WHY YOU CAN’T FEEL JOY (EVEN WHEN LIFE LOOKS GOOD) WITH DR. JUDITH JOSEPH

Last week, I hosted an event with today’s guest, Dr. Judith Joseph, in collaboration with M.M. LaFleur—thank you to everyone who came out! With the New Moon in Gemini still lingering in the air, I want to plant a little manifestation here: one of my goals for this year and beyond is to create more in-person moments for this community.

Not only do I believe there’s a real need for more conversations like the one I had with Dr. Judith, but I also deeply believe in creating more spaces for women to connect, share, and be vulnerable. I’ve seen genuine friendships form at my London gatherings, and I honestly miss the Monday night Geneva chat sessions during lockdown (you had to be there!). It may take a bit of experimenting to find the right format, but I’m excited to keep building this in-person energy and to meet more of you IRL.

Now, without further ado, if you couldn’t make it to last week’s event, don’t worry—you’re still getting a generous dose of Dr. Judith Joseph’s brilliance today. I first met Dr. Judith when she was a guest on I’m Fine, You?, the mental health podcast I hosted for Maybelline, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. She later invited me to be a guest on her podcast, The Vault—named after her Diamond District-based research lab, which contains an actual old diamond vault.

At her lab, she leads an all-female team conducting clinical research on pediatric, adult, geriatric, and women’s mental health. Last month, her first book debuted: High-Functioning: Overcoming Hidden Depression and Reclaiming Your Joy. Her mission is to help people understand that depression doesn’t always look like people who are underfunctioning—and why wait until it does? Dr. Judith wants us to recognize signs like anhedonia (a loss of joy or pleasure) and the ways we often suppress or avoid trauma through overfunctioning, whether that’s people-pleasing, constantly caring for others, or being relentlessly driven and ambitious.

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You just have the most impressive resume. You did your undergraduate degree at Duke Medical and Business from Columbia, and you’re the clinical assistant for child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Medical Center. You lead research on high-functioning, depression, and menopause related mental health issues and have done research for the FDA. Your research has garnered so much recognition, including a congressional proclamation from the US House of Representatives in 2023. But first, I want to take it back to your childhood. What were you like as a kid?

Dr. Judith: As a child, I grew up with three other siblings, and we didn't have much. So when we came to this country from Trinidad, we lived in this tiny one-bedroom apartment. Dad stayed behind in Trinidad to work and send us money because he's older than my mom. That was very common for a lot of Caribbean American families to have one parent going to get better opportunities while the other family member worked and took care of things at home…

My mom lived that as well.

Dr. Judith: Yeah, your family's Jamaican. So, just because it's normal and typical doesn't mean it's not problematic or has issues, but everyone did it. So when I was missing my dad and I was having severe attachment issues related to that, no one ever said, Well, you should feel like that. They were like, well, everybody does it. Well, just because it happens to everyone doesn't mean it's not painful. But that was how I was raised. My mom was very strict and didn't let us watch television. So instead of watching TV, my siblings and I would come up with skits, play together, and be very creative together. So my childhood had a lot of positives and negatives, but my siblings really shaped the way that I see myself in the world. I never feel alone because I have my siblings, and we're very, very close.

Was mental health something that was talked about in your house?

Dr. Judith: I remember growing up, there was a child in our community who, now when I look back, I'm like, oh, they were probably autistic. But growing up, everyone would lay hands on them and pray. I think back, and I'm like, oh my gosh, that must have been so traumatizing for that person. They probably don't ever want to go to church because what they were experiencing because of neurodiversity was seen as a spiritual matter and not a positive spiritual matter, as if there was something wrong with them.

I also think about a lot of times we'd have people coming in with severe trauma, and as a child, I wouldn't know what their trauma was because that was an adult matter. But if they expressed their trauma in a way that they were dissociating or it looked as if they were hallucinating, it would be said that they had spirits or something like that. So, I remember mental health in not the most positive way growing up. I know that many people would use the church to pray, to get a sense of community, to lean on faith, and a higher power, to experience things that we classify as awe in psychology. That awe of you're not here alone, you're here for a reason. So there were elements of mental health. It just wasn't called mental health growing up. But I think things have changed because my dad, he's now very much more open to the more informed perspective of mental health and open to things like medication and diagnoses and things that before, were not talked about..

