Sometimes the smallest moments of joy are the only ones that feel possible. That’s what Nora McInerny learned in 2014, when she lost her 35-year-old husband and her father to cancer and her second baby to miscarriage—all within the span of eight weeks.

Her husband, Aaron, was a “naturally buoyant person,” says McInerny, who’s the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking and author of the upcoming book Bad Vibes Only. “He just had this otherworldly ability to find the fun and the joy in anything,” she says. “I learned from him the importance of staying as present as possible in the moment, even when the moment sucks. Even as he was literally dying, he could make me laugh.” (Among Aaron’s final words to his wife: “I will always be with you … so you need to stop picking your nose.”)

It was a moment she remembers with levity, plucked out of an unbearable time. During these past few years—plagued by political strife, social unrest, and, well, an actual plague—many of us have struggled to even briefly escape morose moods. But experts say that incorporating just a little bit of joy into our lives can disproportionately enhance our well-being by reducing the risk of chronic illness, strengthening the immune system, and combating stress.

“I think joy feels sometimes like a really big emotion—like crazy happiness,” McInerny says. “But it can be a small point of light in the darkness. It doesn’t have to be throwing the light on in the dark.”

Remind me—what’s joy again.     .     ?

Joy is the state of feeling freedom, safety, and ease. Unlike some other positive emotions, like compassion and contentment, experiencing joy often depends on preparing for it, rather than spontaneously feeling it, says Philip C. Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University who’s authored many of the leading research papers on joy.

One of the best ways to usher in joy is to strengthen bonds with friends and family. “The most intense joy experiences are probably experienced in relationships,” he says. Filling your life with meaningful goals and purpose is also essential, Watkins notes, as is cultivating an open mindset—and not just to the good stuff. “If you’re open to joy, you have to be open to disappointment,” he says. “Paradoxically, in terms of experiencing joy, there has to be a willingness to experience loss and sadness.”

If you’re not sure how to go about sparking joy, start with some self-reflection, advises Brie Scolaro, a licensed social worker and co-director of the New York City-based and LGBTQ-focused Aspire Psychotherapy. First, take an inventory of what joy means to you, and when you last experienced it. Ask yourself: What’s standing in your way of feeling joyful?

Then, think back on your favorite, happiest moments. Doing so will trigger some of that same joyful energy (just as reflecting on sad memories will make you feel upset). It will also give you a hint of how to achieve more joy in the future.

Next, “make a plan to bridge the gap between what you know brings you joy and what you’re currently feeling,” Scolaro says. What actionable steps can you take today to increase your odds of experiencing joy?

Finally, make sure you’re present enough to soak in joy when it washes over you. “Are you listening to your friends speak? Are you tasting the beer that you’re drinking? You have to be able to register joy,” Scolaro says. “Joy is in the moment. Building the capacity to move back to the present moment—like through meditation—is the best way I can think of to be present to joy.”

Here are a few ways to achieve small moments of joy in dark times

Make a joy bucket list

Robin Shear, a life coach, speaker, and author based in Detroit, has an emergency plan for those inevitable times when everything feels awful. Instead of spiraling—and it would be so easy to hop on the merry-go-round of doom—she turns to her “joy bucket list,” a tally of all the things that make her joyful: test-driving fast cars, being spontaneous, sharing new experiences with her family. She suggests others do the same, storing it in their phone or some other easily accessible place.

Having a physical reminder is helpful, “because there will be times in your life when you don’t feel joy. When life really hurts—and when you’re needing to rise out of that—it can be difficult to think about what will bring you joy again,” says Shear. “If you already did the work and made your list on a scrap of paper, you’ll find it’s much less challenging.”

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Incorporate daily habits you look forward to

Every morning, Deborah J. Cohan has a cup of coffee in a colorful ceramic mug. She begins looking forward to it the evening before. Another favorite part of her day: Going for a nighttime swim under the stars. “I think there’s something about joy that’s multisensory,” says Cohan, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. “You smell it, you taste it, you see it—it’s a heightened sensory experience.” Think about ways to schedule pleasurable habits into your day. Then savor the anticipation of them, because that’s part of the magic.

