Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons, and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. Today, we are working with our element of sympathetic joy and like we did last episode, we are focusing on an obstacle that can make this difficult. So last episode, we dug into the fallacy of fairness. So head over there after this, if you missed that one. And today we're talking about the fallacy of scarcity. Which is essentially falling into this trap of thinking that [00:01:00] even when we have sufficient resources, we still believe we don't have enough.
Could be not enough time, money, friends, cars, whatever. So I think this fallacy, also known as scarcity mentality, is really important to pay attention to because it can have a big impact on our mental health and on our decision making. So let's get into what it is a little bit more and some of those impacts.
Do you want to give some examples of this fallacy, Henry, and how it relates to mental health?
Henry: Sure, you gave some good examples already, and I think, uh, you know, the two really common ones that you mentioned are the belief that there's not enough money or not enough time.
Aimee: Right.
Henry: two are kind of related, aren't they? Because most of us use our time to make money. We always hear that money can't buy happiness, right? [00:02:00] Research, though, recently, points out that there actually is a correlation between money and happiness. And, the amount of yearly income that's associated with a happier baseline is actually higher than I thought it would be. It goes beyond just meeting our basic needs, which isa side issue, but it's interesting. Nevertheless, I can tell you from my work with a lot of different clients that it is still our belief about how much is enough that really matters,you know, beyond a certain baseline level. I have seen folks making far more money than they needed to reach that baseline, but they are still miserable because they're comparing themselves to others, people in the top 1%, or if if they themselves are already in the top 1%, they'll compare to people in the top 0.1%, you know. It's just [00:03:00] so, there's some ideal that they have in their mind that they will never reach because once they do it, it'll just go to a higher number.
Aimee: Right.
Henry: Having enough time, enough money, enough material things seem to impact our happiness, but I think that deep down, they're really just substitutes for the really important things that we all want and need. And those are to have enough love, to feel worthy of being loved. In terms of mental health, I think those are the two that really matter. Everything else, beyond kind of meeting our basic physical needs, just takes a distant backseat.
Aimee: Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking of the William James quote here. "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
Henry: Hmm.[00:04:00]
Aimee: It's at the heart of all this. So let, let's dig into that fallacy and what it means for decision making. It's kind of like bringing it down to the practical here because that is related to mental health in big ways as well.
So, like you said, Henry, there's a lot of research we can actually lean on here. Much of it from research, looking at folks who do lack resources. So kind of under that baseline. So, for example, a person who is trying to pay their rent and grocery costs, just kind of getting by, the research there is really clear that mental health outcomes are worse.
Particularly, there's higher rates of depression and anxiety. and cognitive functioning and decision making skills are negatively impacted. If you've ever been in that space, you know there's just no room for much else besides how am I going to make this work?And it's because when we need to spend more cognitive effort, like just thinking about getting by how to make bills each [00:05:00] month, it's just takes up so much space that there's less flexibility to work through creative, good decision making processes.
So, these effects of scarcity on mental health and decision making, though, they are not just based on money or reality. So here's where the fallacy of scarcity really comes in. If you believe you don't have enough of something, money, time, whatever, even if you do, your body, your system believes you. And it revs up these ancient wirings of survival, really, to keep you focused on getting more. And when that's happening, again, we can't do our best thinking. Specifically, our empathy tends to drop like our world gets smaller. We're more likely to get into competitive thinking, which ironically doesn't help us get resources.
Beyond that, fascinating our [00:06:00] IQ actually drops. So IQ scores actually drop amidst scarcity mindset. They will bounce back when we get out of it. It's not like a permanent thing. Our memory is negatively impacted. We fall into rigid and black and white thinking, um, that limits our decision options. So it's not good.
And the more firmly we latch onto the scarcity thinking, the more likely we are to make then decisions that are bad for us. Decisions that do not help our situations, that fight against our cooperative nature, that leave us feeling isolated, decisions that do not help our mood. I'll quote Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to drive in this point, I think. It's from his book, The Body Keeps the Score. He wrote, "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves." And I think Van der Kolk nails the problem when it comes to these fallacies. These are lies [00:07:00] that we tell ourselves and they keep us down.
They keep us from our true nature. And so with Sympathetic Joy as an antidote to this, I think it allows us to take that hyper focus on ourselves, it takes that focus off a bit, like, look up, look out with more clear eyes. What is good in the world that we can tap into and celebrate? And I like that because it kind of also pushes back on the pressure that
if you have a scarcity mindset, then you just need to adopt an abundance mindset, which is my, I get so frustrated with. Maybe it's just the Instagram notion of abundance mindset and all this manifesting stuff. I don't know why I have a real problem with it. I don't think that's the goal, at least for me.
We need to do another podcast on this. I think
I know I'm getting all revved up about it. I don't know what it is, [00:08:00] but maybe it's just my issue. But I do think that sympathetic joy can help us to actually see what is really true, right? Rather than just manifesting, again, with a hyper focus on ourselves--
I think that's why I get so agitated with it. It doesn't allow us to look up and look out. Sympathetic joy can create more space for in our thinking so that we aren't so easily taken over by these fallacies. And when that happens, like when we get out of these fallacies, our true nature just naturally rises up.
And our true nature is good. And it creates abundance, there we go, in and around us.
Henry: Yeah, I think that's one reason why this month's element of sympathetic joy can be such a huge boon to happiness. It really cuts through a lot of our beliefs that we don't have enough or that we ourselves are not enough. It helps us to see that [00:09:00] it's not really a competition for resources that are scarce; at least not on an emotional level, and certainly not on a spiritual level. So, when it comes to living a more joyful life, which is ultimately our focus here at Joy Lab, sympathetic joy is a radical but super effective way to boost our happiness. And remember, again, it's a skill, it's a practice. Which is why we developed the Joy Lab program in the first place. It gives structure to the practice. But just imagine, if you could really, genuinely feel happiness for someone else's good fortune, what a game changer that would be. You would know deep in your bones that happiness is not a [00:10:00] scarce commodity. Neither is love, or self worth, or meaning, or authenticity. You know, the things that really matter, the things that give us an unshakable foundation for a joyful life are not in short supply. Our greatest mistake is thinking that they are. And the great paradox of sympathetic joy is that when you let go of the need to get more of these deep qualities, you find that you actually do have more of them.
Aimee: That is a great paradox. So we all have these tools right now to do that. I want to close
with some wisdom from Dr. Brené Brown that I think doubles down on that. Here it is. "There's only one way out of scarcity, and that is enoughness. At some point, we just need [00:11:00] to say enough. I am enough. What I'm doing is enough."
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