The Feeling of Joy: Why it Scares us + How to Pass it on
Famous at Home
Josh + Christi Straub
4.8 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A conversation about joy!
In this episode, Josh and Christi talk about why joy can be so difficult to feel. “We’re actually scared of joy,” Christi says. “It is such an intense emotion that our bodies feel under threat.” Christi goes on to say, “The feeling of joy is so big that you can’t start at 95%, you have to begin by micro-dosing it at about 5%.”
But feel it we must. The Bible says that the joy of the Lord is our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). If it strengthens us, it must be dangerous for darkness. No wonder it takes courage to feel it. Like anything else, joy is caught, not taught. Josh and Christi talk about how to overcome the fear, shift the atmosphere, and pass joy onto our kids.
Time Stamps:
0:00 Introduction
1:24 10 Days of the Easter Story
2:53 Josh & Christi’s wedding story
5:55 The unexpected pivot into joy
7:30 Shifting the spiritual atmosphere for joy
13:10 Left brain knowledge of versus right brain experience of joy
17:52 How joy is birthed within us
21:16 God is a joyful God
28:14 Why we’re afraid of joy
31:30 How to micro-dose moments of joy in your life
34:01 Practical ways to experience joy and pass it onto your kids
42:55 Ways to make joy not feel threatening
Show Notes:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're afraid to have joy. Oh, and not, it's not just you. Like, it's not like you, Beth, |
| 0:06.1 | have chosen to be afraid of joy. It's like your literal body has recognized a correlation. |
| 0:13.2 | You felt a little bit of joy, which means your hypervigilance has come down. So you have basically |
| 0:18.6 | let your defense down to experience joy because you have to. |
| 0:22.9 | But here's the great news, okay? |
| 0:24.4 | Here's the thing. |
| 0:25.2 | The body learned that, right? |
| 0:26.8 | It was a correlation that was learned through experience. |
| 0:30.1 | Guess how it unlearns it the very same way. |
| 0:33.1 | And so we like praise God for neuroplasticity, which basically just means our brains can change. |
| 0:38.2 | You are not stuck cement. |
| 0:39.6 | You are able to change. |
| 0:41.0 | And that's how you're created. |
| 0:42.7 | And that is the hope because you are not stuck the way that you are. |
| 0:46.8 | You learned it that way and it can be unlearned the same way. |
| 0:51.8 | I won't lose hope in the night when the fire is growing down. I'll just let go and I'll try. Help me walk this road and find my way back home. Find my way back home. |
| 1:11.6 | Find my way back home. |
| 1:16.6 | Oh, oh, oh, my way home. |
| 1:21.6 | We're back. |
| 1:24.6 | We are. |
| 1:25.6 | Here we are. |
| 1:26.6 | Here we are. Here we are. We are back. And listen, Easter's just around the |
... |
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