Find a palatable way to express gratitude

There’s strong research indicating that gratitude fuels well-being. But sometimes it feels like too much of a stretch—or, as McInerny puts it, like “a blunt-force object to force people into a better attitude.” If keeping a gratitude journal or otherwise expressing thanks isn’t a path to joy for you, think about more creative ways to reflect on and appreciate the good parts of your life.

When McInerny’s son broke his arm right before the summer, he was sentenced to a giant cast that rendered him unable to swim or participate in other fun activities. “The day he got it off, he was like, ‘Say goodbye to my cast, Gerald,’” she says—revealing that even in a bummer situation, her son had created a cute, funny nickname for his orthopedic device. It reminded her to find something lighthearted and fun in every crummy situation. Now, she looks for a “daily Gerald,” or one small thing that’s good about even a bad day.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Have a short “recess” every day

You’re never too old for a recess break—a sentiment backed by ample research. Even short amounts of physical activity, in particular, can elevate your moodand cut the risk of depression. Shear likes to schedule a 5- or 10-minute play session once or twice a day. “It’s an appointment with yourself. And whenever that time comes, you stop what you’re doing and get to spend a few minutes doing whatever makes you feel good,” she says. Shear has spent recess breaks hula-hooping, for example, and likes to set a fun ringtone on her phone as a notification that it’s go time—the adult version of a recess bell.

Look for connection

When McInerny gets lost in a black hole of gloominess, she calls someone she loves. The conversation might last just a few minutes, but that’s enough to lift her up.

When she’s particularly overwhelmed, she looks for other small, tangible ways to connect: If she goes for a walk, she’ll try to catch someone’s eye. Or she might mail a friend a card. “Whatever I can do to feel connected to other people is really helpful,” she says.

Dance it out

Music is a reliable way to spark a few minutes of joy, says Melanie Harth, a psychologist based in Santa Fe, N.M. She suggests making a happiness playlist full of upbeat, inspiring songs that make you want to bust a move, and then turning it on whenever your spirits start to falter. “I dare anybody to go on YouTube and watch Pharrell Williams’ Happy or Sara Bareilles’ Brave and not feel a little better”—or give up on your gloom and start dancing, she says.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Help someone, or something

Robust research indicates that helping other people, or getting involved with a cause that’s important to you, is correlated with well-being. Look for an opportunity to give back, in even a small way: by planting a tree, donating blood, or contributing to a friend’s online fundraiser. “It can help us get out of our scary little minds and into something that’s more important,” Harth says. “And it can also help catalyze an unexpected moment of joy. You never know when that’s going to happen.”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.         .        .

J                       O                      Y
maybe you find it most
when you create it in others.          .          .

Many of us have had this uncanny feeling before: Entering a silent room, walking through a dark night, or waking from sleep—and suddenly, it’s there. A sense that someone is with us, without any sight or sound. A feeling of a presence.

It’s a sensation that occupied the forefathers of psychology for a long time, including William James. Writing in the Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote of “a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses.’” It was an experience he recognized as key to many a spiritual occurrence, but also one with an often sinister and foreboding air. A friend of James’ recounted a night-time encounter of his own that he experienced as a student: “I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception.”

If you’ve had this experience and you’ve tried to explain it to someone, you may be met with a blank look, or even skepticism. It sounds like something out of a ghost story, and indeed, William James was a kind of 19th-century ghostbuster. He was a key member of the Society of Psychical Research, which was set up to examine the truth behind telepathy, spiritualism, and apparitions of the night.

But what we now know is that James’s friend was correct. This isn’t a ghost story, or even a sixth sense, but something at the roots of our being. Contemporary neurology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychiatry shows us that such presences truly belong to us because they are linked to how our bodies and minds give us a sense of self.

