Tiny Joys, Big Healing: Retraining the Brain for Hope with Dr MaryCatherine McDonald
Episode Notes
If gratitude and grief seem to arrive hand in hand this season or hope feels costly, like putting your armor down in the middle of a battle… Nothing is wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with researcher, author, trauma educator, and joy scholar Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, (MC) to explore the often misunderstood relationship between trauma and joy.
Drawing from neuroscience, trauma research, and lived experience, Dr MaryCatherine explains why joy can feel threatening after loss or prolonged stress, and how joy isn’t something we force, but something we practice in small, embodied ways.
Together, they unpack:
- Why trauma responses are strength responses, not weaknesses
- The “joy thieves” that quietly steal our capacity for delight (hypervigilance, guilt, fear of loss, shame)
- Why joy and grief are not opposites, and often show up together
- How tiny, 10–20 second moments of joy can gently retrain the nervous system
- What neuroscientists call the hope circuit, and how activating it turns off the fear circuit
This conversation is both tender and practical, especially for anyone navigating holidays, anniversaries, or seasons where pain and beauty coexist.
Joy, as Dr MaryCatherine reminds us, isn’t the absence of suffering.
It’s a posture of healing.
A way of saying trauma doesn’t get the final word.
📖 Dr MaryCatherine's book, The Joy Reset: Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness and How to Win it Back
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📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone, and Welcome back to this week’s episode of The Best of You podcast.
Today we’re diving into a topic that feels especially timely as we move toward the holiday season — how we can reconnect with joy, and hope even in a world that feels heavy or uncertain. If you've ever found
yourself wondering, how do I keep showing up when life has been hard? How do I not lose myself to stress, grief, or that lingering sense of exhaustion? This episode has something for you. It's incredible.
I loved this conversation with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald. She goes by MC. She's a researcher, an author, an educator and life coach,
and she focuses on trauma, grief, and healing, but also on joy. I love that juxtaposition, and it's so rich in our episode today. You might know her from her previous books, Unbroken. The trauma response is never wrong and other things you need to know to take back your life. And her brand new book release, this one came out this spring. She talks about it a lot in the episode today. It's called the joy reset six ways trauma steals happiness and how to win it back in the joy reset
MC explores how joy isn't just a fleeting feeling it's a radical act of healing she talks about how trauma can change the brain what she calls the joy thieves that keep us stuck things like hypervigilance fear of loss guilt and shame and how to reactivate what neuroscientists call the hope circuit. So this is super practical.
It's also spiritual because we want to experience joy and hope, especially at the holiday season. But we also want to be realistic about what's hard. So today we're going to talk about what that hope circuit is, why it matters, and how we can train our brains and our hearts to visit it more often. Because When we do, we start to find those glimmers of hope and joy even in the mess, even in the heart. And you'll hear MC talk about a really painful experience she had at the holidays and how she found joy even in the midst of it. And that's
what I want for each one of you. And for me too, this holiday season, it won't be perfect. It will be messy. But how can we find and orient ourselves to also find the joy and the goodness and the hope this holiday season. As you'll hear MC explain, joy isn't the absence of pain. It's a posture of healing, a way of saying that trauma doesn't get the final word. I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. It's thoughtful, grounded in science, and full of practical ways to bring a little more joy into your day -to -day life.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Mary Macdonald
Dr. Alison Cook (00:03.056)
Well, MC, I am so thrilled to have you here with me. I am just obsessed with this new book, even the title itself. It's called The Joy Reset, Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness and How to Win It Back. It's such a great title, this sort of back and forth between joy and trauma. And I love that that's what you're doing and taking all your research and trauma and kind of teaching us how to refine joy. And I wanted to have you on, especially right now with the holidays.
We're smack in the middle of the holidays. As you know, as I know from my years of working in clinical practice for my own life, this is a season where we see that juxtaposition, right? We're supposed to be feeling joy. And yet for so many of us, the holidays are complicated.
MC (00:32.43)
Yeah.
MC (00:50.127)
yeah. Force.
Dr. Alison Cook (00:51.56)
And right. so, and then we can feel the guilt about the fact that they feel complicated. We have to bump up into family members that are harder. We have grief memories or, you know, so many different things that can rob our joy. So I'd love to start our conversation today, kind of with a big picture framing of how you see trauma and how it steals our happiness. And then move into how we can find more joy, real authentic joy.
MC (00:55.438)
Thank you.
