‘It’s the little things’
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director at the Greater Good Science Center. “The first thing is just physiological because when we repeatedly exhale in short bursts we’re activating the vagus nerve, which is calming.”
The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is also known as the “rest and digest” part of the nervous system. It does things like decrease our heart rate and inhibit the production of stress hormones such as adrenalin.
At the same time, when people around us are laughing and smiling, we’re likely to feel safer and more trusting, because their behaviour signals that they’re friendly and not out to get us.
Plus, laughter is contagious.
“If you walk into a room and everyone in the room is laughing, you’ll feel compelled to laugh also, because we’re built to be empathetic,” said Simon-Thomas. “A lot of the time we think of empathy only in the context of grief or pain but, actually, we mirror many different kinds of emotions. Laughter is no exception.”
“Share a Laugh” might not work for every single user. Some of the micro-acts of joy are bound to resonate with some people better than others.
Those who don’t feel like laughing might prefer to partake in the ones that encourage us to practise compassion, be kind to others and/or celebrate other people’s joy.
Stephanie Smith, for example, said she’s found a lifetime of joy in volunteering since she was a preteen growing up in California. She kept it up when she moved to Wisconsin and, for the past 25 years, much of her community work has been shared with her four gorgeous Collies, all trained therapy dogs.
“I can be tired or stressed and out of sorts, but when I enter spaces with my therapy dogs I feel joy,” said Smith. “The dogs feel joy, too, and the people we interact with become much happier and more joyful, which is partly why I’ve been volunteering in some way with kids, elders, dogs and cats for 60 years.”
Smith is far from alone in finding joy contagious.
“I organize folk and ballroom dances for my community,” said Dorothy McLean, a Canadian writer who now lives in Scotland. “Seeing everybody dancing brings me major joy.”
And then there’s Lauren Maynard, a Buffalo resident who loves introducing her friends to other friends who share common ground. “This may sound weird, but connecting people who should know each other gives me the happiest of chills and fulfilment,” she said.
Not weird at all. Lovely. Other people we spoke with through our highly unscientific poll said they got joy from things you might expect: singing and/or dancing to music, gardening, cooking, walks, runs and cold plunges and, of course, animals, be it snuggling pets or watching wild beasts in the great outdoors.
“Every weekday morning I stand at a particular spot on the GO Train platform and listen to and observe a colony of starlings, who chatter, whistle and flit,” said Su Hutchinson, who works in legal administration. “They react in unison to danger and hop and preen when calm.
“This brings me immense joy before heading into whatever grinder the day presents.”
The Big Joy Project’s architects probably couldn’t have designed much better of an exercise than this one to demonstrate the power of experiencing awe, which is linked to stress reduction, life satisfaction and becoming a better critical thinker.
For Gina Fossitt, a marketer in Chicago, that awe comes via her five-year-old son.
“I get so much joy from watching
my son experience theatre,” she said, “Such awe, wonder and inspiration.”
And then there’s gratitude, which many of us already know is connected to joy, thanks to research that suggests gratitude blocks negative emotions, such as envy and resentment.
Toronto west-end resident Ron McFarlan said one thing that brings him joy is his new-found habit of listening to an “old-timey” mystery radio program at bedtime.
“Most of the time I just conk right out to it within minutes but anticipating that — and coffee in the morning — just lightens my heart and makes my feel like I’ve got a good thing going on,” he said. “It’s the little things.”
A lot of us already have some pretty good ideas about how to find joy, but it’s easy to lose track. For example, I had a random act of kindness planned for months. Signing onto the Big Joy Project made me stop procrastinating and just do it. The recipient of my gift was overjoyed. And as a result, so was I. What had I been waiting for? The key to happiness had been sitting on my to-do list for ages.
“We’re hoping to flip the switch for people in a very preliminary way so a user might come away thinking, ‘I can actually do something that really will, at the end of the day, leave me feeling just a little tiny bit better about who I am and my position in life,’ ” said Simon-Thomas.
“I don’t have to be toxically optimistic or inauthentic,” she continued, “but I can genuinely change a little bit about my habits of thinking and feeling in ways that can bring more joy into my life.”