Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD, co-directs the Big Joy Project, billed as the largest citizen science project ever on how joy relates to wellbeing. The study asks participants to do a “micro-act” – some small action intended to elicit joy, awe, or happiness – each day for seven days and briefly report how they feel before and after. To date the study has chalked up more than 119,000 participants across 221 countries and territories who together have completed nearly half a million micro-acts of joy.

Simon-Thomas is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkely. She visited the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Health in the spring as part of their Virtues for Well-Being seminar series.  We caught up with her just before her talk to learn how tiny acts can add up to big joy.

Your evidence suggests that taking just a couple of minutes a day for these micro-acts, for just seven days straight, can have positive effects on one’s psychological and physiological wellbeing. How is that possible?

Such a crucial and consequential question, right? How is it that we could expect, or even hope, that anybody would change in some measurable way in just seven days, particularly with regard to their overall wellbeing in life, which is what we’re interested in. We’re not interested in momentary emotion or recovery from a specific difficulty or adverse event. We’re interested in a broader quality of a person’s experience that comes from their overall satisfaction with life, their tendency toward positive states and happiness, and their sense of meaning and purpose. How could just seven days of really brief exercises really change that? That was our question.

Many interventions that promote wellbeing are three months, or even eight months. If you think about exercise or a fitness routine, most would not expect significant physical changes in just seven days. But the interesting thing about wellbeing is that it partly has to do with context, and it’s partly experiential.  It relates to how you interact with the world, how you prioritize your time, how you think and judge and interact. What we’re offering is an opportunity to really quickly understand your domain of agency around wellbeing.

So are you finding that joy is the secret to wellbeing?

We purposely call it the Big Joy project because we frame it as an opportunity to learn about what you can do to bring more joy into your life. We offer participants these little exercises, and as they’re doing them, they’re also self-reflecting. They’re asking, “how do I feel right now?” The very act of considering and answering those questions is part of gaining a greater understanding of your own wellbeing.

“We purposely call it the Big Joy project because we frame it as an opportunity to learn about what you can do to bring more joy into your life.”

I think a lot of people mark their days in a very passive and habitual way. They’re not thinking about how a particular choice or moment of activity is impacting their wellbeing or how they feel. Just having that invitation to do so is a beginning.

You’ve chosen a specific set of exercises that are short and simple. Why these prompts?

The mini exercise itself — whether it’s making a list of eight things you’re grateful for, adopting a different perspective on a past moment that was difficult, or watching a video that is awe-inspiring — takes somebody out of their ordinary element and invites them to do something that changes how they feel. This creates understanding and empowerment about the role of emotional and cognitive experiences in their own wellbeing.

The Big Joy prompts partly shift a person’s understanding and partly shift their alphabet of simple things they can do to feel more ownership over their own wellbeing. It’s about learning what wellbeing means to you, paying attention to how it impacts you, and considering the possibility that there are multiple routes to improving it.

At the end, we give people a tailored report, a little illustration that describes how each exercise impacted them. This can act as a guide for moving forward, helping sort out which things they might want to keep doing because they worked well for them, and maybe letting other ones that didn’t work as well fall by the wayside.

The self-reflection piece edges toward mindful attention. How does this compare to mindfulness meditation?

For sure. The interesting thing is that there is no explicit mindfulness practice in the Big Joy Project. You could argue that inviting a person to self-reflect, even for two breaths or however long it takes to ask, “Am I feeling positive emotions or unpleasant emotions in this moment?” is a form or variety of mindfulness. It’s not the quiet stillness, or the attention to breath and to mental habits, but it is a self-reflective moment.

And over the course of seven days of doing this repeatedly, maybe — maybe — people are gaining an increased awareness of their own experiences, mental habits, and priorities in a way that makes them feel like they have more agency over their own wellbeing and moment-to-moment emotional experiences.  That’s important. That’s a valuable contribution, and we’re excited that we can offer that.

You’ve championed the idea that humans have an innate urge to be compassionate, that we’re born with a bias toward empathy. Have we lost that as a society and how do we get it back?

It’s such a valid question, and one that we’re thinking about every moment here at the Greater Good Science Center. We try to provide insights and resources that will enable people to reconnect with and strengthen that inborn capacity, that innate drive and urge to approach others, to affiliate in generous and mutually supportive ways, and to form long-term social bonds.

“My hope is that people can understand the realm of opportunity to experience joy, generosity and connection, collaboration and creativity, and all things prosocial.”

We are born that way. We have evolved with that capacity to care, to extend compassion, to console one another, and to reconcile. But we’re also shaped by our lived experiences and by the circumstances, environments, and cultural factors that we live within daily. When the geopolitical powers that be impose a firehose of adversity, ideological conflict and polarization, our nervous systems and our brains take that in and respond in kind, because we want to survive.

It takes intention and deliberate prioritizing to reintroduce the information that awakens and strengthens that innate prosocial capacity. You can walk around being angry, hostile, frustrated, and that actually doesn’t feel good. It’s such an interesting thing to realize. That’s what Big Joy does. It gives people agency over their own experiences, choices, behaviors, and feelings.

My hope is that people can understand the realm of opportunity to experience joy, generosity and connection, collaboration and creativity, and all things prosocial. We just keep telling that story and hoping that it sinks in.