MC (01:12.375)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (01:20.779)
even when we're dealing with trauma.
MC (01:23.286)
Yes, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here and talk to you about this and especially during the season, which for me is one of the hardest seasons of the year. And I've learned how to take back joy during the holidays. So think if it's okay, actually, I want to start there because...
Dr. Alison Cook (01:39.375)
Yeah.
MC (01:41.826)
And then we can go into sort of how we define trauma and why trauma takes away joy and how to deal with it. when I was 24, my father died really suddenly on Christmas Day. And so the holidays are obviously incredibly, I mean just...
shattered in that moment, right? And he was the person in the family who was sort of like Father Christmas, you know? He loved Christmas and loved to celebrate with all of us. so that moment was such a huge reckoning for a bunch of reasons. One, being raised Catholic, you know, I thought, OK, here's the miracle, right? He's not doing well. He's in the hospital. This is really scary, but it's Christmas Eve.
and here will be the miracle and then the miracle doesn't come and then
here's where the joy comes in. We were at the funeral, which was of course just a couple days after Christmas, since he died on Christmas. And so the church was still decorated for the holidays. And the church was so packed that we couldn't see to the front of the church as we were walking up the aisle. And I think I was just looking down because I was trying to steady myself, you know? And when we got to the altar, we were met with these ginormous plastic
full-size lawn animals on the front of the altar because the church had decided to kind of go in a different direction. Usually they had this very sort of discrete small glass nativity scene sort of off to the left of the altar, but this was this huge, garish, kind of hilarious scene. And the thing that made it even funnier was that...
MC (03:28.942)
my dad thought that animatronic animals were the funniest thing in the world. So he would have been the first person to absolutely have to leave church from laughing. And I remember just kind of collapsing into the joy of that moment and the mercy of that laughter because it came at such a brutal moment and it was like a deep breath, you know?
Dr. Alison Cook (03:33.2)
MC (03:51.36)
And so there's kind of one example of a million that I have of where you are in the deepest, darkest moment of your life and then joy shows up. And like almost knocks you over. It can be jarring because you're like, no, no, I'm doing the grief thing right now. I'm doing the sad thing. Like why is this joy coming up and interrupting my serious moment?
Dr. Alison Cook (04:01.082)
Yeah, wow.
MC (04:16.81)
But if we can learn to recognize that and see it, the beauty of what that joy does in the moment is that it sustains us through those things. And so to begin kind of talking about joy and trauma, we have to sort of first take apart the wall between them. I think we pretend like they don't coexist and they're standing right next to each other. And there's a reason for that, you know?
Dr. Alison Cook (04:43.972)
That is so powerful. Thank you for sharing that. It perfectly frames this conversation because what you just said, taking down the wall between them. I just literally wanna throw out all my notes and just dive into that, right? Because this is also my experience that when we have this sort of bifurcation of, like you said, I'm doing my grief work now.
MC (04:47.062)
of course.
MC (04:57.174)
Yeah, let's do it.
Dr. Alison Cook (05:08.644)
And then joy surprises us. It strikes me that the muscle we need to develop has far more to do with flexibility, that you could be open to that moment. It says something to me about your own sort of inner system, that you could be open to it. You didn't miss it. And it strikes me that's part of the goal, right? I mean, that was such a powerful, it's not just that it happened, it's that you could be open to it.
MC (05:17.506)
Yes.
MC (05:25.249)
Mm-hmm.
Great.
MC (05:36.034)
Great.
Dr. Alison Cook (05:36.4)
and allow it to come in. So what's happening there? How does that occur? How can we begin to address that wall that we create, that sort of false binary internally?
MC (05:43.436)
Mm-hmm.
MC (05:48.888)
Yeah.
I mean, think the first thing is to say, our emotions are not, you know, just like us, they contain multitudes and they're not these neat little tidy categories that fit into these tiny boxes and never meet each other. I think actually the movies Inside Out have done a really good job of showing us how emotions are mixed. You know, most emotions aren't like primary colors. You think about things like bittersweetness, right? That's literally too
Dr. Alison Cook (06:10.49)
Yeah.
MC (06:19.696)
emotions at once. And then I think the other thing that really gets in the way is that we shame ourselves for our emotions. Instead of seeing them as biological events that exist for a reason, just like every other biological event, we say, oh my god, I'm feeling joy in this moment where I'm supposed to be feeling grief. Now I need to go into guilt. And this is where we get into what I call in the Joy Reset the Joy Thieves, because there are these thieves that show up. when I think when joy comes in, in a moment,
Dr. Alison Cook (06:31.461)
Yeah.
