411: How to Deepen Your 'Joyspan' which will Lengthen Your Lifespan and Elevate the Quality of Your Entire Life
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
Shannon Ables
4.7 • 944 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
"Joy is the experience of contentment, gratitude, and meaning, regardless of our external circumstance. Joy is not simply feeling happy. Joy encompasses quality of life and the ability to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose . . . Joy, by definition, cannot be the goal." —Dr. Kerry Burnight, author of Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half
A mindset shift. A lifestyle choice.
Rather than 'choosing joy' a concept that is vast in its meaning as what brings one person joy will be different from another's, it is rather knowing how to cultivate joy. What we choose are the ways to bring more joy into our life.
What awesome news to discover that this is a choice we each have the opportunity to make, and in so doing, we welcome more quality into our life today and each day moving forward, as well as a longer life to savor.
Gerontologist Dr. Kerry Burnight defines the term joyspan as how many years you enjoy living. "The experience of psychological well-being and satisfaction in longevity."
In order to lengthen our joyspan, we need to know how to cultivate joy, and where to find it. The good news is, similar to contentment, we possess the capabilities within ourselves. We now just need to choose to put them to work.
Listen to the full episode, and find the detailed Show Notes here on The Simply Luxurious Life blog - https://thesimplyluxuriouslife.com/podcast411
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the simple sophisticate, where in 2014, this podcast premiered, and now in its 12th season, |
| 0:10.0 | the show continues to focus on the same principles it was founded upon, the art of living a life of quality over quantity. |
| 0:18.0 | Topics range from creating an everyday life you love living, strengthening mindfulness |
| 0:22.9 | practices, building a capsule wardrobe, preparing seasonally delicious meals, traveling and exploring |
| 0:29.2 | France and Britain, and living life to the fullest as you courageously honor your true self, |
| 0:34.8 | because living well really is quite simple once we know the skills of |
| 0:39.3 | cultivating contentment. I'm your host, Shannon Ables, and whether you're listening while |
| 0:44.7 | you're on your commute, exercising, working in the garden or art studio, in route or returning from |
| 0:50.4 | that dream destination, or sitting down and savoring a hot cuppa or a cafe au lae thank you for tuning |
| 0:57.3 | in let's get started welcome to the 411 episode of the simple sophisticate and welcome to |
| 1:04.9 | october as we start this month off on october first rabbit rabbit for everyone who is rabbiting, rabbiting with me. |
| 1:13.7 | All right, today's episode is all about how a concept that plays a role in savoring a life |
| 1:23.7 | of contentment is a choice that we get to choose. |
| 1:30.1 | And often it's a word or a concept that's conflated or confused with other words. And we're going to break it down and talk about |
| 1:34.5 | what it is. But we're also going to talk about how it ultimately elevates the quality of our |
| 1:38.6 | every day's now and also improves our health so that we live a longer, more satisfying life for the rest of our lives. |
| 1:46.7 | I mean, that's a win-win-win. Win. Right there, no? All right. I will dive right into that in a |
| 1:52.5 | second, but I want to give a quick peek into what our Petit Pleizier will be this episode. |
| 1:58.4 | And it is a Francophile find. It is for mystery lovers. And it is for, I don't know, |
| 2:05.1 | just fun television. We are going to talk about a new series that I think you're going to love. |
| 2:11.1 | And I'll explain why at the end of our chat today. All right, let's get to the topic of our |
| 2:16.4 | episode today. We're going to talk about how to |
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