My mother used to hum while cooking pierogi at midnight. Even exhausted, she found small joys: the hiss of onions in butter, the warmth rising from the pot, the satisfaction of feeding her family.
I thought about her last Tuesday while staring at my coffee, feeling… nothing.
Not the warmth between my palms. Not the smell. Not even the simple fact that I was upright and breathing.
That’s when it hit me: I hadn’t lost my capacity for joy. I’d lost my ability to detect it.
The Epidemic of Joy Blindness
Scientists have a name for this: anhedonia.
It isn’t exactly depression. It isn’t even sadness. It’s the brain’s inability to register good experiences, like a smoke detector with dead batteries.
The fire might be there. Your alarm system just can’t sense it.
Neuroscience shows this involves real changes in your brain’s reward processing circuit. It’s not a character flaw. Your environment broke the system designed to help you feel alive.
And here’s the cruel twist: joy is already in your life. Your brain just stopped noticing it.
How the Attention Economy Hijacked Your Brain
Your brain evolved for what psychologists call soft fascination—the gentle, restorative attention that comes from watching clouds drift or hearing water flow.
Modern life gives you the opposite. Hard fascination. Constant notifications. Endless micro-decisions. Chronic low-level stress that keeps your attention on high alert.
Every ping, scroll, and “urgent” email depletes your focus. Every choice between forty-seven types of coffee overloads your reward circuits. Every dopamine hit from social media chips away at your ability to register the good already happening around you.
The attention economy is stealing your joy and profiting from your constant dissatisfaction.
Why “Choose Happiness” Backfires
Most self-help advice gets this wrong. It treats joy like something you need to manufacture instead of something you need to notice.
University of Stanford research shows that trying to “choose happiness” actually makes you feel worse. It creates pressure to feel grateful or calm or blissful on command turning joy into another exhausting task on your to-do list.
When you’re drowning, being told to “be positive” feels like being handed a meditation cushion instead of a life raft.
What if the answer isn’t to create more joy but to train your brain to detect the joy that’s already here?
The 60-Second Joy Detection Protocol
Here’s the practice I used the first time I felt completely numb, sitting in my car before work with a knot in my stomach.
I set a timer for one minute. By second 40, I noticed sunlight on the dashboard. It wasn’t earth-shattering. But it was… something. A crack in the gray.
This micro-practice works even when you feel nothing at all.
Phase 1: Attention Rescue (20 seconds)
Give your brain a micro-break from hard fascination:
Stare out a window and count three things moving naturally (clouds, birds, leaves)
Feel your feet on the ground for twenty seconds while breathing slowly
Listen for the most distant sound you can detect
This isn’t meditation. It’s emergency cognitive first aid.
Phase 2: Micro-Detection (30 seconds)
Now, notice what was always there:
One texture you’re touching that feels pleasant (your shirt, your chair, warm coffee mug)
One thing working correctly right now (your phone battery, comfortable temperature, background music)
One small convenience you just experienced (green light, elevator arriving, parking spot appearing)
Phase 3: Neural Anchoring (10 seconds)
This rewires your reward system:
Pause and think: “My brain just noticed something good.”
Place your hand over your heart for three beats
Say internally: “This counts.”
Why This Works When Everything Else Fails
Unlike most happiness hacks, this doesn’t require:
Energy you don’t have
Big life changes
Pretending things are okay when they aren’t
The neuroscience is clear: your brain’s reward system responds to recognition, not generation.
Every time you notice a tiny good thing, you’re literally repairing your brain’s ability to feel joy again.
The Quiet Rebellion
Every moment of noticing is a refusal to let modern life turn you into a numb, endlessly scrolling machine.
It’s rebellion against the lie that joy must be purchased, optimized, or performed.
It’s how you reclaim the small pleasures your nervous system was designed to feel before the world overloaded it.
Your 24-Hour Challenge
Set a reminder for any moment you usually feel empty—on your commute, at lunch, before bed. Try the 60-second protocol once.
Don’t try to feel better. Don’t chase joy.
Just practice detection.
Your brain isn’t broken. It’s been running the wrong software.
It’s time to install the update.
The Takeaway
You don’t have to earn joy.
You don’t have to chase it.
You only have to relearn how to notice it: one 60-second moment at a time.
This counts.
👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.
PS: Register for the kick of of my 7 day program called: “Permission to unlearn” that starts this Thursday, September 11th, 2025 at 8:00 PM EST and feel the joy of being alive!