MC (06:49.856)
where it's unexpected, it's there to help us sustain ourselves. But then these trauma responses come in and steal it away because joy can be jarring to a nervous system that's not ready for it. So I think the first step is saying, okay, emotions are valid and real. They're not primary colors. They can be very mixed and confusing. And when I encounter one, I'm going to try as best as I can, no matter how inconvenient that emotion.
Dr. Alison Cook (07:02.32)
Wow.
MC (07:19.596)
is to turn to it and try to welcome it in.
Dr. Alison Cook (07:22.96)
So let's talk about these joy thieves. I think that's a really interesting way to put it. And you talk about these thieves of joy in the context of these nervous system responses that we might think of as trauma responses. They're neurobiological. There's no shame in them, right? And I think that, again, I was talking to you a little bit before we started. A lot of myself and my
MC (07:28.097)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (07:50.883)
audience and maybe you, you know, from your background come from, think well intended, but sometimes spiritually bypassing faith settings where it's like, choose joy, right? As if it's something we, it's almost like a moral imperative. And yet our bodies are saying, I'm in fight or flight right now, or I'm anxious, or this person that I have to spend this time with is really hard for me, or, you know, something really painful.
just happened. And so we don't want to shame ourselves to your point about what we're feeling and the different emotions. And simultaneously, we don't want to lose that access to joy. So let's talk about how you see those joy thieves, not from a shaming perspective, but I love how you're just naming it. This is what it is. This is what's happening.
MC (08:20.898)
Great. Great.
MC (08:38.894)
Yeah.
MC (08:43.15)
Yeah, and I just wrote down shame versus bypassing because I think those are two sort of sides of the same coin where we can either put ourselves into shame or we can sort of try to bypass the emotion and for this kind of greater purpose of like, well, but you have to welcome and enjoy, but you can't be feeling, you know, this is God's purpose. So how can you be feeling sad? The truth is that there, yeah, we can come back to that.
Dr. Alison Cook (08:48.176)
Hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (08:54.757)
Yes!
Dr. Alison Cook (09:03.342)
Yes.
MC (09:09.162)
When it comes to the Joy Thieves, so the book that I wrote before the Joy Reset is called Unbroken, the trauma response is never wrong, and the whole purpose of it is to figure out how to recontextualize trauma.
without shame. So neurobiologically, if we look at the trauma response, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all of these responses that we talk about, they are there to help us survive. They are literally strength responses. And yet culturally, we look at them as a sign of brokenness or weakness. And that's now that we know so much more about the brain than we did 150 years ago, we can see that they are literally strength responses. So the goal of that book was to try to kind of update
definition of trauma. Trauma is a strength response. That doesn't mean it doesn't cause pain, right? When we get stuck in a trauma response in moments when we are not being, you know, we're not actually in danger, that can be really disruptive for your life.
One of the things that I was seeing when I was doing research and working, starting kind of in 2020, I reached for positive psychology because I felt really under-resourced. I've been working with clients since 2011, but in 2020, I just started to feel like none of the tools were enough. And I was like, okay, what do we have from positive psychology? How can this help get us back to baseline? And one of the cool things is that a lot of the positive psychology hypotheses from the 60s and 70s have been sort
strengthened by the neuroscience. So we know that making a gratitude list or leaning into joy is something that's going to be profoundly regulating for your nervous system. And so I was seeing all these clients and I had these groups at the time and I was like let's use positive psychology we just need to get back to joy. And what I found was that the majority of my clients were incredibly resistant.
MC (11:04.71)
And as I'm sure you know, like resistance is a message too. Resistance tells us something. And so instead of turning away from it and being like, you know, what's wrong with this person? It's like, wait, hold on. What's in the resistance? What am I missing? And the thing that I found was that...
When we have a hypervigilant nervous system or when we have a nervous system that is conditioned by trauma or chronic stress or fear, joy, asking that nervous system to stop and embrace joy is like asking you to put your armor down in the middle of a battle.
Dr. Alison Cook (11:42.254)
Yes, yes.
