You Can Be Joyful and Sad at Once, but Not Happy and Sad

Kate Bowler, a professor at Duke University and an author who spent much of her 30s living with advanced cancer, puts the puzzle this way: "while you can't be happy and sad at the same time, you can be joyful and sad." The reason comes down to how each feeling works in the body.

Happiness, as Bowler describes it, is relaxed. It is ease, and it comes from many small things going your way at once and adding up until you can settle in. In that sense, happiness adds up slowly, the way math does.

Joy works differently. Bowler says, "if happiness is relaxed, joy is this big, bright, enlivening feeling." It startles you awake. She calls it "a surprise of temporary wholeness," a moment when, as she puts it, "Even if nothing is okay right now, it is deeply okay." It feels like your soul saying yes, that it is good to be alive.

What surprised Bowler was that joy also engages the stress system. She had learned that joy does not just hit dopamine, a brain chemical tied to wanting and reward, and the reward system. It switches on the stress system too, the part of the body that activates under strain and alertness.

That difference changes what a parent has to do. Wanting a child to be happy means trying to line up every circumstance and smooth the rough parts of each experience. Wanting a child to know joy is less controlling. As Bowler puts it, joy "doesn't require a lot of things to go right for it to still come your way." She adds that "there are maybe a couple preconditions" for joy, but they involve following what children already do.

A child can have a complicated life, with worries at school and friends who are kind one day and unkind the next, and still, as Bowler puts it, "have an enormous capacity for joy." Joy can still find that child, right in the middle of what is hard.