There is also a thing with Caribbean people having something against traditional medicine. If my dad has a headache, I'm like, okay, well why don't you take something for it? He's like, no, no, no, I don't like to take those things. I'm like, okay, well then suffer.

Dr. Judith: Yeah, they're really anti-anything medicinal, the older generations. The way I frame it is that a lot of the meds we use came from the rainforest. So pharmaceutical companies, because I'm in that space, I know that they get these meds from the earth. So if you think about it that way, if you believe in God and God created the earth and God created these plants and God created man, then man uses their science and their intelligence and creativity to use elements from the earth to heal. If you think about it that way, it's not very different from what you believe. Things like lithium that I prescribe every day, lithium is literally an element on the periodic table. It is literally an element from this earth, and in some places it's in the water. So when I'm working with people who let's say have bipolar disorder, and I'm like, lithium is natural, they love that. There's a lot of mistrust in pharma. But when you think about it, this stuff comes from the earth. We're just using our God-given talents to make them more accessible to the human body.

When did you start becoming curious about psychology?

Dr. Judith: Well, I started in medical school in the surgical field. I wanted to be the first doctor in my family. I had this tunnel vision approach to it. I was like, I'm going to do something surgical. Initially, I was doing neurosurgery research as an undergrad at Duke. Then when I went to Columbia, I thought maybe either something surgical, and I found myself in the operating room doing anesthesiology as a resident for two years. At the time, it was super competitive. Everybody wanted to be an anesthesiologist because they made a lot of money. They had a good schedule. But when I was doing it, I felt empty. I was like, I'm putting patients to sleep. It's a very important job. You're not just putting them to sleep, you're keeping 'em alive.

I just felt like that's not why I went into medicine. I wanted to connect to people. When I started to understand the science of happiness, I grew up in this big family, we would go out into the community, we'd help others. Connection is what makes me happy, but I'm in a field where there's very little connection. I put a patient to sleep, the surgeons don't really talk to you other than table up, table down, more meds, less meds, wake the patient up. So it just wasn't feeding me. Although on the outside it looked very prestigious. People were like, wow, how did you get a spot at Columbia? That's the most competitive program. You should be so lucky. When I started to say I didn't want to stay in the field, people were like, no, you're making a mistake. In two years you'll be done. No one's happy in medicine.

Well, I don't want to be one of those. I want to feel fulfilled in the job and outside of the job. So I left, which was a huge risk. My parents were like, do not leave. That is a good job. You're going to ruin your reputation. But I did it. I listened to my gut. A friend of mine was actually in a residency at Cornell in psychiatry, and said, you should do psych because it's really good, you get to talk to people, and you help people. And she was like, you really enjoyed your psych rotation in South Africa when you were working with those orphans and you were doing trauma-informed work, you came back so happy. You should consider that.

So I ended up leaving anesthesiology — I was lucky enough to land a spot at Columbia. They were looking for a psychiatrist because one of their residents had left for personal reasons, and I never looked back. It was so eye-opening. Why didn't I do this from the beginning? It's just so fascinating.

Then they offered us therapy. They were like, if you're going to be treating patients, you need to be in therapy. I was like, oh, I don't need to be in therapy. I'm not crazy. This is me as a naive psychiatry resident. I was like, I don't have schizophrenia. I'm like, fine. They were like, oh no. This is so that you can unpack your own trauma. I don't have trauma. Whoa, was I wrong. Just because you don't acknowledge trauma doesn't mean you don't have it. So the brain suppresses it so that you don't think about it, but then when you don't acknowledge it, you don't see how it's impacting your behavior. So, not only was psychiatry lifesaving for me because it gave me a field that actually brought me purpose that I feel like I was destined to be in, but it saved me on a personal level because it allowed me to take down the mask of being perfect and examine the past that I had never dealt with that I was actually running from by being pathologically productive and excelling and being excellent. I was out trying to outrun a past that was actually quite painful for me, and that led me to my work in high-functioning depression. 

That's so incredible. What was that journey like of being in therapy and starting to unpack your childhood and what you've been through? As you said, you were hesitant, so were you resistant to it for a while before things started to click for you?

Dr. Judith: Yes. The program was essentially giving us this free therapy from these world-renowned psychoanalysts who are dressed to the nines with their three-piece suit, nice shoes, and their nice Upper East Side homes with the Persian rug. It was out of a movie. And here are these broke residents coming in. I often felt like, why am I here? This guy can't get my problems. What does he know about me? I'm from Trinidad. What does this rich guy know about me? Boy was I wrong. That rich guy knew so much.