MC (11:43.905)
And your nervous system is going to say, no, I'm not going to do that. That's not for me. Right. And I'm doing it and that's what's keeping us alive. And that's right. Right. So then it's like a build and how do you build a bridge from that trauma response back to joy? And again, going back to this idea of like first being aware of it, it's, you know, what are the joy thieves in the way? Is it hypervigilance that has got you scanning, waiting for the next threat so that when something good happens, you immediately dismiss it? Because
Dr. Alison Cook (11:47.012)
Yes, I have a job to do. Yeah.
Yeah. Yes.
MC (12:13.908)
it's getting in the way of your scanning. Is it emotional numbing where you had to numb your emotions in order to survive because you were feeling so much intense fear and anxiety and sadness that you ended up kind of flatlining all of your emotions so that joy comes in and you can cognitively understand that good things are happening but you can't feel into it. So on and on which kind of thief is in the room and then how can we outsmart it and bring us back to joy and actually get that benefit to your nervous system.
that Joy is offering.
Dr. Alison Cook (12:47.392)
That's so good. That really clicks in for me when you're saying that because I feel, I will feel it in myself. If I'm really worried about something or there's some sort of, you know, it's like, I can't just, it's like trying to shift into a different lane too quickly to jump to joy. And so we're pausing long enough to go this hypervigilance, this scanning for the other shoe to drop, this numbing that I'm kind of defaulting to.
MC (13:02.412)
Right. Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (13:16.696)
It's there for a reason. I love how you talk about it. It's actually a strength response, not a weakness. It's how I learned to survive. And so from there, so we need some intermediary steps, it strikes me. So let's say, we're going into the holidays and we're noticing, right? The scanning or the hypervigilance or the numbing or whatever, the withdrawal, the avoidance, whatever.
MC (13:31.074)
Yeah.
MC (13:35.874)
Yep. Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (13:45.317)
the thing may be and some part of us is like, wish I could just enjoy the holidays to some degree. What is the intermediate? What are some of the steps that we can take to put our neurobiology in the position to receive the moment that you so beautifully set up for us at the top of this episode where it might be unexpected. It's
MC (13:51.522)
Yep. All right.
Yeah.
MC (14:02.798)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (14:12.046)
the least place we would expect it, but we've done the work to till the soil to where when that person that drives us crazy does something at family dinner that suddenly we're laughing at the absurdity of it as a, right, we can find, what can we do to kind of put ourselves in the position for that?
MC (14:16.334)
and
MC (14:22.028)
Right.
MC (14:30.796)
Yeah. So the good news with all of this is that there are practices you can start to use like right this second. And I'll give you a couple of really simple ones because...
Dr. Alison Cook (14:37.765)
Yeah.
MC (14:40.878)
You said a minute ago, it's almost like a muscle, right? This ability to recognize joy and welcome it in is a muscle and it's one that, especially if you've been dealing with trauma or chronic stress, you're not used to exercising. So of course it's not robust and strong, and that's totally fine. It's important to kind of recognize where you're at and then figure out, do I instill some sort of counter practices that welcome joy in with
Dr. Alison Cook (14:44.559)
Yeah.
MC (15:10.832)
activating my nervous system and bringing just snapping me right back to hypervigilance because I think that's the risk and I think you just said it so perfectly when you were like okay I'm gonna set up this huge pressure for myself how do I enjoy holidays right knowing that I'm stressed out and you're introducing more stress into that situation yeah yeah yeah
Dr. Alison Cook (15:24.952)
Yeah. Yes!
Dr. Alison Cook (15:31.428)
Yes, exactly. That we put this pressure on that just almost backfires and increases the, so we're kind of trying to take baby steps here. I love this. Like baby steps to putting ourselves in the path of a little bit of joy, right? And that's a beautiful lofty goal.
MC (15:42.318)
Yes.
MC (15:48.781)
Yep, yep, and a tiny.
bit of joy. this is the book was originally called Tiny Little Joys because this is a practice that came out of 2020 and all of my research around joy, which was really designed from, I don't know if I'm sure you're familiar with Peter Levine's ideas of pendulation and titration where you understand that like, if you want to process trauma, you need to kind of swing into it, let yourself feel it a little bit and then bring yourself back to baseline. And I think we're very used to that framing like, okay, I'm going to go into my trigger
Dr. Alison Cook (15:56.848)
Hmm.
