Anyone who’s ever attempted a mental health reset will be familiar with the overwhelming feeling of trying to break well-worn habits and squeeze new activities – whether that’s journalling, practising mindfulness, or trying to be more physically active – into a schedule already brimming with to-dos.
Psychologists have noted that while social media has never been more saturated with programmes and courses on how to revamp your life and achieve greater happiness in the process, this rarely seems to result in long-term fulfilment.
One recent study suggested that while big corporates have invested heavily in mindfulness apps, resilience training and other workplace wellness programmes in the past few years, these don’t actually appear to result in happier or more contented employees.
One of the reasons why such initiatives tend to fail, explains Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, is that humans are not adept at making major changes. Instead, we fare better when making small adjustments to our lives.
“When we monitor all the people trying to keep their New Year’s resolutions, it’s those who break down the big changes into lots and lots of little ones – so going to the gym, or doing more exercise once a week, and building up from there – who succeed,” says Wiseman.
Perhaps, as a result, the latest concept within positive psychology urges us to think small.
Instead of chasing big, dramatic changes – buying an expensive gym membership, setting ambitious self-improvement goals, or fantasising about winning the lottery – the idea is that true happiness may come from simply making time for, and appreciating, life’s small pleasures.
A growing number of academics have come to believe that the cumulative benefit of these ‘micro-joys’ can have an outsized impact on your quality of life – and even your physical health.
Smell the roses
As one example, researchers from the University of Surrey took 79 volunteers into a landscaped garden and encouraged a group of them to actively smell the scents, tune in to the birdsong and feel the plant textures.
Those in the group actively taking everything in reported significantly higher levels of relaxation, reduced stress and positive emotions, compared with those who just walked around the space.
Of course, micro-joys can be very individual, and one person’s idea of a small pleasure will be different from another person’s.
For some people, small rituals like a favourite morning coffee or a mid-afternoon biscuit will count as a small joy. But research suggests that there are a number of activities that can leave pretty much anyone feeling uplifted.
Over the past few years, a citizen science project called Big Joy, coordinated by the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), has been looking to put this into practice.
As part of the project’s largest published study to date, 17,598 people from 169 countries and territories were asked to choose from a list of science-backed micro-joys, and spend five to 10 minutes each day incorporating them into their lives.
The activities included making a gratitude list; doing a kind act to brighten someone’s day; asking someone to share a fun, inspiring or proud moment; or taking a frustrating event and reframing it from a positive perspective.
At the end of the experiment, the participants overwhelmingly reported higher levels of wellbeing, decreased stress and improved sleep quality.
Dr Emiliana Simon-Thomas, a neuroscience and psychology researcher at UC Berkeley who helps coordinate Big Joy, says that if we all spend a few minutes every day thinking about things that make us feel particularly good, and try to do more of them, it will likely enhance our wellbeing.
Simple advice, perhaps, but in many ways, the concept of small joys represents the antidote to the cultures of consumerism and instant gratification that have taken over the modern world.
Psychologists increasingly feel that our repetitive exposure to omnipresent social media advertising and implicit suggestions that we might be happier if certain desires were fulfilled – whether that’s a bigger house or a luxury trip – is desensitising our brain’s reward pathways, and actually making us less capable of experiencing lasting joy.
“If you go on a big holiday or spend money on goods like a new pair of trainers, the pleasure you get from that dissipates pretty quickly,” says Wiseman.
“And secondly, it tends to just make people jealous of you, rather than forging proper social bonds. What’s interesting about the small joy stuff is that it does the opposite.
"It’s not about spending a lot of money, it’s about little things which are pretty good for you, like gratitude, staying mindful in the moment, and so on.”
The more that psychologists learn about the science of small joys, the more it seems like these little things don’t merely have the power to make us genuinely happier – they could provide lasting health benefits as well.
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Activate your vagus nerve
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that learning to appreciate small pleasures and working more of them into our daily lives should make us feel better in both the short and long term.
After all, numerous studies have suggested that people who are more grateful for the little things in their lives have lower levels of depression and reduced stress – a known driver of biological ageing.
According to neuroscientists, one explanation for this is that seeking out and savouring brief moments of positivity triggers the release of ‘feel-good’ chemicals in the brain.
This includes neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, and endorphins – chemicals that improve mood and reduce pain and stress.
The prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in emotional regulation and decision-making, also shows greater activation when we experience positive emotions and partake in gratitude practices, which makes us more resilient and better able to manage negative feelings.
As Dr Karen Goodall, an applied psychology researcher at the University of Edinburgh notes, this all means small joys can play a big role in helping to dissipate some of the negative effects of a stressful day or week.
They can also have a wider physiological effect. “If we experience a positive emotion after something stressful, it has a really beneficial effect on heart rate and blood pressure,” she says.
Because of this, small joys are viewed as a potentially invaluable tool for people under strain. Goodall says we know that being in a permanently stressed state, where your brain gets stuck in a pattern of continuous high alert, is extremely detrimental to long-term health.
