Daily, five-minute acts of joy can have meaningful impacts on your emotional well-being.
Lounging by the seaside during a luxurious week-long vacation. Dancing for an hour in a group fitness class. Spending a screen-free day with your loved ones. Those activities might pop into mind when you think about ways to boost your mood. But new research suggests the path toward better emotional well-being doesn’t need to be so grand or time-intensive. Simple joy snacks can do the trick, too.
That’s a takeaway from a 2025 study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, investigating the impact of a well-being intervention known as the Big Joy Project. Nearly 17,600 participants from around the world were tasked with doing a daily “micro-act of joy” for a week. They made gratitude lists, performed kind acts to brighten someone’s day, and asked other people to share a fun, inspiring, or proud moment, among other activities.
Though these practices each took fewer than 10 minutes, their effect was significant. After the week, participants showed meaningful improvements in emotional well-being, increases in positive emotions, self-reported health, and sleep quality, and declines in stress. The more micro-acts performed, the greater the improvements, the researchers noted.
Importantly, the participants who experienced greater “social disadvantages” — those who were Black or Hispanic, had less education or more financial strain — all demonstrated larger improvements in well-being. Plus, the results were comparable to those of other, more extensive well-being programs that take 10 to 12 weeks. (Note: This study didn’t include a randomized control group, which the researchers note should be used in future investigations.)
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To Michael Gervais, Headstrong Meditation creator, yoga teacher, and Equinox’s senior director of group fitness programming, the results aren’t all that surprising; though fleeting, states of stress and gratitude generally can’t coexist, he says. Think of it this way: You’re driving down a two-lane highway when you run into a lane closure. The construction workers stop all cars heading north, allowing the cars driving south to pass through. Then, it’s your turn to continue your journey. While you let your gratitude fly freely, you’re forced to press pause on your worries, says Gervais.
As you intentionally seek out joy, your mindset surrounding happiness, namely that it’s left up to fate, can shift. After the week-long intervention, the participants believed they had more “happiness agency” — the idea that you’re able to play an active role in how happy you generally feel.
“What I like about [joy snacking] is it gets into a big piece of what meditation teaches you, which is that you're in charge of your state. You're not just a victim of what's happening around you,” Gervais explains. “I know that's really a delicate thing, because there's actual awfulness happening to people in the world, right now as we speak, that actually they don't have control over. Of course, circumstances are going to happen to you, but [once your basic needs are met,] you are still in charge of your own state and how you react to things.”
The habit of seeking out and creating joy can have lasting impacts on mental health, says Gervais, which can influence physical health, too. “People with higher well-being are less likely to develop chronic conditions, like cardiovascular diseases, and have reduced mortality in both healthy and unhealthy populations,” Elissa Epel, Ph.D., a senior author of the study, said in a press release. Greater life satisfaction and positive affect have also been linked with better health and longer survival.
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To start joy snacking, consider practicing one of the daily activities used in the study: celebrating another person’s joy, writing about the positive outcomes from a recent time you felt frustrated or upset, doing an act to brighten someone’s day, or reflecting on how you can be a force of good. Gervais also recommends choosing acts that bring you into the present moment, like writing a gratitude list or journaling. Try to make it a habit: The more often you practice using joy snacks — flipping that switch in your brain from stressed, anxious, or frustrated to optimistic and happy — the easier it’ll be to find the good in life’s toughest moments.