Dr. Alison Cook (16:07.791)
Yeah
MC (16:23.108)
then I'm going to come back out into safety. We have to do the same thing with joy if we're understanding that joy is also activating to the nervous system. so tiny little joys is a practice where you literally take 10 to 20 seconds to scan your environment for something that gives you a very small
little burst of joy. So for example, I have a nail polish on my desk that my sister gave to me last Christmas that I love. And so as I was talking to you right then, I just noticed that. And then can I lean into the joy of having that object? And can I think about my sister and the fact that she sent me something for Christmas last year and what that means and all this stuff just for 20 seconds and then go back to whatever I was doing? If that was stressing out about Thanksgiving dinner, if that was worrying about seating charts,
or my uncle who's going to say something dumb and make everybody mad, then so be it. But you've given yourself now a 20 second nervous system reset. And the amazing thing is that that's not just a thought experiment. What that does is it lets your body kind of dampen the stress response because when you imprint 20 seconds of joy, you're releasing a bunch of chemicals and stress responses in your brain that counter fear and counter
stress.
Dr. Alison Cook (17:43.035)
So, okay, so let me, that was just so well stated. it's all, think what I'm hearing you say, let me just make sure I'm getting it for all of us listening, that just as we have to, in a way, learn our triggers, learn what they feel like, learn to be with them. And there's so much therapy speak about, right, feel your emotions, you know, and the negative emotions, right? And I'm part of that and I get that and I needed to learn that, right? I was a great sort of.
MC (17:50.53)
Yes. I said a lot.
Dr. Alison Cook (18:11.342)
spiritual bypasser, I was a great sort of emotional bypasser. So, and, but just as much as we need to do that, be aware of our triggers, be aware of where we're gonna feel activated and be able to lean into that and also flow out of that. It sounds like you're saying we also have to learn our joy triggers, for lack of a better word. Find them, feel them, notice them, seek them out so that that part of us is primed.
MC (18:30.828)
Yep, yep, yep, exactly. Right, right, right.
MC (18:41.504)
Yes, exactly.
Dr. Alison Cook (18:42.586)
That's so interesting.
MC (18:44.142)
And then in a moment of stress or when you're having a tough day or whatever, you will find yourself automatically going to the place of joy instead of the place of fear because your body learns to kind of look for that, that counter to the stress that you're dealing with. I made the sort of hilarious decision January 1st of 2025 on Instagram live, on Instagram, that I was gonna do tiny little joys every single day. And you know, it's hilarious because
you don't know what the year is gonna present you and you're gonna do this, make a video every single day, that's absurd. And 2025 served up like one of the hardest years to date. And the cool thing about that though is that I've been able to see in real time and show people in real time how anchoring that is to be able to like hold yourself to that practice and then see what sort of benefits you can reap, you know?
Dr. Alison Cook (19:24.688)
Wow.
Dr. Alison Cook (19:32.442)
Wow.
Dr. Alison Cook (19:41.561)
I want to see that. That's cool. That's really beautiful. I want to switch gears just a little bit to a related topic that you talk about and also related to this time of year, which is the hope circuit, right? Hope. How do we rewire our brains for the hope circuit? First of all, how is that different? How is hope different from joy? And is it a similar process?
MC (19:43.468)
Yeah.
MC (19:48.877)
Yes.
MC (19:54.861)
Yes.
MC (20:02.552)
Yeah.
MC (20:07.416)
That's great question. I think if you want to think of, I'm going with this metaphor of like primary colors versus mixed colors. I don't know why I'm not an artist, but it's just what's here. If you think about like hope and joy and imagination as different colors on the same palette, then I think that's a helpful framing. So joy and hope and gratitude and kindness and imagination, all are emotions and entryways into
that has been termed the hope circuit in the brain. Which is just a series of brain areas that wire together and fire up when you're experience, when you're making a gratitude list from a really like present place or when you're practicing tiny little joys or when you're doing something called absurd hope, which I can explain in a second. All of those things activate the hope circuit. The cool thing about the hope circuit is that it turns off the fear circuit.
So when you think about like sort of electrical circuits in your brain, you can think about your brain almost like it's an old house. And in an old house, you may have had this experience. If you're running the air conditioner, you can't turn the microwave on or you'll blow a fuse. That's just because these circuits are counterposed. They can't be on at the same time. Our brains are the same. We don't have endless energy and electric ability in our brains. We have limitations. And so when you're in fear,
about this a couple of minutes ago, you can't access joy. When you're in the fear circuit, that part of your brain kind of goes dark because all of your resources are needed to handle whatever the stressor or threat that you're dealing with is. And we all know that and that's very, like we've had that experience. the smoke alarm is going off in your house, you can't do like complex math and balance your checkbook because you're too in the fear. The cool thing is that in like
2015 neuroscientists discovered that it also goes the other way. So if the hope circuit is online by a practice of joy or hope or kindness or gratitude, then the fear circuit can't be online either. And so we can leverage that by then making ourselves, like holding ourselves accountable. Do I have a couple of exercises every day where I'm intentionally going in and turning on the hope circuit? Because if I can do that for five minutes or 20 seconds, that's five whole minutes.