He just said the right things. At one point he confronted me, he was like, you are a masochist. You have this opportunity to have this incredible therapy and you're just wasting it. Why?

You got called out.

Dr. Judith: I did. He was an incredibly skilled therapist. So, me assuming that he didn't know me because he has a different background was, first of all, wrong on my part. That was my personal defense mechanism for not wanting to engage in the therapy. But when I finally stopped being masochistic and depriving myself of an experience that was transformative, I actually grew in the therapy. I learned so much about myself, how my unresolved trauma was the reason that I overworked, constantly collected degrees, constantly felt like I had low self-worth, that I needed to prove something, that I had to collect all these accolades to be appreciated. I told my therapist, you saved me from that JD because I would've collected a law degree.

You would've kept going. Obviously, education is important. Maybe not in this current presidency, but traditionally it has been very important. And so you would look at someone like yourself who's very intelligent, striving to get all these degrees, and you're like, well, that's great. She's just ambitious and she's driven and she's going after everything that she wants. But somewhere underneath, there's something a bit more sinister that's driving that need for success.

Dr. Judith: Yeah, I can't tell you every time I go to these major corporations or these talks, I find exceptional Black women. I see them, they see me, there's this unspoken, I know you're doing well, you're the top of your game,you are still working hard, you're still proving yourself. And I think that's the part of understanding the science of your happiness. When you look at the biopsychosocial model in my book, biologically, as Black women, we go through so much, and because our hormones are dysregulated at a different rate and severity than others (there's a lot of theories around that) but it's probably due to trauma.

 Psychologically, again, we have higher rates of trauma, and socially, we have a lot of stressors, the microaggressions, and also we don't have the advantages, the opportunities, and the pay. So from a biopsychosocial model, our happiness looks different because there's so many more barriers or different barriers in the way of our happiness. Whereas, if I look at a patient who's like a young man biologically, he may be at risk for something like dementia. It runs in his family psychologically. He may have attachment issues that stem from his childhood, and then socially he may have stressors having to do with maybe overuse of substances. Everyone has a different biopsychosocial. But the important thing is that we know that we're different. Why are we using tools that haven't been tested on us? Why are we just saying, oh, I'm going to read this book, I'm going to watch this podcast, I'm going to do that?

 Well, that science does not apply to you. So if you find yourself reading books, listening to things, and you're just like, well, I tried, that didn't work. It's because you didn't understand the science of your happiness. I want people to read this book, anyone can, and then say, I understand the science of what's making me unhappy because I am unique. I'm the only one who will ever exist like me in the history of the universe. So let me understand the science of my happiness and the science of my unhappiness. I know how to actually use these tools to get the most out of it.

Did you see other Black women as you were going through school? Did you ever feel like you received pushback because you were a Black woman at these prestigious schools? As we know, DEI is currently under attack. Elon Musk had made a comment sometime last year, about how if he got a Black doctor, he would think that the standards had been lowered for them, which is just truly vile.

Dr. Judith: I wish that he would actually go to a school and see who's there, because if you're looking at these schools, there’s not many of us. So, to assume that the few of us who are there are there because we didn't earn it... It's actually the opposite. The ones who are able to be in the room tend to have to work harder to get there. DEI doesn't give you honors. DEI doesn't dish out degrees. We are the most decorated group of individuals. Black women have accolades upon accolades. They don't just pass you because you are Black. I think if people thought about that, they would think differently about when they see a Black person, a Black woman in a position of power, and what it took for them to be there. They had to be the very, very best. Even if you're looking at the actual numbers, the test scores, they will still say, you got there for another reason. So rather than even being in those discussions, I just excel and focus on me. I'm not in the business of changing minds that don't matter to me.

So let's talk about your book, High-Functioning: Overcome Your Hidden Depression and Reclaim Your Joy. How did you decide to write this book?

Dr. Judith: In my research lab, I was seeing a lot of people with symptoms of depression, but then when we went down on the checklist, they were over-functioning or exceeding functioning. To meet the criteria for clinical depression, you actually have to lose functioning or be in significant distress. So I thought, well, something is happening right now in physical health, longevity science is experiencing this renaissance where it's like, don't wait for the cancer, prevent it. Don't wait for the heart attack, prevent it. Don't wait for the hip to be broken, prevent it with HRT and menopause care. Why are we waiting for people to break down in mental health to do something? So why are we not a part of that whole bandwagon of prevention? Where's our renaissance? I had that epiphany as I was doing these assessments in my lab, why are we waiting for people to break down, to intervene?