Some research suggests that greater happiness in early adulthood may be a way of protecting the brain from age-related decline, as well as opening us to being social and creative.
The latter idea is known as the ‘Broaden and Build’ theory of positive emotions, conceptualised by the American psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson in the early 2000s.
“The kinds of behaviours that stem from positive emotions like contentment and feeling peaceful are much more diffuse than those from negative emotions,” says Goodall.
“So there’s more capacity for your brain to develop in different ways. When we’re feeling joyful, we feel playful, we become creative, we become open to new connections with people, and all of that has a knock-on effect on our cognition.”
The biological pathway behind much of this is the vagus nerve, a bundle of nerve fibres often dubbed a ‘superhighway’, which connects the brain with the major organ systems.
It’s the vagus nerve that responds to positive emotions and experiences, and slows down your heart rate and relaxes you.
But in people under chronic levels of stress, the vagus nerve can become dysregulated and function less efficiently, which can lead to mood and anxiety disorders, persistent inflammation, and even digestive problems.
The secrets of vagal tone
Simon-Thomas says that small joys can help improve your vagal tone – a heightened ability to activate the vagus nerve – and lead to better emotional regulation. “You’re more likely to recover quickly from adversity,” she says.
Developing a better vagal tone can also have positive knock-on effects. For example, it creates a natural tendency to feel a sense of common ground with others, making you more likely to forge social bonds.
People with poor vagal tone are less capable of socialising because their bodies and brains are constantly in ‘fight or flight’ mode, making them more argumentative and confrontational.
Those with stronger vagal tone, on the other hand, have a greater balance between ‘fight or flight’ and the ‘rest and digest’ state, making them more likely to be peaceful and compassionate.
“It’s woven into the health benefits of having a higher vagal tone,” says Simon-Thomas. “Increase your vagal tone [through small joys] and you’ll have lower blood pressure, your immune system works better, and you’re less vulnerable to chronic stress. But it also impacts you in ways that evoke a pro-social stance.”
This has all led to the question of just how many small joys we might need to experience each day in order to fully reap the benefits for our vagus nerve, heart health and receptiveness to social situations.
Learning to savour the little things
Some studies have concluded that a ratio of five small joys to every negative experience might be the ideal figure to balance things out and optimise wellbeing, but this is just an approximation.
In general, it’s felt that the more small joys you can get, the better. Yet not everyone is naturally wired to experience the lasting benefits of small joys.
Research suggests that genetics can play a role, and people who are more acutely sensitive to the world around them – for example, the ability to really drink in a breath of fresh sea air, or feel warm sunlight on your skin – or those who are more easily moved by art, music or sport, can get more out of these little sources of joy.
Others may have had their ability to feel joy diminished by adverse childhood experiences.
It’s well known to psychologists that people with lower self-esteem tend to automatically dampen positive emotions.
“They have subconscious strategies that mean they’re not paying attention to those emotions, or they’ll find ways to quickly find faults with things, and close them down,” says Goodall.
In particular, researchers have found that while everyone experiences the same degree of brain activation in response to a positive experience, some people are able to sustain that feeling for longer, a concept psychologists call ‘savouring’.
“Some people just automatically shut positive emotions down, and others are very good at finding ways of making that positive emotion bigger,” says Goodall. “They have strategies to increase its intensity and duration.”
If you’re more in the habit of shutting down small joys, some experiments have hinted that it may be possible to retrain your brain to become more of a savourer, something that has actually been seen in rats.
In one experiment, scientists split a number of rodents into two groups: the first were given rewards immediately, while the second were trained to wait for them.
When they put the rats through a psychological assessment, they concluded that the group that learnt to wait for their rewards were more optimistic.
It’s thought the same may apply to humans – if we take time to anticipate upcoming positive experiences, however small in nature, we become more receptive to these sources of joy.
“The brain is quite plastic,” says Goodall. “We can almost train the parts of the brain that respond to positive emotion to be more receptive and to sustain that for longer.”
As well as taking time to dwell on parts of your day or your week that you’re particularly looking forward to, Goodall and Simon-Thomas recommend practising so-called savouring exercises, such as the affectionately named ‘raisin meditation’.
It involves taking a food or drink you enjoy, but maybe tend to quickly shove in your mouth and rush to swallow without really thinking about it – like a raisin, but also perhaps a piece of orange or even your morning coffee – but instead of consuming it in the normal way, taking 90 seconds to pay more attention to the sensations, the flavours and textures.
This is a classic exercise that, over time, can help enhance your receptivity to small joys.
There’s also much to be said for what Simon-Thomas calls social savouring: sharing a positive experience with a friend or family member and embracing it together, or helping that person celebrate something positive in their life.
“But pick the right people to share these experiences with,” Goodall advises.
Such practices can maximise your innate ability to get the most out of life’s small joys, something we all perhaps overlook amid the constant distractions of 21st-century living.
“We can’t live our lives in a perpetual state of savouring, but I think most people rush through positive experiences to a degree that is again harmful or detrimental to their mental wellbeing,” Simon-Thomas concludes.
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