MC (22:36.976)
that the fear circuit is offline. And that makes changes in your entire body because the fear circuit releases stress hormones and the hope circuit releases hormones and chemicals that counter stress.
Dr. Alison Cook (22:48.746)
my gosh, that's unbelievable. Yeah, that's amazing. It's just amazing to me how the brain is wired. And I guess what comes to mind is, gosh, we've spent, I feel like, so much time kind of shaming ourselves for not feeling these emotions as if they're magic. But we can sort of unlock.
MC (22:51.182)
Isn't that cool?
MC (22:57.165)
I know.
MC (23:12.472)
Right.
MC (23:16.022)
Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (23:16.816)
We now understand it a little bit more now we can again put ourselves on the pathway toward a meaningful rich experience of hope that's amazing
MC (23:22.35)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think hope is another one of these things where it gets very bypassy, right? We tell people in the deepest, darkest moments of, we can't give up hope. Actually, you can. And you will. right? And the cool thing is that hope and joy actually don't need you to believe in them for them to exist. And they will come and find you, even when you don't want them to, you know?
Dr. Alison Cook (23:33.998)
Yes, 100%.
Dr. Alison Cook (23:39.544)
Hmm. Yes!
Dr. Alison Cook (23:52.741)
That's incredible. And to me, that's where the psychology meets the spirituality, right? We're putting ourselves in the path for these incredible, real realities to find us through the miracle of the way our brain is designed. I mean, that's just incredible. I wanna ask you, MC, if you're okay with this, since you so just beautifully shared with us your experience.
MC (23:56.738)
Yes, totally.
Right.
MC (24:06.55)
Yes, exactly.
MC (24:10.702)
Right. Yeah.
MC (24:16.215)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (24:22.34)
do you going into the holiday season, going into Christmas, knowing you have, I would imagine, this twofold experience of hope and excitement and joy or wanting to have that and also knowing you're going to have some grief?
MC (24:30.477)
Yeah.
MC (24:41.23)
Yep. For sure.
Dr. Alison Cook (24:44.112)
come up, knowing that all of that is part of the beautiful multicolor, all can coexist. How do you set yourself up for both holidays?
MC (24:51.35)
Yep.
MC (24:57.494)
Yeah, that's a great question.
I want to start by saying that I very much subscribe to sort of like a toolbox method of coping rather than a singular tool because I know there are going to be moments where I feel anxiety. There's going to be moments where I feel grief. There's going to be moments where I feel sort of desperation or loneliness or isolation. And each of these moments is going to require a different tool. And I think so going in, it's like, okay, what let's get the toolbox
Dr. Alison Cook (25:27.568)
Mm-hmm.
MC (25:31.706)
ready, not just the one singular tool.
Dr. Alison Cook (25:34.341)
Before you go into the toolbox, which I love, what you just said is a big part of it. I'm going into it knowing I'm going to feel all these different things. I mean, right there, it's like, this is baseline. I'm going to have moments that are going to be hard. I'm going to have moments that are going to feel rich. And even that right there, that posture, I think is a huge reset for so many of us. Again, it's not putting that pressure of, need to have a joyful season. It's like, it's going to be complicated.
MC (25:41.398)
Yeah, yes, right. Yeah.
MC (25:48.643)
Yep.
MC (25:52.835)
Mm-hmm.
MC (25:57.123)
Yeah.
Right. Yeah, it's going to have all the right. Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (26:04.336)
So I love that. Yeah. Okay, great. And so then how, kind of tools help you and that do you recommend to help you through each of those?
MC (26:13.634)
So the Tiny Little Joys, I would highly recommend. think that's a great anchor and can join us on Instagram if you are so called or you can do it yourself. You can do it with a group. I've had people do it with their kids at dinner every night or in the car when you're commuting. But that's an anchoring practice. also love, there's a practice called absurd hope where you kind of go into the hope circuit and flip it on. But instead of trying to hope for your own future, which can sometimes be complicated, you hope for a future
Dr. Alison Cook (26:17.583)
Yeah.