Why don't we prevent the breakdown?

 That's where I thought there needs to be research in high-functioning depression. There needs to be research on people who have these symptoms but are not breaking down. We have to figure out a way to prevent them from breaking down. That's how this was born. Fortunately, I have a lab. So I thought, let me write this protocol. There's no way that no one has ever done a study on this. I searched and I wrote to the IRB (Institutional Review Boards), and they did a search and they said, no one has ever done a study on high-functioning depression. Well, we will be the first.

 I wrote the study submitted to the IRB, and got the consents. We have patients who are identified as having high-functioning depression and enrolled them in the study. Then we submitted it at the end of last year, and it was published earlier this year. It's the first study in the world on high-functioning depression. So, the book is based on the research. My hypothesis was that people are running from trauma.

People think of trauma as being, hypervigilance, flashbacks and nightmares, but there are 30 symptoms of trauma. One of the symptoms of trauma in the CAPS-5 (Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale), is avoidance. So you could avoid things, people, places, or situations—but also you can avoid by busying yourself so you don't ever deal with the pain. One of the other symptoms is low self-worth and internalized blame and shame. Well, if you don't process trauma and you're blaming yourself on an unconscious or conscious level, you're going to end up bending over backwards and doing things that you shouldn't be doing: overworking, overextending yourself, robbing yourself of joy. One of the symptoms of trauma is what's called cognitive symptoms, things like not thinking clearly or forgetting. Well, guess what? Many of us push down our trauma and don't want to deal with it. So we don't even remember our trauma. That's why I put an expansive trauma inventory in the book so people could try to identify past trauma that they don’t even remember.

Also, one of the symptoms of trauma is a low ability to enjoy things, just not being excited about interests that you used to enjoy. It's in the CAPS-5, that's anhedonia. So anhedonia is not feeling pleasure or joy in things that you once enjoyed. Let's say you used to really seeing your friends, but you'd rather not see them, stay home to watch Netflix. You used to really like eating sushi, and when you're eating it, it tastes blah. You used to look forward to being intimate with your partner, and now you're just like, when is it going to be over? These are the simple joys in life that are robbed when you have anhedonia.

When a patient comes to my private practice, they'll say, Dr. Judith, I just want to be happy. But in research, you will rarely find “happy” on an assessment. What you will find are things that we measure called points of joy. So, for example, if you're tired and you rested, did you feel refreshed? That's a point. If you were really exhausted, were you able to feel less restless? That's a point. If you were feeling lonely and disconnected when you saw others, did you feel connected? Did you enjoy the interaction? That's a point. So it's all of these points that make up overall happiness. Happy is an idea or an ideal. Joy is an experience. When patients think about it that way, they're like, oh my gosh. So I can get points every day?  At least it's attainable versus happy. That idea of being happy, you may never get that, and then you feel like you failed, and you blame yourself.

Also, it's temporary. We can't feel happy 24/7. That's just impossible. And yeah, the idea of chasing that is really overwhelming.

Dr. Judith: Also, it makes you less present because chasing an idea. It's elusive versus if you're like, I'm going to try and get joy in as many moments. Joy could be, I'm thirsty and I'm going to take a sip of water, and it will quench my throat. And that was actually very joyful. But we don't think about it that way because our phones tell us, joy is when you have the man, the car, the house, and the perfect body.

And a million followers.

But even people who get that they're still not happy. The science shows that you get those things that you think will make you happy, but you're still searching. Whereas if you sit at your desk and you eat your salad, you close your laptop, and you're actually tasting the almonds and the dressing and crunchy leaves—that is actually joy, right?

How can someone differentiate between high-functioning depression and regular stress or burnout?

Dr. Judith: Burnout, was only put into the Bible of psychiatry, the DSM diagnostics, only recently. But nobody would say that because it wasn't put in there, it didn't exist, right? It's always been there, just like impostor syndrome. It's not in the DSM, but probably one day it will be, but we wouldn't say it didn't exist. But burnout, by definition, in how it was classified, has to do with occupational stress. Technically, once you're removed from that setting, your symptoms should resolve. But many of us will be like, okay, if I just take a break, go to a different country, and  relax, I'll be fine. But the anhedonia chases them—it doesn't go away. The symptoms don't leave them. That's a really easy way to know whether or not it's burnout or a true depression, because being removed from that situation, that is stressful and toxic, should actually help you feel better. But some people leave it, and they're still not better. They're actually finding other ways to busy themselves. So that one is external, one is internal.

