Retrain Your Brain for Joy

Make joy a habit and transform your life!

You can train your brain to experience each day with increasingly greater joy! Dive into this one-month plan of simple activities that keeps you creatively engaged and stimulated as you develop a consistently joyful outlook. Researchers tell us that it takes a month of daily practice to acquire a new habit. The thirty-one mini-adventures are designed to produce a habitual mindset of  joy that overflows into everything you do: your work, relationships, and other aspects of daily life. 

More than a modern-day self-help solution, this approach has been around for centuries—even millennia.  It's what the apostle Paul wrote about in in A.D. 61, suffering beatings, impoverishment, and criticism. "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things" (Philippians 4:8 NASB).  In a similar vein, he wrote to the Thessalonians, "Be joyful always,  pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances (I Thessalonians 5:16-18 NIV).

Wherever you are in life, whether facing minimal or major obstacles, whether battling difficulties related to relationships, job, school, family, or illness, you can train your brain toward greater joy and fulfillment.

Each mini-adventure involves a simple experience-oriented learning activity that can easily be incorporated into your busy day. These can be enjoyed individually or shared with your spouse, family, friends, or group.

Retrain Your Brain for Joy features questions for individual, couple, family, or group use, a guide for eight weeks of group study, and thirty-one adventure cards for inspiration and note-taking throughout your journey.

As you start on this adventure, it will be like playing a game throughout your day, creating a secret inner life that keeps you smiling inwardly even through mundane tasks. Along the way, you're transforming your mindset, creating new, joyful, lifelong habits.                                                 

So onward and upward — into the light!

Day 1: Count Your Many Blessings

"Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things"                                                                                                        (Philippians 4:8 NASB).                                                                  

Every day, a steady stream of good things passes you by, unnoticed and un-savored. If noticed and savored, your moments can be infused with increasing joy, wonder, and appreciation. From sunny weather to kind, complimentary words to a friendly email to flowers along the freeway to a favorite song to a new spiritual insight to a job accomplishment—there are numerous opportunities in each day to lift mundane or gloomy existence to radiant new levels. Today, notice each thing that brings you a spark of joy or a surge of happiness. Write it here or in your specially-purchased notebook or journal, and enjoy. Then, at the end of the day as you lay your head on the pillow, savor each individual blessing. For an extra portion of joy, start the next day looking over them again.

Create a lifelong habit.  As you lay your head on your pillow each night, reflect back over your day and savor at least three happy moments from that day.

                                                                 Day 2: Beauty Quest                                                                                                                     

"Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow" ( James . 1:17 NASB).

John Keats wrote, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Beauty is everywhere: in the blue sky outside your window, in flowers that dot the freeway landscape, in the patterns on a garden lizard’s back, in the kindness of a face, in the artwork displayed on your wall. Yet, how often do we bustle through the day without noting it. Today, make a point of noticing, writing down, and mentally savoring each item of beauty that crosses your path. You may be surprised at how much there is to enjoy that you’ve never noticed before. Then, savor your sightings by looking back over what you’ve written at the day’s end.