MC (26:43.618)
that you know is ridiculous and will not happen. So I use the example of I'm going to be a cartoon elephant, ballerina, who lives in Paris and eats baguettes all day long. And then spend five minutes, you can sort of...
tack this onto a habit that you already do like brushing your teeth or showering and imagine that future that you know is absurd in the most vivid detail possible. So what are your shoes going to look like as a cartoon ballerina in Paris? What kind of friends are you going to have? What's your apartment going to be like? What kind of animation are we talking? Is this Pixar? Is this anime? Is this something else, right? Like because when you get into the hope circuit and can activate it and turn it on for any extended period of time,
you are shutting down the fear circuit and that's going to change what's happening in your biology. And I think sometimes when we're in really difficult seasons, we fixate on what's happening, of course we do, right in the here and now. I'm worried about Thanksgiving and who's going to come and whether they're going to be angry and what the conversation is going to be like and are we going to talk about politics and what then? And instead of that, if you could take yourself out of that negative loop for five minutes every single day, you will see that you have more resilience.
and then loading up on tools to deal with whatever you know is coming. So think about last Christmas. What did you really struggle with? Was it anxiety? Okay, what helps you with anxiety? Having tactile fidgets around or a playlist that's really calming, taking cold showers? Like what are your tools to deal with these core emotions that are gonna come up and then make a list of them and put it somewhere you can see it, whether that's in your phone or on your
Dr. Alison Cook (28:09.082)
Yeah.
MC (28:28.528)
refrigerator or your bathroom mirror so that you're cued to do the things when you're in the overwhelm. Because the other issue with overwhelm is that it disconnects you from the part of your brain that remembers the list. And so that's, think, why we get stuck in these things where I'm like, I know I'm supposed to do X, Y, or Z, but I really struggle remembering.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:34.084)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:45.529)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (28:48.878)
love that. You've mentioned the word imagination and it strikes me that in the hope circuitry and in the exercise you just shared about, it sparks imagination. I've found imagination to be such a powerful tool. can, in my life, I'm not sure about my listeners or you all, just be a candid, it can turn into fantasy, which...
MC (29:00.705)
Yeah.
MC (29:14.157)
Mm.
Dr. Alison Cook (29:15.226)
can take me out of, can be a little bit of a spiritual bypass, but at its best, imagination has been a very powerful tool. I guess what I think about is even from, I think about Viktor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning where he used, he imagined his loved ones and he imagined the love and that helped him through just impossible.
MC (29:19.436)
Yep.
MC (29:36.28)
Yeah.
MC (29:41.016)
Yep. Great.
Dr. Alison Cook (29:42.765)
circumstances. So from something like that, I know I've done that in my own life when I felt really isolated or alone, will think, I will imagine the people who I love surrounding me, you What are your thoughts on imagination and how that, I know for me that can be a built-in tool. Like you're saying, I kind of want to remind myself, I want to put it as a sticky note on the mirror.
MC (30:06.796)
Yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:09.52)
because if I'm alone or I don't have immediate access to something, thoughts on that and its relationship to joy and hope.
MC (30:13.707)
and
MC (30:18.924)
Yeah, and I mean, think it's part of what your question is, like, how do we make sure we're not maladaptive daydreaming? that? Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (30:24.952)
Yeah, yes, yes, yes, not escapism, but helpful.
MC (30:30.004)
Right. So I mean, I think there is, there are some subtle differences between these kinds of imaginations, right? I actually get this question a lot because I think people are really wary of imagination. And I think that's super fascinating, right? Like it's like, where's this going to take me? Where are we going? There's something about it that's a little bit scary because it's unknown and we know that it's made up. And so what does that mean about this life we're living? And I point this out because I just think this is another one
Dr. Alison Cook (30:57.829)
Yeah.
MC (30:59.918)
of these places where you can see the sort of tension between trauma and joy if we want to put them under sort of umbrella, you know, names. It's like, yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (31:11.652)
Yeah, for sure. Because fantasy or escape hatches that we build in our mind can be a way to survive a traumatic event. And again, to your point, it's an incredibly brilliant, strong way. How do we bring that back into a healthy thing in the moment? Yeah.
MC (31:18.606)
Totally. Right, right.
MC (31:25.292)
Great.
MC (31:31.779)
And I think, so one thing that differentiates between the kind of maladaptive daydreaming or escapism and true imagination is that maladaptive daydreaming has an ache to it that imagination replaces with silliness.
