There is no shortage of programs or practices that promise to increase happiness. People may meditate for 30 minutes every morning, block off full evenings to deeply connect with close friends or commit to a 12-week daily gratitude journaling exercise. Some of these activities, which emerged from the field of positive psychology, can reliably and sustainably boost psychological well-being, a technical term for happiness. But let’s be honest. Most people feel too busy, tired or overwhelmed to add on—and then keep up with—new and demanding routines in day-to-day life.
What if finding more happiness did not require a major time commitment or lifestyle overhaul? What if instead it could come from simple, brief actions such as texting a genuine “thank you” to a colleague, asking a friend to share something that made them feel proud, looking at the sky’s vastness with wonder or marveling at the intricate details of a wildflower?
We set out to explore this question by investigating whether brief daily activities, or “micro acts,” can affect overall happiness in life. We also aimed to investigate how doing happiness-promoting micro acts might ripple outward in ways that enhance mutual care, compassion and generosity.
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Our research began as a spin-off from the 2021 film Mission: Joy—Finding Happiness in Troubled Times, in which the 14th Dalai Lama and the late archbishop Desmond Tutu talk about their friendship and offer lessons on creating joy for oneself and others regardless of circumstances. Producer and co-director Peggy Callahan and impact producer Jolene Smith teamed up with psychologist Elissa Epel and one of us (Simon-Thomas) to develop a meaningful way for people to act on the film’s messages.
The result was a free, globally available online resource called the Big Joy Project. People who sign up for this project receive a daily e-mail or text that includes a link to instructions for a five- to 10-minute micro act, defined as a short, simple activity for building joy. The opening micro act, for example, invites participants to listen to a 42-second audio clip of different people laughing, including the Dalai Lama and Tutu. It’s an uplifting moment designed to elicit a smile or chuckle. The rest of the activities are delivered each day for seven days and include making a gratitude list, doing something kind, reflecting on a core value, feeling loving-kindness (or a state of tenderness and consideration to others), reframing a difficult experience, celebrating another person’s joy and watching an awe-inspiring video.
When people have more joy in their lives, they tend to be more generous with their time and resources. And when people want to give more to one another, everyone benefits.
Participants also answer several questions along the way. On a scale from “not at all” to “a lot,” they rate how positively and how negatively they feel before starting and after completing each micro act. People can also reflect on the experience in writing during and just after an evening check-in. Most people have reported that they found the micro acts easy and appealing to do. Since its launch, more than 100,000 individuals across more than 200 countries or territories have joined the Big Joy Project and have done more than 400,000 micro acts. These numbers make it the largest-ever community science project on joy in the world.
The research team gradually expanded to include collaborators at several institutions, and together we analyzed our data. In two articles published earlier this year, we and our colleagues showed that the micro acts add up in meaningful ways. We compared people’s responses with answers to 18 questions presented before the start of the Big Joy Project and, for most questions, again at the end of seven days. By analyzing responses from 17,598 people from 169 countries and territories, we found that people reported higher emotional well-being, more positive emotions, lower stress, and even modest improvements in sleep quality and physical health.
It took surprisingly little time and effort for participants to feel better. Many well-being programs span eight weeks or more, but the Big Joy Project yielded meaningful changes after just one week. And the more micro acts people completed, the more their happiness improved.
An important finding is that the benefits weren’t limited to those who had more privilege or access to resources and opportunities. People who reported higher levels of social disadvantage, such as increased financial strain, lower educational attainment and lower subjective social status, often noted greater boosts to well-being as well.
The Big Joy Project also increased people’s self-reported prosociality—that is, their innate impulse to help others and connect with communities. They said they felt more inclined to reach out, offer support and attend to the needs of people around them after completing the project. Once again, there was a clear “dose-response” relation: the more micro acts a person did, the greater their improvement in prosocial tendencies was.
The biggest increases in this impulse were observed among groups one might have assumed would be the least likely to show them. Men, whose prosociality scores were lower before the start of the project, experienced the largest improvement after seven days. Increases were also more pronounced among people who rated themselves lower in socioeconomic status and those living in Global South countries. These results suggest happiness-promoting micro acts can have a more pronounced effect where they may be needed most.
In a world grappling with loneliness, burnout and ideological division, small reminders of inspiration, kindness and connection can be powerful. When people have more joy in their lives, they also tend to be more generous with their time and resources. And when people want to give more to one another, everyone benefits.
Certainly there is still more for scientists to investigate. For example, our work relies on people reporting their own progress and feelings. In the future, we would love to see studies that track people’s improvements in other ways as well. We also hope we can run our study again with a subgroup of control participants who will not complete daily micro acts. But for the time being, we feel our studies make a compelling case for how modest steps can have remarkable benefits.
Why do such small actions work? We think it’s because they activate the same psychological ingredients as longer, more involved programs: they boost positive emotions, inspire feelings of connection, and help people feel more aligned with what brings them meaning and purpose. Indeed, many of these behaviors—practicing gratitude and being more sociable, for instance—have been well studied for years and found to be beneficial to the doer or giver. But the Big Joy Project is special in its simplicity. It’s a low lift. Participants also developed a stronger sense of agency—a feeling that they can control their happiness and that they don’t have to wait for good things to happen to feel happy.
Perhaps that’s what makes the project so powerful. People mired in busyness wait impatiently for a promotion, vacation, coveted possession or entertaining event, expecting that will make them finally feel good. But our project teaches a different lesson. Simple, daily micro acts can ratchet up happiness in a more empowering way. Deliberately finding gratitude, offering kindness or giving yourself moments to experience awe are not passive acts. They are courageous and effective ways of gently steering your own ship, even through stormy times.
This piece describes work developed in collaboration with three co-leaders who offered an additional review of the text: Elissa Epel of the University of California, San Francisco, and Mission: Joy’s producer and co-director Peggy Callahan and impact producer Jolene Smith.
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