Heal Your Self with Joie de Vivre!

The French have a reputation for understanding the essence of happiness. This essence, commonly referred to as joie de vivre or “joy of living” permeates their culture, manifesting itself through their art, their culinary zest, even their ability to celebrate the small things. While the French have coined the phrase, anyone anywhere can embrace the concept, though, and the effects of finding your own joie de vivre will enable you to live a healthier, more fulfilling life.

Maybe you didn’t know that your holistic health approach should include joy training. It’s okay if this is news to you. Believe me, I understand how hard it can be to recognize the happiness-health connection. Once you begin cultivating the happiness factor, you’ll see healthy benefits in all aspects of your life.

People who work toward living joyfully exhibit certain physiological strengths that go a long way toward proving the foundational effects of a positive outlook for improving one’s physical health. Furthermore, physically healthy people are more likely to exhibit mental, emotional, and spiritual health improvements than those who suffer physically do.

How Can We Prove that Happiness Effects Physical Health?

Two hormones adversely affect moods and may, with too frequent release, lead to physical challenges for those living in commonly stressful circumstances. Released by the adrenal glands, cortisol and adrenaline are crucial to one’s ability to deal with stress. Stressful situations activate our fight or flight responses. Adrenaline releases to increase your pulse rate, blood pressure, and energy. Cortisol causes a spike in glucose and affects how your brain processes it, slowing your digestive, growth, and reproductive systems. While these hormones benefit humans when stressful situations are infrequent, constant stress can lead to unhealthy cortisol levels and various symptoms, such as:

• Depression.

• Anxiety

• Headaches

• Muscle Discomfort

• Problems Sleeping

• Digestive Problems

• Weight Problems

• Memory/Concentration Problems

• Headaches

• Heart problems

• Stroke.

While people who live stress-filled lives exhibit inordinately and dangerously high cortisol and adrenaline levels, happy people have healthy levels of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are hormones that help neurons communicate with each other or other target cells. Four of the nearly 100 neurotransmitters active in most people’s bodies are Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Melatonin. These four chemicals help you to learn, remember, experience pleasure, bond with family and friends, establish mood stability, enjoy happy moments, and sleep/wake balance.

How Can We Cultivate Joie de Vivre?

For many, stress and depression are such common life factors that eliminating them from your daily life might seem impossible. The first step toward freedom from these two damaging conditions is to recognize the power of positive thinking to neutralize negativity.

Your own joie de vivre depends heavily on your ability to:

• Accentuate the Positive

• Practice Resiliency

• Actively Engage

• Listen and Attend

• Foster Social Relationships

• Develop Generosity.

Accentuate the Positive

Sad people often focus on the harder aspects of their lives, but this tendency can be undone if one is willing to take a harder look at tough situations to find the silver linings that may be easily overlooked otherwise. Learning to think of hard times as positive lessons can be one way to find the bright lights in dark times. You might also ask yourself critical questions such as, “What has this challenge taught me?” or “How can I better handle a situation like this next time?”

Practicing Resiliency

Resilient people learn from their mistakes, set high goals, treat themselves respectfully, and love the journey. Reminding yourself that hard times help to condition strong people, you’ll grow emotionally, mentally, and spiritually as you overcome challenging situations.

Active Engagement, Careful Listening, Attentive Mind

One thing many people who feel overwhelmed by their own lives often have in common is the sense that no one else appreciates how hard their lives are. While it may be fair to presume such sense is grounded in fact, a more constructive remedy to that lonely feeling would be to help others know that you understand the challenges they face, too.

Rather than focusing only on your own sense of pain, actively engaging positive people who exhibit the ability to take life in stride is a great way to build a social network of resilient friends who will not only help you to deal with problems of your own but will also appreciate your kind ears, willingness to listen supportively yet objectively, and commitment pay attention as they communicate their own concerns and triumphs.

Foster Social Relationship

As you blossom in your ability to see the positive side of any or most situations, you’ll also become better at discerning between people who are capable of healthy relationships and people who might struggle to be actively engaged in uplifting, supportive friendships. For the most part, human beings are social creatures who rely on community and culture to help individuals and to forge effective friend and family units. Your evolving ability to recognize your joy of living will attract other joyful/hopeful people and help you to find them as well.

Developing Generosity

Happy people tend to embrace the opportunity to help others find happiness as well. Finding your joyous rhythm, you are quite likely to want to share that happiness with others.

Happy people are rarely greedy, envious, malicious, or selfish. In fact, the happiest people often find that generosity plays a crucial role in their own self care. As joyful living comes more naturally to you every day, consider investing yourself in volunteer opportunities that benefit your community.

The true beauty of the joie de vivre is that as each of us blooms to grow toward the lights in our lives we can, also, become lights for others. Whose life do you brighten already? Who brightens yours? Don’t be afraid to give a hug of gratitude to share your joy whenever you get the chance.