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Kavita Daswani

Halfway through writing her new book, The Joy Reset, grief coach Dr MaryCatherine McDonald nearly gave up.
A close friend – young and seemingly healthy – was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and given 12 to 18 months to live.
“I wanted to quit,” McDonald says. “I started thinking, ‘Yeah, I don’t actually believe in this.’”
But she did not abandon the manuscript. In the midst of her doubt, a quiet realisation surfaced – and it became the heartbeat of the book.
“I realised then that joy doesn’t need you to believe in it,” she says. “Whether you want it to or not, joy will find you.”

That idea – that joy is not a naive escape but a resilient force – pulses through The Joy Reset: Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness and How to Win it Back.
A practical guide backed by neuroscience, the book offers a road map for rediscovering joy even amid personal or global crisis. It is a follow-up to McDonald’s book about trauma, Unbroken, released in 2023.
McDonald – a San Francisco-based trauma researcher – first developed the idea for the new book when she began noticing widespread emotional numbness in the early days of the pandemic in 2020.
“Everyone was just so stuck and in a dark place,” she says.
She saw it in her clients, her friends and herself. People were not just sad – they were forgetting how to find joy altogether.
“I reached for the research that was coming from positive psychology and realised that there had been some interesting neuroscience that no one was talking about.”

That included the “hope circuit”, a term coined by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, which explains how the brain builds pathways for anticipating positive experiences – or, after trauma, shuts them down.
From this work emerged one of the book’s key concepts: the “joy blockers”. These are six common barriers to joy, organised into three categories: joy-resistance, joy-fear and joy-guilt.
“The most common, easily identifiable joy thief is hypervigilance,” McDonald says. “When you are on constant alert for potential threat, positive emotions like joy or hope or imagination – anything attached to it – by definition lower your guard. They lower your state of alertness, and that can feel very vulnerable.”
Another common block is guilt – especially amid collective suffering.
“Maybe you’ve been through a loss and you feel like you have this debt, that you have to continue feeling bad. Then joy can feel like something that’s indulgent, or something you’re not entitled to feel.”

She sees this a lot right now.
“People are looking across the world and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got innocent folks being held in prisons in El Salvador – how is it OK for me to think about [feeling] joy right now?’
“If we all push joy away, then we’re all suffering in ways that we don’t need to.”
The difficulty many of us have with joy, she says, is directly tied to how we experience – and define – trauma.
In Unbroken, McDonald proposed a broader definition: “Anytime you have an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home.”
Many people do not recognise their own trauma, especially if it does not fit into narrow definitions, she explains.
“Rather than saying, ‘OK, an earthquake is allowed or a mugging is allowed to be traumatic, but your fourth-grade toxic teacher is not’ – I ask, how did that impact the nervous system of the human being going through it?”

McDonald believes healing from trauma is not just about managing pain, but also about learning to experience joy again.
“Part of the key ways to heal from trauma is to learn how to sit with the pain,” she says. “And then once we get used to that, we then have to learn how to sit with the joy – because it can be counter to that.”
The book is packed with tools that help ease people back into joy and gently reawaken its role in emotional resilience.
One of the simplest tools is “Tiny Little Joys”, a daily practice McDonald shares on Instagram.
“The idea is that you just look for something in your immediate environment that sparks a tiny bit of joy … It might be enjoying a favourite drink, or a cosy pair of socks. It might just be the way light hits a window.” Or even a Snoopy tattoo, a temporary one of which McDonald sports on her wrist

Other tools include “Freudenfreude Field Trips” – visits to places like parks or cafes, where you simply observe joy in others.
There is also “Absurd Hope Imagining”, where you envision wildly implausible but exciting scenarios – like being surprised with a private concert by your favourite band.
“You’re not trying to manifest it,” she says. “You’re just waking up the part of your brain that can still imagine.”
“Retroactive Celebration” is a practice in which you revisit moments of past success that were not properly celebrated at the time – a kind of emotional do-over.
“All of these are about building trust with joy again,” McDonald says. “You don’t have to be ‘healed’ to begin that process. You can start now.”
If joy feels unfamiliar, she suggests starting with memory. One powerful place to look is childhood.
“Go back to a time before the barriers came in. Maybe you loved swimming in the pool in the summer. Maybe you loved playing video games with your brother.
“Even if it feels really faint, ask yourself – what did that feel like in your body? Can you remember the feeling of shrieking laughter, or laughing in church when you weren’t supposed to?”
These memories help reconnect us to the physical experience of joy, she explains – and from there, we can start noticing it in the present.
She often remembers a specific moment from her own life when joy appeared in the most unlikely of scenarios.
“My father died suddenly when I was 24, and in the aftermath of his death I would lie on the floor of my apartment keening, convinced I was going to die, the world was so black and dark and awful.
“And then I would hear a child laughing on the street, and it would pierce the pain. It would be a reminder: joy is right here, and it will always find you.”
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A woman finds joy outside in nature. Many people “forgot” how to experience joy during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Dr MaryCatherine McDonald. She gives tips on how to reawaken the feeling within you. Photo: Shutterstock

“Joy is right here, and it will always find you,” says Dr MaryCatherine McDonald. Photo: MaryCatherine McDonald

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A post on McDonald’s Instagram account. Photo: Instagram/mc.phd

One of McDonald’s “Tiny Little Joys” is a temporary Snoopy tattoo near her wrist. “Maybe [it] will be real someday soon,” she says. Photo: Instagram/mc.phd

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Lifestyle

Health & Wellness

Health

Dr MaryCatherine McDonald, author of The Joy Reset, explains how important joy is for emotional resilience and how to gently reawaken it


Dr MaryCatherine McDonald, author of The Joy Reset, explains how important joy is for emotional resilience and how to gently reawaken it.


Mental health

Books and literature

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