That's why it's important to resolve it and to process it because once you understand the biopsychosocial of your happiness, then you're like, oh my gosh, I can't sit still because I'm afraid of what I will feel. I can't sit still because maybe I'll remember what triggered this behavior. I can't sit still because maybe people won't value me. I have no worth unless I'm doing. Where does that come from? I hope people can actually take the time and use some of the tools in the book to find out who they are again and to understand themselves better.

There's an element of self-sabotage that's involved in high-functioning depression. Can you talk a bit about that?

Dr. Judith: Yeah. There's a dirty word in psychiatry called masochism, masochistic personality disorder. When people think of masochism, they think of sexual masochism. That's not what we're talking about. There are actually personality disorders that were in the DSM at one point in time that were yanked out. Masochistic personality disorder is one of those that was yanked out in the eighties because it was overly used to classify women who were victims of domestic violence. So, there were terms within masochistic personalities that were problematic, such as “you incited violence” or “bad treatment onto yourself”. That's victim blaming. But there are other elements that I think we should have kept, people who tend to bend over backwards for others, people who tend to do for others, even though it's robbing them of joy, people who think that they're not worthy of happiness and pleasures. So those things we see now, and I think one of the lay terms is people pleasing, right?

Again, if the theory of high-functioning depression stems from trauma, one of the symptoms of trauma is internalizing shame and self-blame. You don't feel worthy enough. So what do you do? You end up doing and pleasing and bending over backwards, working and overdoing, and you can't sit still. You always have to be in this role. So, people pleasing and masochism are things I talk about in the book, as well as trauma and anhedonia. When you take the people pleasing quiz and you identify these problematic elements of behavior, then hopefully you'll say, okay, I really have to make sure that I limit that type of behavior because it's only worsening things for me. 

So let's break down the path to healing this high-functioning depression. You came up with a system that's called the Five Vs. Yeah. Can you take us through them?

Dr. Judith: Often people with high-functioning depression don't acknowledge how they feel. It could be because they’re running from trauma, or they weren't raised in a household where people talked about feelings, whatever it is, they have a hard time with that. So what do they do instead? They push through pain. Validation is accepting how you feel and naming it. This is scientifically based. There's something called “affect labeling,” where if you’re able to name the feeling and identify it, that is therapeutic in itself. Why? The human brain doesn't like uncertainty. Uncertainty is stressful. Look at what happened in 2020. We didn't know what was going to happen the next day, the next week, the next month, and it really drove us crazy. Being able to name and accept your feelings is so powerful. I have different tools for people to validate. That's why you use rating scales, because having a number that says, I do have trauma, my anhedonia score is this high. That's a form of validation.

The second is Venting. Expressing how you feel, and people can express their emotions differently depending on how they were raised and your industry. I have a lot of clients who are performers—they like to sing their feelings or wear their feelings with fashion. Others like to write about what they're going through. Some like to talk about it. In my Caribbean household, prayer is essential for my father and his generation. Also crying for little kids. Now we know that it's okay to cry. You're not like a little baby. It's really an important way to express your emotions.

Values, is the third V. These are things that don't have price tags. These are things that are priceless. What are the things that give you meaning and purpose in life? For many people with high-functioning depression, it's the accolades, they're chasing the clout. But really the things that they want to tap into to leave them feeling full and fed spiritually are things like a their community, their families, their faith, or nature. That's something that hass a lasting value.

The fourth V is Vitals. These are the things that help to support your body and brain because you only get one of them. So your doctor will tell you about the typical things like eating foods that are not processed, getting good movement in to boost the endorphins, good sleep. I added three non-traditional vitals in there: your relationship with technology, because there will be a whole host of conditions in the future related to tech use. Two, your relationships with people. Because longevity science is now showing that the quality of your relationships can be the most important predictor of your health and longevity. Also your work-life balance, because with high-functioning depression, we tend to have a hard time with that.

The fifth V is Vision. How do you plan joy in the future? So you keep moving forward instead of getting stuck in the past and celebrating your wins. And these are the five Vs. I don't recommend doing all five at once. Don't be high functioning. Tap into one or two a day. I give you guidelines in the book as to which ones tap into when science says you can't really do more than one or two things anyway, then you get overwhelmed. The whole purpose is to try and get some points of joy every day. When you're building up these points and you're adding them up, that is going to overall make you a happier person.

