Finding Joy in the Everyday Life

When it comes to tackling daily challenges, why do struggles leave a deeper mark than moments of happiness? Is the Goddess of Misery stronger than the Goddess of Joy?

•

Mehnaz

A simplified snapshot of a typical day in my life

5:30 a.m. – The alarm goes off. I hit the snooze button, knowing I have a long, tiring day ahead. I groan. After a few attempts, the alarm finally gets me out of my cozy bed. I complete my prayers, as I map out my day in my mind.
Next, my mind battles to decide whether I have the strength this dawn to complete my Quran reading routine, while my inner critic whispers: “I don’t trust myself. If I slip once, I might slip often, and that slip might become a slide. I slide too easily… such a weak person!”
So I force myself to read the Quran, even when I don’t feel like it.

7:00 a.m. – The family is up, and the rat race begins! The toddler’s tantrums, the indifferent attitude of my nine-year-old, the morning rush, the tiring job, the annoying colleagues……

12:00 p.m. – Something, no matter how small, doesn’t go according to plan at work. I can’t shake the feeling that everyone sees me as a failure and the thought/feeling spirals. I tell myself I’m in the wrong job, yet I can’t pull myself away from my laptop to take a lunch break. Instead, I end up snacking later and blaming my job for it.

3:00 p.m. – Time to call it a day at work and pick up the kids, starting the second half of the rollercoaster ride. I’m already half-drained. The boys are hungry and tired. They can’t play together for long. Every ten minutes, they come to me with complaints while I prepare dinner.
Me: “Oh my God!! I can’t take any more whining”

7:00 p.m. – Dinner is done. Now it’s time to clean up. I drag myself into cleaning the kitchen and tidying the family room, thinking, “Why do I have to do everything? I have no help, I’m all alone.” 
Completely oblivious, of course, to the fact that my husband is right there—doing the dishes.

8:30 p.m. – Kids’ bedtime. I can’t wait for them to go down. At this stage, their voices are getting on my nerves; their loud screams and laughter are making my head spin.

9:30 p.m. – I am exhausted. After my night prayers, there’s no time left for myself. I try to read but can’t keep my eyes open. I fall asleep with my book in hand and a heavy heart, knowing I’ll have to do this all over again.

As I am script out what goes through my mind most days, I can’t help but think, ‘What a heedless, ungrateful mess I am, taking these days for granted. Working hard but not showing kindness to myself; surrounded by love yet failing to appreciate it; too blind to see the difference between a busy, hectic life and a full one.

I am too busy focusing on the sporadic negatives and give a blind eye to the many positives.

In this blog, I’ve tried to uncover the reasons behind my petty complaints and why I often tend to focus only on the hard parts of my life. After all, the last thing I want is for my final thoughts to echo Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, ‘What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realised it sooner.’

The ‘Why’

A quick Google search gave me some relief as I realised I am not the only one living in this negative bubble. Many hundreds have studied to understand why humans tend to dwell more on negativity and it is now widely accepted that humans are more sensitive to negative stimuli than to positive ones.

Most studies conclude that the “negativity bias”- our tendency to be drawn to and linger on negatives – is an adaptive evolutionary trait. Survival often depended on being highly attuned to potential dangers, as failing to recognise threats could prove fatal. Organisms that were more vigilant to risks had a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes.

I don’t have to hunt to feed myself or my family, nor do I need to fight to protect us from the wild. Why do I still focus more on the daily negativities and centre my thoughts more around the bitter moments? I can’t blame it all on my genes, no matter how much I want to!

I have always found that a quick ‘how to’ is not enough for me. For something to truly stick, I need to understand the deeper why. After some reflection and research, I have identified three reasons:

Play the victim

Negativity bias makes it easier to slip into the role of the victim. I’d rather be the one offended than the one offending. By focusing constantly on negativity and on things beyond my control, I find it easy to place the blame on others, on society, on the world. It’s very convenient for the little girl inside me to cry out for not being able to become who she wanted to be and for not having what she dreamed of due to all the challenges and obstacles in her way. In a strange way, focusing on the negatives helps justify the void/setback by shifting the blame onto others or onto fate.