Dr. Alison Cook (31:50.768)
Yeah.
MC (31:51.437)
Right? So if I'm thinking about being a ballerina, even as a human being and not a cartoon elephant in Paris, there's a real silliness to that because I'm a clumsy person. Yeah. And there may be like a shadow of an ache of like, maybe I do want to take dance classes and that's maybe something to actually do. But when you get into the space of maladaptive daydreaming, there's part of that, the way that I understand it, that is about sort of, it's like giving you access to the pain of the fact that you don't have
Dr. Alison Cook (31:59.161)
Yeah, platefulness. Yeah.
MC (32:21.41)
that life. Does that make sense?
Dr. Alison Cook (32:22.352)
Yeah, sure. Yes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And go ahead.
MC (32:26.446)
So, and that is run. No, you go.
Dr. Alison Cook (32:32.206)
Well, no, that ache is a good word because then there's a longing that we actually want to pay attention to. And what is that about versus the joy and delight that comes from imaginative play that we all had a taste of when we were kids, right? That's what kids do, right? And so that makes sense to me that when there's that ache in it or a sorrow in it, that might be when to look at it go, is there something there underneath that that I actually want in my real life?
MC (32:37.73)
Right, totally. Right. Yeah.
MC (32:49.262)
Right.
MC (32:59.04)
Right. Right, right, right.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:02.744)
or need.
MC (33:02.86)
And then turn to that, yeah. And maybe you do this practice every day in the shower and you're like, okay, I'm imagining a different scene every day, but like there's a theme and what's the theme? Okay, I need to think about that. But I think when it comes to escapism, I don't think we're really at risk until we're abandoning our own lives. So the practice that I'm talking about is that you take five minutes or 15 minutes and you're enhancing your day. You're not escaping from a task
Dr. Alison Cook (33:10.947)
Yes.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:29.348)
Yeah. Yes.
MC (33:32.824)
or your real relationship or a feeling that's over here that you don't want to feel.
Dr. Alison Cook (33:36.933)
Yes, I love it. You're exercising that muscle. You're being intentional about exercising the hope. I love that. feel like you need to, this is unsolicited, but speaking of the holiday seasons, we've covered hope and joy. Now we need to have you back on and we'll talk about peace. Right? Because all of these beautiful, you know, I think about the holiday, all the songs we sing, know, hope, joy and peace.
MC (33:41.218)
Yeah.
MC (33:55.052)
There we go, yeah.
MC (34:02.925)
Right.
Dr. Alison Cook (34:04.484)
They are available to us. And I love that you are not minimizing the pain and the trauma. You're teaching us how to work with our design.
MC (34:06.392)
Yep.
MC (34:12.611)
Yeah.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, there's, I'm huge on exercises. There's exercises at the end of every chapter in the Joy Reset, but also just knowing this framework. What exercises can you think of for yourself, right? How is your life structured and situated? And how can you adapt these exercises so that they really work for you, you know?
Dr. Alison Cook (34:30.384)
Yeah. Yeah.
MC (34:39.222)
And to your point about music, think music is incredibly powerful. And so that can be another tool, right? If you have 15 minutes, do you have a playlist that really lets you feel inspired or lets you feel a bunch of sadness? And then you turn the playlist off and go make dinner, you know, like, yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (34:42.938)
Yeah. Yes. Yep.
Dr. Alison Cook (34:53.623)
Yes!
Dr. Alison Cook (34:57.518)
that's good. Yeah, that gives you that outlet and you're doing it intentionally. You're giving yourself that sad song or that that joyful song. Yeah, I love it. And see, I'm gonna go check out your I love the the joy challenge. I think that's really beautiful. Tell my listeners where they can find you and your work and these resources are just so helpful.
MC (35:02.349)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
MC (35:16.877)
Yes.
MC (35:21.006)
thank you. I am on TikTok and Instagram at the same handle, just mc.phd. And then my website is just alchemycoaching.life.
Dr. Alison Cook (35:32.484)
Beautiful, so you provide coaching services as well.
MC (35:35.672)
Yes, yep, I do curriculum and I work with corporations and groups and individuals and all sorts of stuff. yeah.
Dr. Alison Cook (35:40.528)
Amazing. Okay, we will link to everything in the show notes. Thank you for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today.
MC (35:48.856)
Thank you so much for having me. This was lovely.