The first piece of evidence comes from case studies of people affected by epilepsy, brain tumors, and other major changes to brain functioning. For instance, in a 2006 study, a 41-year-old man, whom the study called “PH,” presented to a hospital clinic complaining of fatigue, dizziness, and seizures. The one night in hospital, he awoke to feel he had split into three parts: his left side, which felt normal; his right side, which felt somehow detached; and then off to his right, another man who wasn’t him. This figure mirrored his body position, and when he tried to look at him, he looked away; PH felt as if “they shared the same soul.” Beyond the man stood a woman, again mirroring PH, and beyond that, some girls; he called them his “family.” After a few days the image of these figures receded, but the feeling of their presence remained.

PH’s experiences were the product of an aggressive tumor in the left hemisphere of his brain, which affected two areas in particular: the posterior insula and the temporoparietal junction. The former is a key brain area for processing internal information about our bodies (like heart rate or gut feelings), while the latter is involved in integrating our senses to make a map of where we are in space. Damage to those areas would have changed PH’s internal model for where he felt his body was. So when he was visited by this presence, in a way it did share his soul. It was where he should have been (or his brain thought he was).

The next piece of evidence comes from cognitive neuroscience, and a team led by neurologist Olaf Blanke in Geneva. Since 2014, they have used a robot to induce feelings of presence in healthy individuals and clinical disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The robot works to disrupt your sensory expectations: Whenever we make a movement, our brains are thought to make a set of predictions about what will happen to our senses. Go to clap your hands, and your brain is ready for a new sight and sound, all at the right time. But if you mess with that, strange things start to happen; things don’t feel like “us” and instead start to feel like they belong to someone else. With the presence robot, you make random pressing movements into the air in front of you, while the robot presses you in the back at exactly the same time. In sync, it almost feels like it’s you pressing your own back—you brain takes the cues from your own movements, and the sensations on your back, and comes to the conclusion that the only person in this process is you. But when the touches start to then go out of sync—slowing and dragging, not quite hitting where they should—participants suddenly feel like a person, not just a robot, is controlling the touches from behind. Lots of people with Parkinson’s have feelings of presence as part of the condition, and this makes them particularly susceptible to the phantom touches of the robot.

Lastly, we’re now beginning to recognize that feelings of presence are a missing piece in the story of psychosis. Not long after William James was writing, figures like Karl Jaspers were describing examples of presence in some of the first textbooks of psychiatry. But the trail ran cold for a number of years—until very recently. There’s now evidence that people who hear voices (or have auditory hallucinations) also describe high rates of felt presence—literally voices than can be there without speaking. And grassroots work such as Rethink Psychosis, led by people with experience of psychosis themselves, are calling for more recognition and understanding of the phenomenon through projects like “Psychosis Outside the Box,” a collection of the more neglected and unusual aspects of psychosis.

The strangeness of presences makes them all too easy to miss in a time-pressured doctor’s appointment, but for many people, it may be the figure behind voices or visions that matters the most. If you’ve ever had your own personal space violated, or dreaded to go into certain places because of who might be there, you will know how much the presence of another can affect you, even without a word being uttered. Thinking about presences, and not just voices, poses a whole new set of challenges for our scientific models of psychosis and how we deliver psychotherapy. It’s even part of some of the newer psychotherapeutic approaches to psychosis, such as AVATAR therapy.

The through-line in all these examples is the self. In Western societies, we are used to the idea of a unitary, consistent self—the core of us that never changes. But psychologists and neuroscientists know that the self is something that can be disrupted in multiple ways; it’s less of a one-man band, and more of an ensemble piece. In clinical disorders, case reports, or through ingenious experiments, we can observed how radically the self can altered to produce a presence.

It goes beyond that, too. Given the right conditions, all of us could have this is experience, whether as a result of grief, exhaustion, trauma, or even sleep problems. In this way, the new science of presence isn’t about a mysterious “other,” after all. It’s a way of learning about ourselves.
W  H  O  A,  Right
And yet the not-so-big-surprise
WE ARE LIKE OCEANS.          .          .
THERE IS SO MUCH WE KNOW ABOUT EACH OTHER
AND SO VERY, VERY MUCH MORE THAT WE DON’T.     .     .
with the biggest question of
JUST HOW WILLING ARE YOU TO FIND OUT?
Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
FIND  OUT