Could micro-acts of joy be the key to happiness?
Just five minutes a day performing 'micro-acts of joy' that foster positive emotions is enough to banish stress, boost health and improve sleep quality, psychologists discovered.
Listening to laughter, admiring a flower or doing a nice thing for a friend can measurably improve people's emotional well-being and attitudes toward life, according to Dr Elissa Epel. It's often said that happiness is finding joy in the little things in life – now, scientists appear to have found the proof. Pic: Getty Images
The professor, an expert on stress and ageing who oversaw the new research, said: 'We were quite taken aback by the size of the improvements to people's emotional wellbeing.'
Her team at the University of California, San Francisco, studied nearly 18,000 people, mainly from the US, Britain, and Canada, for the web-based Big Joy Project over a two-year period, up to 2024.
The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, asked participants to perform seven brief acts of joy over a seven-day period.
Professor Epel said the thousands of people who took part matched the positive results achieved by programmes that required months of classes for hours at a time.
Ethnic minority participants saw even greater benefits than white participants, while younger people reported more benefits than older people.
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Could micro-acts of joy be the key to happiness?
It's often said that happiness is finding joy in the little things in life – now, scientists appear to have found the proof. Just five minutes a day performing 'micro-acts of joy' that foster positive emotions is enough to banish stress, boost health and improve sleep quality, psychologists discovered. Listening to laughter, admiring a flower or doing a nice thing for a friend can measurably improve people's emotional well-being and attitudes toward life, according to Dr Elissa Epel. It's often said that happiness is finding joy in the little things in life – now, scientists appear to have found the proof. Pic: Getty Images The professor, an expert on stress and ageing who oversaw the new research, said: 'We were quite taken aback by the size of the improvements to people's emotional wellbeing.' Her team at the University of California, San Francisco, studied nearly 18,000 people, mainly from the US, Britain, and Canada, for the web-based Big Joy Project over a two-year period, up to 2024. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, asked participants to perform seven brief acts of joy over a seven-day period. Professor Epel said the thousands of people who took part matched the positive results achieved by programmes that required months of classes for hours at a time. Ethnic minority participants saw even greater benefits than white participants, while younger people reported more benefits than older people.
The Irish Sun
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