Creating a Joy Bank

There was an interesting article in the Guardian Weekly last week about nostalgia. Only recently have scientists started to study the potential benefits of nostalgic memories. Before that such things were seen as related to denial and of little use.

But it seems that nostalgia has a positive purpose after all. If people can store and recall happy moments from their past, that can act as insurance against anxiety and depression.

This stands to reason, if only because our brains seem wired to seek out positive past memories, and evolution has ensured that most things our brains do have some benefits, even if we don’t always know what these are. It also gels with my personal experience, and, as far as I can tell, that of most of my friends and family.

One consequence is for parents. Subconsciously we seek to create special memories for our kids while they are young. Of course, we cannot control such things, and most of the time our role is to let the kid learn and grow on their own. But we can help. One method is by trying – though not too hard – to make a birthday event especially memorable. We can do this not by spending thousands or by showering the child with hugs and presents, but by associating the event with something fun and unusual.

 We are more likely to recall an event more frequently if something weird happened – such as someone singing a funny song, or a surprise guest arriving. It can even be something unplanned and annoying at the time, like getting lost on the road or a guest vomiting over grandma. The incident will plant the event into the memory more deeply, and, if the overall event was a happy one, it can be worth more in the nostalgia bank of the child later.

This gels with my experience. As a result, though we must be careful what we contrive, we can use the idea to offer lasting gifts to our children. We can make it slightly more likely that something offbeat (but ultimately safe) might happen, then we can help the child associate the event with the happy occasion and remember the occasion more easily that way.

This concept got me thinking about my own joy bank. Counting blessings has become something I advise for others, and I remember to do it myself too, but often in a rather vague way. Do we take time to note and count specific blessings, or do we just acknowledge that we have many blessings to count?

Even more specifically, could we record our joys? We might consider the gifts of serenity to lie inside four concentric circles. In the middle is love, then peace, joy and blessings. If you accept this model that I have just made up, all experiences of love are also peaceful, all peaceful experiences are joyful, and all joyful moments come from blessings. The wider our circle of blessings, the more we can hope for joy. The wider the circle of joy, the more we can hope for peace, and the more peace, we can hope for love.

The great thing about all the circles is that we have the power to grow them ourselves, indeed in most situations it is quite easy to do so. True, external things arise which push the circles inwards, but for most of us we can compensate by pushing them outwards with our own actions and attitudes. Hence the mantra of counting blessings, a thought, if habitual, which will surely grow the circle on its own.

It is not all that simple to actively grow the love circle, though eminently possible. For peace, we can adopt various lifestyle aids, though this takes effort and works against other perceived priorities for most of us.

But what about joy? We can hold ourselves open to joy, and we can savour it when it arrives. Perhaps we might also be able to savour it in such a way that it can live beyond its moment. We might be able to add moments of joy to what we could call a joy bank – this will happen subconsciously, but maybe we can take actions to help the process.

Perhaps this is a good way to understand the modern tendency to capture everything in a photo. It seems to traditionalists like me that some kids take so many photos nowadays that they could be forgetting how to enjoy a moment, and I am skeptical that more than a tiny fraction of photos endures any length of time, such is the sheer number of photos taken.

But Instagram and the others are clearly on to something; they have captured some sort of human impulse to record joy. I have yet to succumb, and it will also be interesting to see how that trend plays out over the next few years – surely some restraint and some segmentation will occur.

Instead, I tried something different this week. It is the time of year to put together summaries of the year and newsletters for friends, so I tried to come up with my list of top joyful moments from 2014. I set a rule that it had to be specific enough to pin down to a couple of hours of time – “that holiday in Portugal” would be too vague.

It turned out to be a wonderful exercise. The first takeaway was just how much joy I am blessed with, and perhaps most of us are if we only stop to consider. From the awe from attending major US sports event to the perennial joy of a good breakfast or an excellent article over a café latte, from moments of personal intimacy to the serenity from great performances or exhibitions, joy is everywhere.

Then there was the selection of highlights. Most involved family reunions. Many involved personal recognition, often of a paternal variety. The top one was a miraculous couple of hours when my wife and I arrived through unexpected serendipity at an event in the Netherlands along with many dear friends we had not seen for a long time.

The takeaway from that could be that the strongest remembered joyful moments were the ones within the love circle. I could also conclude that family only becomes more important as we grow older, and that I have a personal hot button for being recognized by people I have coached or otherwise respect. That is useful insight.

Another takeaway was just how good I felt during the days I carried this exercise out – it gave me a lot of strength.

A final takeaway came from trying to go further back in time. Compiling joy highlights for 2014 was not difficult. To do it for the five years before that was much harder, and for the twenty years before that impossible – I ended up resorting to obvious headline moments such as weddings or Christmases, and the remembered joy was far less intense and even sometimes tinged with bitterness. Perhaps this tells me that I was not as happy then. It also makes me wonder whether joyful memories fade unless stored carefully and consciously.

So I think I might have stumbled upon a powerful new practice. Considering joyful highlights each year might make those highlights linger longer, and keep my bank account of joy healthy and topped up. I’ll certainly try this for the next few years to test the theory. I recommend the exercise – what were your top joy highlight moments in 2014?