Connection and attention

Misery loves company, but misery also attracts company. Time and time I have seen people gathered more attention and have built connections over their pains and problems in life. I have seen people bonding over the toxic mother-in-law and what she did, the lazy husband and what he didn’t do, the uncontrollable teen who did the unacceptable. Unfortunately, I’m no different! My trusty brain is fabulous in creating an invisible list of ‘things that went wrong’ and ‘mistakes people made’ and keeping them readily available to play the ‘poor me’ card.

Risk aversion

This aligns somewhat with the evolutionary theory. Like most humans, positive outcomes give me joy, while negative ones bring me down. I’ve often noticed that, to lessen the anticipated pain of a possible negative outcome, I subconsciously imagine all the ‘what ifs’ that could go wrong. I walk myself through each scenario, allowing myself to experience the pain in advance. The idea is that practice makes us better—so, by mentally preparing for unwanted situations, I probably hope to improve my resilience to adversity. However, instead of becoming invincible to negativity, I end up letting it become my shadow.

Question mark on sand

The ‘How to’

A Google search will give many tactics to fight negativity bias. There are also some great free tools. The challenge is to figure out which ones work for me. Here are three that I’ve picked for myself to train my brain to have a more positive narrative towards life.

Self-awareness and mindfulness

Moments come and go. One second we’re overflowing with love and joy, the next we’re sweating over problems. The switch is so abrupt that we’re often too slow to catch the fleeting moments of pure joy—yet, ironically, quick to transfer and store misfortunes in our long-term memory.

In other words, it takes more effort to capture, store, and nurture positive experiences. To make matters worse, negative interpretations tend to be cognitively sticky. As a result, once someone labels a person as bad, it’s often harder to later see them as good.

Hard to tackle, right? Here’s what I’ve been doing:

I’ve been trying to be intentional and catch some beautiful moments to add to ‘my positive memory jar’. Sometimes I write them down, sometimes I tell my close ones how amazingly content those moments made me feel and sometimes I just repeatedly remind myself of those moments to send them to my brain’s long-term storage.

The idea is to immerse myself into these memories whenever I catch myself questioning the future or ruminating over some unwanted outcome. I stop myself and sort my positive memory jar and start reliving the moments of joy exactly the same way I would relive the moments of pain. Most of the time, I do get a warm feeling, I start to breathe more deeply and manage to isolate myself from the pain.

Doing something challenging

I have found that whenever I am tormented by the past or anxious about the future, doing something that is challenging yet good for me instantly makes me feel better- gives me a hit of the feel-good chemical, the dopamine. This task can be anything from exercising to cleaning a cluttered space. In a way, it distracts me (even if briefly), from my worries and provides the satisfaction of investing effort into a task with lasting rewards. There’s something inherently enjoyable, and satisfying about pushing myself in a direction that aligns with my broader goals. It also helps me live in the present and reminds me that all I need to do is to take one deliberate action at a time.

My prayers

This has been my most effective tool, saving me countless times. There are days when I feel I can’t get out of the negativity rut. When days feel hopeless, uncertainty looms around and I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel. The constant negative thoughts, the heaviness in my chest becomes too much to bear. My nafs wants me to eat chocolates and chips and scroll through YouTube videos to kill time, to blame and shame myself and others. These are the days when returning to my spirituality feels the hardest, so distant that I fear I might drown before arrival.

Yet these are the very days when I need to submit wholeheartedly to my spirituality more than ever, to isolate and liberate myself from the pain and worry.

So I try, really try, to awaken my weary spiritual soul, to cling to her, and to turn to my Lord, saying: ‘O my Lord, You didn’t create me to put myself through this pain, neither did you create me to anguish over the past and worry about the future. You have promised me to take care of me if I take care of my part of the deal. So give me the courage and strength to keep going and take care of my affairs and the patience and confidence to leave the rest on You. Indeed You alone are sufficient for me’

A promise I made to myself :

I don’t think it’s realistic to expect or wish that all my negative thoughts will suddenly vanish, and that my mind will always wander through fields of lavender and pretty butterflies. I am a human, I will stumble. I will go through rough days, happy days and spiritual days. The promise isn’t to make every day perfect or pretend it is. Rather, the promise is to be present and mindful – to feel the pain but not ignore the love and beauty, to learn to appreciate and hold tight what I truly value. To let go of what no longer serves me and those who don’t serve me. The promise is to show up each day with kindness and courage – as my authentic self.

References

•