Why Joy Heals Burnout Faster Than Discipline

Most of us mothers, when we have been living in survival mode for years, arrive at a very reasonable conclusion. “Well. It took years to get here. It will take years to heal.” A sensible thought. Yet, from my experience, entirely wrong.

While survival mode does feel all-consuming, the amazing little mercy I wish someone had told me sooner is that God designed the brain and body to be much more responsive, and more mercifully changeable than one might think. Because in the same way that you can be thrown into panic in a few seconds by one sharp comment, one heinously loud noise, or unexpected mess, so too can you escape that kind of acute stress in mere seconds.

The reason is because there’s a very practical tool to escape stress like this and it’s called joy. Joy loves speed.

I know that sounds almost offensively simple. But hear me out.

I had spent too long thinking that I needed a calmer season, a cleaner house, better sleep, more help, fewer responsibilities, fewer interruptions, in order to feel peace. Surely, those things are lovely. I am not opposed to a quiet house, or to children sleeping through the night. I’m certainly not opposed to someone else folding the laundry. But the problem was that I had made peace dependent on circumstances that motherhood does not regularly provide.

I was waiting to feel joyful before I deliberately practiced joy. That is where I stayed stuck.

Here is the framework I want to give you today. There are 4 principles that helped me get out of survival mode within months even though I lived in it for years and the first is…

Principle 1: Joy Loves Speed and Peace Loves Repetition

When you experience genuine joy, your body responds immediately in a physiological way. Your vagal tone shifts. That’s the nerve that regulates your nervous system between stress and rest. Dopamine gets released. Heart rate variability improves. Cortisol drops. All within seconds.

Your body is designed to downregulate from stress when it encounters joy. The beautiful thing is that we can use all that to our advantage to go from chronic stress, to lasting peace because your brain wires what you often repeat.

Recall a funny memory, and you’ve just strengthened a joy pathway. Stop to notice something beautiful and really delight in it and you’ve trained your attention toward awe.

Your brain responds to the input you give it, and that response affects your nervous system. If you’ve been feeding it overwhelm, your brain is wired for more overwhelm. But if you feed it joy, gratitude, awe, it wires for that instead. When you practice joy, you’re giving your nervous system important signals of safety.

While joy is the spark, peace is the fire you keep feeding. Joy can interrupt the spiral in seconds, but peace is built by returning to that joy frequently, when, in the very moments you actually want to feel anxious, you instead turn to joy.

By the way, the first few times you choose joy in those unsuspecting moments, it may feel awkward and unconvincing. Almost impossible, like you’re trying to stop the wind, so I’m going to give you a practical tip to incorporate more intentional joy interruptions in your home, but first, if you’re realizing that the way you’re living motherhood right now is leaving you exhausted, overstimulated, disconnected, and stuck in survival mode, I created a free workshop to help you begin coming back to peace, order, and healing. I walk you through the exact process I used to move from chronic fight-or-flight to building a joyful, God-honoring home without changing my circumstances. You can watch it for free below.

A Jar of Funny Moments

Here’s the joy interruption idea to increase your joy in your home. This idea came from a student in my community.

She called it a “jar of funny moments”. In it we put keywords of stories that had happened to us as a family or to one of our family members. These are stories we love to recall together and laugh really hard because they are so funny. When we are having a hard time or sometimes just because, we take out a card, read the caption and go like “oh, remember when…” “Yes, and then XYZ happened…” Most of the time we are laughing so hard that we are crying.

Principle 2: Joy Replicates

Which leads me to the next principle and it’s that joy replicates. Faster than seems reasonable, honestly. Which is terribly inconvenient for our despair.

Have you ever noticed when you start noticing things that bring you joy, you notice more things that bring you joy? Or when you’re laughing with someone who told a joke, other things become funnier and before you know it you’re belly laughing?

This does not have to be some elaborate exercise. Sometimes it’s much more ordinary than that.

The other day my husband and I were sitting outside, and he said, “Can I show you something? And can you actually look at it and not just say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s cool’?” Which was, I admit, a fair request and also very convicting to say the least. In any case, I said yes and he goes, “See how cool those clouds look? Just look at the contours of them!”

