These daily habits can bring outsize happiness — and it only takes 5 minutes, UCSF study finds
The simplest tasks of joy and awe — listening to laughter, admiring a flower on a neighborhood walk, doing a nice thing for a friend — can measurably improve people's emotional well-being and attitudes toward life, according to a new UCSF study.
So-called micro-acts of joy can have remarkably outsize effects on people's moods, and in particular on their belief that they can control their own happiness, said Elissa Epel, a UCSF professor who has long studied the effects of stress on aging and overall health. Epel is lead author of a paper published last week on the (ironically named) Big Joy Project, a program run out of UC Berkeley that has participants practice five- to 10-minute acts of joy every day for a week.
Epel's team at UCSF studied nearly 18,000 participants in the Big Joy Project over a two-year period, from 2022 to 2024. Their study was the first to look at whether small, easily accessible interventions — the Big Joy Project is a web-based program — that don't take much time could have measurable and lasting effects on people's attitudes.
The results were surprisingly robust, Epel said, though she noted that the study needs to be repeated under more controlled conditions to prove that it works, and to demonstrate whether the effects are long-lasting.
Still, she said, 'we were quite taken aback by the size of the improvements to people's emotional well being. She said that participating in the Big Joy Project for a week provided positive results equivalent to programs that require months of classes for hours at a time.
'And it wasn't just people who were already well off' whose moods improved, Epel said. 'We actually saw greater benefits in people who came into the study with challenges, either they felt financially strained or they felt in a low social status,' she said. 'This is not just an intervention for the privileged.'
The UCSF study, published in the Journal for Medical Internet Research on June 4, had participants practice seven acts over seven days. The acts included sharing a moment of celebration with someone else, doing something kind for another person, making a gratitude list and watching an awe-inspiring video about Yosemite.
Epel said her team picked tasks that were focused on promoting feelings of hope and optimism, wonder and awe, or fun and silliness. Each task took less than 10 minutes, including answering short questions before and after.
At the start and end of the seven-day program, participants completed a series of questions on their emotional and physical health. The scientists measured participants' emotional well being, positive emotions and happiness agency, along with their stress and sleep quality, and compared their answers from the start to those at the finish. Emotional well being includes how satisfied people are with their life and whether they have purpose and meaning; happiness agency is how much control they feel they have over their emotion.
The team found improvements in all areas, and the benefits increased depending on how much people participated in the program — meaning, those who participated in all seven days saw greater benefits than those who only did two or three days. Black and Latino participants saw greater benefits than white participants, and younger people saw more benefits than older people.
Epel said she wants to be careful to not overstate the benefits of the intervention, which isn't going to solve people's greater mental health issues or the uncertainty and anxiety blanketing much of western society at this time. 'We don't want to deny what's going on or act like everything's fine,' Epel said.
And it's not clear yet why these micro-acts appear to be having such a profound impact, she said. On a biological level, there may be complicated hormonal activations at play. Or it's possible that even these small acts are able to break up negative thought cycles — excessive worrying, for example, or self-criticism — and redirect mental energy in a more positive way.
One important takeaway from the study is that people probably have more agency over their own happiness than they think, Epel said. And even in these trying times, a daily dose of joy could have intense impacts.
In fact, she said, these micro-acts may be more powerful now, in the current political and social climate, than ever.
'All of this well being stuff, it's not a luxury,' Epel said. 'We often say that we'll let ourselves be happy once we've reached some point or finished some task. Well, we want to flip that — we need the energy of joy to get through the hard parts. When we can focus on well being and connecting with others, that's the fuel that will help us cope with adversity. So these are really necessary skills.'
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