“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.” — Karl Barth
June arrives with longer days, softer evenings, and an almost collective exhale after months of navigating the heaviness that winter and spring so often bring. And yet, for many people, the arrival of brighter days doesn’t automatically translate into feeling brighter inside.
This month, we want to talk about something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in the mental health space: joy. Not the performed kind. Not the kind you post about. But the quiet, ordinary, deeply personal kind, and why learning to notice it, allow it, and tend to it is one of the most genuinely therapeutic things you can do for yourself.
June also holds space for awareness that reminds us how much people carry, including PTSD Awareness Month and Men’s Mental Health Month, which acknowledges the profound weight of trauma and its lasting effects. We honour that fully. And we also believe that even within a month that holds heavy awareness, there is room and reason to tend to what feels good. Healing and joy are not opposites. They are, in many ways, companions.
Why We Resist Joy Even When It’s Available to Us
This is something that comes up in therapy more often than you might expect.
What we hear: life has been hard. The world has felt heavy. You’ve been through something (or several somethings) and somewhere along the way, allowing yourself to feel genuinely good started to feel almost inappropriate. Like you haven’t earned it yet. Like something will go wrong if you let yourself relax into it. Like joy is a luxury reserved for people whose lives are more sorted, more settled, more certain than yours.
What we want you to understand: your resistance to joy is not actually a character flaw, but is often a nervous system response. A protective pattern developed in environments where good things didn’t last, where letting your guard down felt unsafe, and where the other shoe reliably dropped.
From a psychotherapeutic perspective, this pattern has a name: a low window of positive affect tolerance. In plain language, it means the nervous system has learned to be suspicious of feeling good. It scans for threat even in moments of ease. It pulls you out of enjoyment before you’ve fully arrived there.
Although this pattern is not always easy to rewire, recognizing it is the beginning of something important. Because joy – real joy, however small – is in fact, not something to be earned or rationed (whether you believe it right now or not), it is something the nervous system genuinely needs.
What Neuroscience Tells Us About Positive Emotion
Research in positive psychology and neuroscience consistently shows that experiencing and savouring positive emotion does not just feel good, it actively builds psychological resilience. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory, one of the most well-supported frameworks in the field, proposes that positive emotions broaden our awareness and build lasting personal resources: cognitive, emotional, social, and physical.
In other words, joy is not frivolous. It is foundational.
When we allow ourselves to experience genuine positive emotion – even briefly or quietly – the nervous system begins to build what researchers call an “emotional reserve.” This reserve is what helps us navigate difficulty with greater steadiness. It is what makes us more flexible, more connected, more resilient when life asks hard things of us.
Tending to joy is not an indulgence. It is maintenance and care, and from where we sit as therapists, it is some of the most important work there is.
The Difference Between Performing Happiness and Genuinely Noticing It
We are not talking about toxic positivity here. We are not asking you to reframe your pain, silver-line your struggles, or pretend that everything is fine when it isn’t. Performed happiness, the kind that papers over real emotion, is not therapeutic. It is suppression in a different outfit.
What we are talking about is something much quieter and more honest than that. It is the practice of genuinely noticing what feels good. A cup of coffee that tastes exactly right. The particular quality of evening light in June. A song that lands in your chest in a way that is hard to explain. A conversation that left you feeling seen.
These moments exist even in hard seasons. Often, we simply move through them without pausing long enough to let them register. The nervous system, particularly one running on stress or depletion, tends to prioritize threat detection over pleasure registration. Joy requires a moment of deliberate attention, not in a way that is forced or manufactured, but simply noticed. And when we repeatedly notice, over time, our nervous system shifts.
Why Small, Ordinary Moments Matter More Than We Think
There is a tendency to reserve the concept of joy for big experiences like vacations, life milestones, and celebrations. But the research and clinical experience point elsewhere.
It is actually the accumulation of small positive moments – what psychologist Rick Hanson calls “taking in the good” – that most reliably builds emotional wellbeing over time. The brain has what is known as a negativity bias: it is wired to register and hold onto negative experiences more readily than positive ones. This was adaptive for our ancestors. It is less helpful in daily modern life.
Actively noticing small moments of goodness is one way of gently working against that bias. Not denying the hard things. Simply refusing to let the good ones pass entirely unregistered.
A summer evening. A familiar song. A meal shared with someone you love. These are not small things. They are the texture of a life, and they deserve your attention.
Six Practices to Help You Tend to Joy This Summer
To preface, these are not tasks to add to your to-do list! Think of them as invitations: gentle, creative, low-pressure ways of building a more intentional relationship with what feels good.
1. Create a Monthly Inspiration Wall
Choose three things that genuinely inspire you right now: a quote, an image, a word, a goal, a feeling you’re moving toward. Write them down or print them out and place them somewhere you’ll see them daily, like your bathroom mirror, your desk, your fridge. Come July, swap them out. Come August, swap them again. This is not about motivation. It is about staying in quiet conversation with what matters to you.
2. Build a Feeling-Based Vision Board
Whether physical or digital (Pinterest works beautifully for this!) create a collection of images, colours, quotes, and textures that make you feel something good. Not goals or achievements. Just feelings. How do you want to feel this summer, for example? Let that guide what you pin, cut, and collect. This is a genuinely regulating practice, and it is more powerful than it sounds.
3. Try a Weekly Joy Audit
Once a week (Sunday evenings work well!) take five quiet minutes and ask yourself: what felt genuinely good this week? Not what went well in a productive sense, but what moments felt light, warm, alive, or like you. Write them down if that feels natural. You can also simply recall them if that works better! The act of reviewing positive experience helps the brain retain it.
4. Explore a Creative Outlet With No Goal
Pick something creative – photography on a walk, humming while you cook, doodling in the margins of a notebook, arranging flowers from the garden – and do it with no intention of producing anything. No outcome, sharing or improvement. Just the act itself. Creativity without agenda is one of the most naturally regulating experiences available to us, and it connects directly to the kind of playful presence that joy requires.
5. Take Yourself Somewhere New
And you don’t need to travel far! A neighbouring town, a coffee shop in a part of the city you’ve never visited, a trail you’ve driven past for years without stopping. Novelty – even mild – activates the brain’s reward system and shifts our perspective in ways that routine cannot. Summer is the perfect season for this kind of small, low-stakes exploration.
6. Make a Playlist That Feels Like You
Music has a direct and well-documented effect on mood, memory, and nervous system regulation. Intentionally create a playlist that makes you feel most like yourself. Listen to it deliberately, at least once a week. Let it be a small, consistent act of self-recognition.
A Note From Our Team
Joy is not the absence of difficulty. It is not something you access only after you’ve healed, resolved, or figured everything out. It is available now, in small and ordinary ways, and tending to it is one of the quietest and most meaningful acts of self-care there is.
If you find that joy feels consistently out of reach, if the good moments don’t seem to land, or if you notice a persistent resistance to feeling well, that is worth exploring with support. Sometimes what sits beneath the inability to feel good is something that therapy can gently help to uncover and help move you through.
We are always here when you’re ready.
