29 Aug I spent a week trying the global ‘joy project’ challenge of micro-acts that bring happiness. Here’s what I learned
Big can be good.
Big good can be especially good.
But more often than not … it’s the little things.
Small acts of positivity or pleasure, kindness or courage. Doing the right type of little things, regularly, is a sure fire way to happiness …
via Fortune by Alexa Mikhail
In full transparency, I had no idea what a micro-act of joy was before last week. But I thought I would give UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center’s Big Joy Project a shot anyway.
Our culture loosely tosses around the word joy so often—I even remember teachers I had growing up commenting on whether people seemed joyful or not in class, as if it’s something you were or weren’t. A 2019 New York Times article featuring Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of “Joyful:The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness,” defines happiness this way: “If you string together enough moments of joy, maybe you can have a happy life,” she said. She sees joy as instances of “delight,” something more attainable in everyday life, and worth striving toward.
If joy is the first step to happiness, then I wanted to try to find more of it. And after this week, I see joy as wonder and hopefulness, warmth and calm, and even grounding and perspective-shifting.
Nearly 14,000 people from 156 countries across the globe have participated in the Big Joy Project, which consists of doing seven days of seven micro-acts of joy, designed by researchers as a response to the film Mission Joy. The goal? To bring more joy into your life and give you practical tools for times of distress. The individualized program deciphers which micro-acts of joy may be most effective for you by the end of the week. For the researchers on the program, this type of investment couldn’t be more timely.
“We have striking levels of mental health challenges … so many contextual factors right now that are really making it more difficult for people to just experience joy in their lives or to see themselves as joyful or their lives as joyful,” says Dr. Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, the science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
These micro-acts are accessible ways to feel sparks of joy—not a fix-all to replace other mental health interventions.
Each day, the program prompts you to rate your feelings of delight, pride, or hope and then your feelings of distress, sadness, or anger from not at all to a lot…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE