JOY vs. HAPPINESS

THIS QUESTION OFTEN COMES UP....

What's the difference between HAPPINESS and JOY? 🙋

Easy.

JOY comes about from making a commitment to being happy IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, whereas HAPPINESS occurs as a result of a culmination of positive events, successes, acquisitions and achievements that have already happened.

If you haven't had any positive events, successes, acquisitions or achievements in the recent past, then it's not easy to be HAPPY.

JOY, on the other hand, is about determining to be happy right here and now, regardless of past events, whether they're positive or negative, or just plain old everyday neutral.

Another way of putting it is that HAPPINESS is dependent on circumstances, whereas JOY is dependent only on your commitment to experiencing it.

JOY is internally generated. HAPPINESS is externally generated.        

MOTION RESULTS IN EMOTION

In an earlier newsletter, I mentioned that our mind/body connections are 80% body TO mind. What this means is that THE easiest way to change what's going on in your mind, your thought patterns, and your emotions, is to use your BODY (motion) as opposed to trying to 'think' or intellectualise your way out of a bad mood (emotion).

Much better (and easier, in my humble opinion) to just DO with your body the things you would do if you were ALREADY filled with joy and happiness. And what are those things?

LAUGHTER 🤣

DANCING 🕺

SINGING 🎤

CLAPPING 👏

SMILING & MAKING EYE CONTACT 😃

These simple actions are what people do all over the world when they feel joyful. None of them is hard to do. None of them needs special equipment. None of them requires a licence or a permit. And all of them you can do on your own, but, and it's a big but, the problem is, we feel embarrassed, self-conscious and awkward doing these things on our own.

We're conditioned to find these activities acceptable only under certain circumstances.

Dancing, singing and clapping with a bunch of friends on a dance floor at a party with a few drinks inside you to loosen you up - ACCEPTABLE.

Dancing, singing and clapping on your own in the middle of your office - NOT ACCEPTABLE (in fact, probably a shortcut to being fired).

SMILING & MAKING EYE CONTACT is also circumstantial. You can't make eye contact with anyone if you're on your own, and if you try it public and the other person isn't up to speed with what you're doing, it just looks creepy.

Which brings us to LAUGHTER. 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣

The easiest, the quickest, the most effective way to express and experience joy, with multiple evidence-based physical, mental and emotional health benefits and it's free and in limitless supply.

LAUGHTER like JOY, is also a choice. You can choose to laugh whenever and wherever you are. If you rely on humour to make you laugh in the form of a joke or a funny story, then it's too hit-and-miss. The joke may not be funny, you may have heard it before, or you just don't get it.

The only surefire way to access all the known benefits of laughter is to intentionally laugh. To make laughter a deliberate act. And what may start out as being 'fake' laughter always quickly turns into real laughter.

Here's a good comparison. Humans are able to run 🏃 As we developed as a species we would use running to either keep us safe by running away from something or to provide us with something by running towards it. Running helped us to survive. In the modern world, however, it's extremely rare for us to have to run in order to survive.

But we do run. In fact millions of people every day pull on running shoes and hit the pavement or the treadmill for minutes or hours at a time. They choose to run. It's an intentional act.

Laughing is similar. Prior to us having the fine motor and breathing control required for speech, we used laughter as a way of connecting and communicating and as a tonic to the challenges of daily life in prehistoric times - a bit of light relief from endless hunting and gathering.

Bringing it up to date, whilst we tend to associate the trigger for laughing as being humour, actually, neuropsychologists have found that we laugh far more for social connection reasons than we laugh at things that we find funny - because humour is incredibly subjective. And you categorically don't need a sense of humour or for something humourous to happen in order to laugh, you can just choose to laugh.

Watch my video below and laugh along with me to see just how easy it is to laugh for 1 minute on your own with no gags, no funny stories, and no drugs or alcohol (I presume) involved.

I'd love to know how it made you feel, so please comment or DM me and share your experience.

Finally, I'm looking for 40 people to join me in making 40 x 1-minute long laughter videos in the run-up to World Laughter Day which is on Sunday 77h May 2023.

If you'd be interested in joining me on a Zoom or Teams call which I'd record and then we laugh together for 1 minute, please comment or DM too.

LAUGHTER FOR TEAM BUILDING & CONFERENCES

Calling everyone with a Team Building event or conference coming up. 🧑 🤝 🧑🤼👯

No other activity brings people together better and quicker than Laughter Yoga. 🤣🤣

It also leaves people feeling great and able to hit peak performance and sets such a positive, upbeat tone to any conference! 📈

The photo below shows me last week at 6.30am with 100+ locals from Nashik in India taking part in their DAILY Laughter Club - yes, they do this EVERY day of the year.

We had:

no common spoken language, 🙊

no cultural references points 🤷

no previous shared experiences...

and yet within seconds of meeting them, I felt I was part of their community.🤗🤗🤗

For an hour we laughed, danced, and had fun...and by the end, not only was I buzzing from the exercise (450 Kcal burnt) but I felt completely energised, focused and bursting with optimism. 🌟🌟

Laughter Yoga is the only guaranteed mechanism for delivering the known benefits of laughter, which includes the power to connect and unite people...and isn't that what you want in your Teams?

People who LAUGH together, WORK WELL together!

If you'd like to know more about how Laughter Yoga could bring measurable, sustainable benefits to your organisation just comment below or DM me.

Who is The Wellbeing Guy?

My name's Jon Bockelmann-Evans and I've been an international speaker, thought leader, trainer and clinician for nearly 25 years, helping people (and the organisations they work for) to cope, thrive and succeed despite the many challenges life sends their way. I'm also a Laughter Yoga Teacher Trainer.

In my 20s I was a musician in Wales' only ever Welsh language heavy metal band (I don't even speak Welsh) and we toured the world (improbable but true). I trained as a physiotherapist when I was 30, then shortly after as a psychotherapist and so began my love of mind/body medicine as I helped clients recover from stress-related conditions in a specialist clinic in the NHS.

In 2,000 I started running training courses. Two years later I left the NHS and formed JBE Health. Then shortly after buying a house with my girlfriend, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Radical surgery and chemo followed as did months of recovery, with no income, in a house we couldn't afford, with my business in tatters, whilst waiting to hear whether the cancer had spread to my lungs or brain.

It was during those dark times that I formulated the idealogy that underpins everything I do now, blending physiology, psychology and personal development into a unique combination of techniques, concepts, strategies and processes that got me through the toughest period of my life and that have helped thousands of individuals since.

I'm pleased to say I made a full recovery as the cancer hadn't spread. Within a year my girlfriend and I were married and a year after that the first of two wonderful children arrived. My business has gone from strength to strength, taking me all over the world to work with clients such as Nike, Dow, EE, ConocoPhillips, County Councils, SMEs, FE Colleges and hundreds of schools of all varieties.