Shortcut to a brighter day

Next time you’re in a great mood after enjoying a nature walk, seeing a friend or getting a gift in the mail, pause to savor the moment and name the feeling with as much specificity as possible (joy, affection, contentment). The reason: Knowing more words to describe happy feelings is associated with greater well-being, say researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, after analyzing 35,000 blogs and more than 1,500 stream-of-consciousness pieces. The authors hypothesize that word choices reflect our familiarity with feeling up or down, as being more fluent in the language of joy correlates with spending more time feeling those emotions.