Experiencing Joy Can Damage Your Heart, Says Science

Like joy, do you? Enjoy having fun? Fan of good times, are you? Delight liker, are you? Pleasure haver? You're dying. It's killing you. All this fun is causing you agony. According to the BBC: "Moments of joy 'can damage heart.'"

Ah. Oh. No all those fond memories—your test results, your birthdays, those times in smudgy-lit bars where you looked across the room and locked eyes with someone, that electric moment, you feel the very condensation in the air tighten around you, adrenalin zips through your body like a flame, moving through the crowd, warm bodies, that moment when love strikes you through to your very core, your are lightning, you are energy, you are for that one very moment vividly alive, and you go on over, a journey of yards that takes a hundred years, a thousand years, and say, "Hi"—all those little moments and memories are destroying your heart, killing you slowly from the inside out. The science, again from the BBC:

"The emotional stress that causes chest pains and breathlessness can occur in moments of joy, as well as anger, grief, and fear, a Swiss study suggests. Three-quarters of cases of takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a change in the shape of the heart's left ventricle, which can be fatal, are caused by stress. The University Hospital Zurich study, in the European Heart Journal, suggests about one in 20 cases is caused by joy."

A study of 1,750 patients found that moments of supposed joy—a son's wedding, becoming a grandmother, meeting a friend after 50 years, a birthday party, a favorite rugby team winning a game, winning a casino jackpot, a CT scan all-clear—were actually extremely bad, causing this temporary shape in the heart's ventricle thing. The study suggested most of the cases were in post-menopausal women, and that the associated syndrome was actually extremely rare. But still, there is something maudlin and beautiful in the idea that joy is capable of killing your heart, isn't there? As lead researcher Dr. Jelena Ghadri says, there is a shared "emotional pathway" between sad and happy events—our bodies react physically to extreme emotions in a similarly damaging way. Every time you delight, you are risking your heart changing shape in a medically inadvisable way.

Joy is a fleeting thing. Sometimes you go weeks without it, sometimes you go seconds. It is the only central totem, the central meaning, to all our lives: the search for joy, that clumsy-handed grasp for it, to pin it down and keep it. Is that, not, truly, what we are all here to do? We are on earth for a fleeting number of years, imprisoned in a weird system of interlocking social constructs—get educated, get a job, find a partner, settle down, start an ISA, start a pension, be careful—and the only gaps between them are the moments we tear loose and find joy: bunk off, get high, drink until dawn, dance, fuck, consume. There is no point if there is no joy. We are only here for a short time. We need to maximize whatever incidents of it we can find. We are, when it all boils down, animals, and animals of primal emotions, and the most important one of that—the high shooting star we cling closest to—is joy. Anyway joy is killing you, stop having it, bye.

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