Suddenly, because I took the time to find awe and delight in the beauty of the clouds my husband was sharing with me, this very ordinary moment became a conversation about heaven. About how if clouds can look like this now, in a fallen world, what on earth will everything look like when all things are made new?

That is what I mean by joy replicating.

Nothing about my circumstances changed. The dishes were still probably waiting somewhere. The ordinary demands of life had not politely excused themselves during our admiration of the clouds in the sky. But my attention had been interrupted by glory and if you allow yourself to do that, your body will follow. Just give it a try and you’ll see. See how abundantly the Lord will bless that little act of attention turned upward.

Joy isn’t the prize at the finish line. It’s actually what gets you there.

Psalm 16:11:

“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

In His presence, there is fullness of joy. As you turn your attention toward His presence, joy becomes real.

If you feel too far gone for that to be true, if you think one moment of joy could never possibly compete with the years of burnout you’ve experienced, this next principle is for you because, and I say this with all the love in the world, you are giving despair far too much credit.

Principle 3: Joy and Stress Are Not Equal Forces

For a long time, I assumed that if I had spent most of the day stressed, the day was simply a lost cause. I thought the bad moments had more authority than the good ones. One ugly morning meant the whole day was ruined. One snapped response meant I had failed my children and that’s all they would remember about their childhood.

But joy and stress are not equal forces and I’ve learned that just a tiny mustard seed of obedience in this area can produce so much more fruit than an entire day of rehearsing the thought that everything is awful and motherhood is miserable. A small moment of real joy truly can interrupt hours of stress.

Another practice that quickly pulled me out of survival mode is living in a constant state of awe. Constantly finding moments that lift my eyes upward, almost like a little game. Where is the awe in this moment?

I’ll never forget the first time I saw worship in American Sign Language. Have you ever seen it? It’s like a full-body act of worship and it’s so beautiful. I was in the lecture hall of my local Bible Study Fellowship and I noticed the ASL interpreter up there worshiping and I was just in absolute awe and wonder. I couldn’t stop watching. It was just so awe-inspiring because it made worship look less like something we sing and more like something we become and I just thought, yes, this is what heavenly worship will be like. A full body experience.

This brings us to the question every exhausted mother is probably asking by now. If joy can interrupt survival mode that quickly, why is it so difficult to escape? I have plenty of moments where I feel glimpses of joy and then ten minutes later I am back in the kitchen feeling irritated by the dishes, overwhelmed by the noise, and just absolutely exhausted.

The answer is tone.

Principle 4: You Get to Choose the Tone of the Home

Survival mode or joy becomes the tone of the home and you get to choose.

Survival mode feels so hard to escape because your day is not usually made up of one isolated stressful moment or even multiple stressful moments. It is one overarching tone multiplying through a hundred ordinary moments. The issue is often that everything that’s happening in a mother trapped in survival mode’s day, hinges on the overarching tone.

A messy kitchen feels annoying when you are in survival mode, but a messy kitchen can feel like a blessing when you’re regulated and have your sights set on things above. A crying baby feels like your body has been dropped into a burning building when you are in survival mode, but it feels like you were literally made for nurturing that baby when you’re regulated.

A normal question from your husband feels ordinary when you are regulated. The exact same question can feel like one more person needing one more thing from you when you are already drowning.

The situation may be the same. Your internal state changes the interpretation of it.

This is why little things can feel enormous when you’re in survival mode. Because your nervous system is already overloaded. When your body is already carrying fear, exhaustion, resentment, and overwhelm, every ordinary demand gets amplified.

But the beautiful part is that the same thing is true in the other direction.

Joy replicates. Gratitude replicates. Awe replicates.

One small act of delight can carry into every other interaction you have that day. One intentional truthful thought can interrupt the next spiral. One calm response can make the next calm response more available to your brain.

Think about that. What if one thought could ensure that you remain your child’s safe place in the very moment your flesh wants to make them feel like the problem?

2 Corinthians 10:5 says, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

Where to Start

If this helped you see why one small moment of joy, awe, gratitude, or truth can change more than you think, would you please share this with another mother who needs language for what she’s been feeling. If you know you have been mothering from survival mode and you need a quick start for escaping that burnout, I created a free workshop to help you begin that process. I walk you through the exact steps I used to move from chronic fight-or-flight to building a joyful, God-honoring home without changing my circumstances.