower gardens? Oh no, is there lactose in this? — it has become difficult to remain, or even want to be, joy-full. Joy, fun, play, or even laughter are almost punk rock in their defiance of the weight of all other issues we collectively and individually shoulder. So, my leather jacket-metal stud-teenage angst-loud music-sweeping bangs- esque response to this feeling is: What does joy look like while it resists? When it defies convention, plays with archetypes, and has fun with an idea? The answer lies in the things that make me happy: imagining, drawing and building. Here, I want to understand joy through a series of pointed questions about what joy even is, then rendered through the conduit of resistance to explore how it can manifest or come to be understood physically through built works. what happens when you feel joy? When people experience joy, a symphony of physiological responses occurs which radiate out through the body. Exactly which area of the brain is difficult to point to, there might be a few actually, but we all know what it feels like, right? Our hearts beat faster, we start to sweat, and our faces flush revealing rosy cheeks to the world. It might be at times a little embarrassing, but our bodies can often reveal how we’re feeling: our central nervous system signals our brain that what we’re experiencing is joyful. The brain responds to the effect of Tom Cruise in the 1988 cinematic masterpiece, Cocktail , releasing a mixture of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin into the rest of the body, changing the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, hence the flush as your heart rate increases, even the perception of temperature within the fingers.
If this all sounds rather lovey-dovey, that’s definitely because it is. Oxytocin is associated with the deep and highly sought- after sensation we call love. Released when breastfeeding, while in labour, engaging in romantic activity, oxytocin is relatively new to the evolutionary drink list of hormonal responses and is thought to have been developed to remedy a myriad of survival and reproductive challenges. A flurry of wellness and nature-supportive websites regale the public that it is thought to even be released while hugging a tree, with the scientific world more hesitant to agree. Despite this, the benefits of being in nature are undeniable and Canadian healthcare professionals nationwide are seeing what it’s all about, with over 10,000 of them actually prescribing nature to help what ails you, including stress and anxiety disorders. thinking happy thoughts Being in nature is important, barring that hugging a tree might make you fall in love, but it can help soothe sometimes debilitating conditions. We owe these new or unconventional treatments to research in a continually diversifying field of psychology. It is impossible to research the field of happiness without at least mentioning Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. A professor of psychology at University of California Riverside, she has authored numerous papers and books regarding happiness, ways to achieve it and ways to keep it. She was also the first to posit the happiness pie chart, where she discovered that 50% of someone’s overall long-term happiness is inherited, and circumstantial influences like salary account for only 10%. The remaining 40% is what we can actively change, like committing to a goal, expressing gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, all categorised in the intentional activity section. But what about people who don’t need much help with the hard stuff? Resiliency, a word I kind of loathe, is critical in enduring the times between the high points. Overall, individuals who demonstrate greater resilience will be more active in the cognitive control area of the prefrontal cortex and less so in areas associated with processing emotions. So how do you foster it? Can you really learn to be resilient? The answer is: sort of, yeah. It takes a bit of work, can be difficult to achieve if you’ve got a lifetime of hardship; however, the building of resilience is totally accessible. Number one is having a strong support network around you for when you stumble. It doesn’t necessarily need to be family, it can also be a chosen family or some combination of the two. This, and several other criteria like physical activity, selflessness, and mindfulness basically ensure that a person will be and remain resilient.
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Harrison Lane
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