Is Our Brain Lying to Us About Joy?
I might as well have an advanced degree in neuroscience. I live with bipolar depression. Before medication and therapy, that meant oscillating between feelings of self-brilliance (mania) and the crushing inability to get out of bed in the morning (depression).
I didn’t know I was bipolar until the divorce. It broke me in more ways than I care to admit—ways I didn’t even know I could be broken. That season led to a lot of therapy, and eventually, this diagnosis. At first, I’ll be honest, it was a real bummer.
But then I decided to look at it differently.
Only 1–2% of people in the world have this “disorder.” What if, instead of seeing it as a rare curse, it was actually a blessing in disguise? It took a long time—and a lot of hard work—but I eventually discovered that the blessing was hidden on the road to healing.
One of the keys to repairing a broken brain is learning how to rewire it—training yourself to recognize when your mind is lying to you:
You don’t suck.
You can get out of bed.
Your brilliant business idea won’t make a million dollars tomorrow.
You don’t know everything.
You aren’t always right.
And here’s the biggest revelation of all:
You can actually experience JOY without material possessions, money, coffee, alcohol, drugs, vacations, sex, or power.
Because those things don’t bring JOY.
They bring her sinister twin sister: PLEASURE.
Unlike joy—which endures—pleasure is fleeting. Pleasure gives us a quick hit of excitement and then disappears, often leaving us with a nasty hangover. That hangover is so uncomfortable that we run right back to pleasure, again and again, convinced that if we just get more, everything will finally be okay.
Pleasure is about me and my needs, right now.
Pleasure is addictive.
Pleasure is very, very hard to say no to.
And Pleasure is a liar. She isn’t Joy.
Friends, the scientific word for pleasure is dopamine.
The Hebrew word for pleasure is Eden.
“If we could just get back to Eden,” we think, “then everything would be okay.”
But what if Eden isn’t the answer?
What if Joy is the answer?
And if Joy is the answer…
Where do we find her?