I love that because you're kind of gamifying joy in a sense.  Do you think high-functioning depression is more prevalent in certain professions or personality types?

Dr. Judith: Well, we did the first study in the world. There have to be more studies, but personally, I do. The study did show that caregivers had a higher rate of anhedonia. Caregivers are people who are parents, mothers, educators, people who take care of elderly folks in their lives, people who take care of the disabled, people who care for patients. If you think of the person who's bending over backwards and can't afford to slow down, they're at risk.

So what happens is that you tie that into your role and you forget who you were before that. You just keep doing it, you don't think about yourself. You can't afford to break down because people depend on you. It's a vicious cycle. So I think they are definitely at risk.

Social media glorifies the grind, nonstop working, achievement, and pushing through our struggles. How do you see this influencing high-functioning depression?

Dr. Judith: I think when people see this, they think, oh, so do you want us to just not function? No, two things can be true. Slowing down is not the same as not functioning. Slowing down and taking care of your basic human needs. You're a human being, not a human doing. That is what life is all about. We were built with the DNA for joy. We have it. That's why I use the five Vs because it's five fingers. You can easily remember to tap into your basic human DNA to find joy. That's why we have the capacity to make dopamine. We're supposed to be finding joy. You don't have to teach a child to be joyful. You put a toddler on the floor and give 'em a box and a spoon, they'll play. Along the way, we become wrapped up in our role. We don't process our trauma, we forget how to access joy. This is your way to access joy again. It's important to do that. But in order to do that, you have to understand the science of your happiness.

Obviously, you turned the study into a fantastic book. Will you continue to do research on this?

Dr. Judith: We are. We're still enrolling patients. The study that was published was based off of 120 patients, but we're trying to double that number. So, with the study still going on and our future work, I have the lab where I do studies on new treatments, but then I have the Happiness Lab where I specifically research joy. So we have one protocol coming up on music and how different music and healing rhythms can heal. We have another one coming up with childhood play, how to teach children to play using their hands versus digital technology. So, the Happiness Lab has many more protocols to come. We're just getting started.

So exciting. I also wanted to circle back to the congressional proclamation that you received. What was that for?

Dr. Judith: I got a call, we need you to come to Washington because there's going to be a party with the Vice President. At the time, it was Kamala Harris, and I was like, okay, am I in trouble? It turned out it was the first ever Caribbean-American Heritage Month celebration at the White House. I got an award for my social media advocacy and my research in mental health. I guess they had seen the content that I was creating and I was making a lot of content around Caribbean mental health. No one was doing it at the time.

That turned into a relationship with the Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress to do a lot of advocacy work in the Caribbean American community. I got invited last year to film the first ever congressional recording on the state of Caribbean American mental health and that you can find that on YouTube. It's me and Congresswoman Sheila McCormick, and she interviewed me about ways that Caribbean Americans can think about their mental health, and so it feels as if it's their own. And I said, mental health has always been ours. We walk by the ocean. That's our mindfulness. We eat our curry chicken and our roti. We dance, we do our whinin’—that’s our bilateral stimulation. We just call it something else. We pray. We have our community.

There's so many things that are built into the culture that is really centered on joy.

Dr. Judith: It is, and it's mental health. We just called it something different. So it's like whenever you think, oh, that mental health is someone else, that's American thing. No, we've always had it. And I've traveled the world. Even in India, when people are meditating and they're talking about the ego. We just call it different things, but we all have mental health. It is ours. We just forgot about that. So we all have it. We just have to honor it differently. It has to feel authentic to us. 

Final question, what's bringing you joy right now?

Dr. Judith: It's always going to be connection. I went through this period in my life where I was like, I need to be happy on my own. And I was just like, why am I kidding myself? I grew up in a family where we were all on top of each other. This is how I've derived joy. I have to be connected. I learned that early in my career. I started to practice by myself, and I was lonely. I decided I want to work in a team. So I started a research lab where I have a team that I see every day, and it's validating for me to have that research out of Harvard that shows relationships are the predictor of your happiness. I love to be around people. So being around my family, my team, my daughter, all that connection, for me is pure joy. I had to learn the science of my happiness and stop fighting it and embrace it, and now I know how to be happy.