Exuberance, Happiness and Joy

ELLE: You seem to be a part of a new wave of scholars that is examining positive mental qualities such as optimism and what you call exuberance. It’s clear why we study mental disorders – to try to help people who have them. What’s the return on thinking about feeling good?
KRJ: I’m struck over and over by how much we take things like exuberance and joy for granted. We don’t give them the kind of importance they deserve; we’re really doing our species a disservice.
ELLE: Give your own history of manic depression, taking exuberance for granted is perhaps the last thing you’d do.
KRJ: True. And if you have the kind of mania that’s characterized by highly exuberant feelings, at the beginning anyway, it’s something you never forget. Because it’s wonderful – the high mood, the energy, the sense that nothing’s beyond you. But you also have an acute awareness that it can escalate into chaos and madness.
ELLE: Most people, though, don’t have your susceptibility to bipolar illness. For them, exuberance doesn’t come with that price tag – it’s unambiguously a good thing.
KRJ: Definitely. We sometimes feel uncomfortable around people who are too exuberant, though. They can seem slightly ridiculous, or like the Energizer Bunny – exhausting and irritating to be around. But it’s important to realize that these very intense moods and temperaments exist for a reason. These hugely optimistic and resilient people are impelled to explore things that most of us would just pass by. What makes us great as a species is that some of us are out front, even sometimes putting our lives at risk, totally consumed by what we’re doing – whether it’s studying the stars or elephant behavior or whatever.
ELLE: Conventional wisdom would describe that kind of heedless single-mindedness as archetypal male behavior. And bookstores are full of pop-psychology tracts that praise the emotional sensitivity of women and cast their husbands – so full of plans, so full of themselves – as the bad guys.
KRJ: That’s right. I get tired of hearing people say there’s only the reflective side of life. That’s why I interviewed quite a few women scientists for this book. And things are changing. I go to neuroscience meetings these days where half the people are young women, and they can’t stop talking about what they do; they can’t wait to get to the lab in the morning.
ELLE: But you’re not suggesting that we all need to work on our exuberance – pump up our EQ, as it were.
KRJ: No. When it comes to temperament, in general, I don’t think you can put in what the Lord left out. Temperament, like many things in life, is pretty hardwired. But I do think a lot of women especially let their natural exuberance get squashed because they feel there’s something vaguely unfeminine about being enthusiastic – when if fact it’s a great feeling and it’s great for other people to be around. Women are taught to rein in their emotions as a social courtesy, but they should give greater vent to their enthusiasm. It’s infectious.
ELLE: You devote part of your book to classic children’s authors – A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame – who seem to have a direct line into youngsters’ fantasy lives. On the subject of being squashed, you seem concerned that kids’ exuberance isn’t given free rein these days.
KRJ: We’ve gotten rid of recess in schools and with it an appreciation of the neurocognitive importance of play, the physical and the social bonding aspects. That’s how mammals learn. You couldn’t put rhesus monkeys in a classroom and expect them to sit still all day. Kids learn from exuberant play. But today they have lessons, lessons, lessons – and then it’s time for soccer practice. The amount of structure in their lives is really beyond pale.
ELLE: How about their parents?
KJR: It’s the same situation, especially for women with their busy schedules. They need to take the time to do things that give them pleasure – going to a museum or going out into nature. We don’t know a lot about the neurology of exuberance, but we do know that the brain chemical dopamine is involved. It’s a reward system, an inducer and seducer. You do something new and challenging and then you feel terrific. That’s nature’s way of reinforcing this state.
ELLE: It strikes me as not so easy to write analytically about positive feelings. Without having much existing science to draw on, you have to draw distinctions between exuberance, happiness and joy, which in everyday conversation mean pretty much the same thing.
KRJ: It is a challenge. As I see it, exuberance is about optimism, about the future – trying to do something that hasn’t been done before. Happiness is a more satisfied and passive, less future-oriented state. Joy is less high energy and usually shorter-lived. It’s been viewed more in the context of religion.
ELLE: You suggest in your book that exuberance is part of America’s national character – the pioneer’s urge to cross the continent, whatever the odds, and all that.
KRJ: Exactly. Happiness is sitting in the drawing rooms of London – not crossing the ocean in the first place.
ELLE: You write about exuberance being tied up with humanity’s earliest responses to the natural world – the season, the harvest, fertility, the whole nine yards.
KRJ: That’s right. There’s the anthropology of it all – but even in my field of mood disorders, we know how much the brain is wired to respond to light and the change of seasons.
ELLE: In An Unquiet Mind, you wrote about having to be especially careful in July. That was when your mania was most likely to take off.
KJR: Yes – well, we’re mammals you, you know, and psychologists, to an amazing degree, tend to ignore that. We’re so species-centered that we forget where we came from. And the mammalian world is especially beholden to the seasons, to changes in life and changes in resources.
ELLE: As adults in the here and now, a lot of our experience with exuberance seems to be bound up in love and romance, especially if we don’t fit the bill as one of your happily driven scientists.
KRJ: Yes. Exuberance, in you or in the person you’re drawn to, helps propel love affairs. And that joyful state enables you to bond very closely with somebody, to be exploratory with them, and ultimately to decide whether you want to make a commitment to them.
ELLE: So being in the early stages of a love affair is sort of like being one of those exuberant scientists.
KRJ: You get serious about everything, right? You become interested in the most uninteresting details about somebody. It casts this cosmic hue over the relationship. Of course, in some cases all this immersion leads to falling out of love, and that hurts. Or it can be the prelude to a different kind of relationship that exists over time – one that is intimate, close, and wonderful.
ELLE: In An Unquiet Mind, you describe some of your own very dramatic love affairs. But your marriage to neuropsychiatrist Richard Wyatt seemed to be an example of the calmer sort of attachment that weathers the long haul better.
KRJ: That’s true, and it’s very important. My husband died two years ago. He was very quietly exuberant. He’d walk into a room and find a hundred questions that he was interested in. We loved talking about what had gone on during the day. And he loved this book. He said, “This is the book you really have always wanted to write.� But he died about halfway through my writing it. So this book is very personal. It’s a kind of love song to exuberance, which allows you to move forward, even if something terribly sad happens. There’s a capacity to be revitalized – over and over and over again.