Dr. Shahar Madjar, Journal columnist

What if small acts of joy can measurably improve happiness, well being and even health? Would you take the leap of faith and commit to practicing these acts daily? Darwin A Guevarra from the Department of Psychology, at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his colleagues have recently studied this question. The results were published in June 2025 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

The study was performed online. The researchers invited individuals from all over the world to take part in a week-long intervention requiring 5-10 minutes of daily activities. These seven activities were known as the Big Joy Project.

What were these activities? Here are some of them, with some minor editing, for clarity:

Celebrate another person’s joy: ask someone to share a fun, inspiring, or proud moment.

Shift your perspective by thinking or writing down of a recent time when you felt frustrated, upset, or anxious. Then, write three positive things that came out of it.

Do something kind: think of 5 individuals you may see today and list one thing you could do to brighten their day.

Tune in to what matters: rank 4 values–virtue, fairness, goodwill, and unity–in order of importance and write about how these values appear in your life.

Make a gratitude list: Think, reflect, and list up to 8 things or people you feel grateful for.

Dwell in awe: Watch an awe-inspiring video and reflect on the emotions it evoked.

Be a force of good: listen to an audio-guided reflection on how you can contribute goodness to the world.

These seem like a lot, right? But each of these activities shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, and participants could practice only one activity, or as many as they wanted.

The researchers measured the emotional well being, positive emotions, happiness, stress levels, self-reported health, and sleep quality of the participants before and after they took part in the activities.

The results were astonishing. 17,598 people from 169 countries participated in the study. There was a measurable, significant increase in the participants emotional well being, positive emotions, and happiness. The participants reported increases in their health and quality of their sleep. And the more daily activities they practiced, the greater the improvements they experienced.

How much better were the participants doing at the end of the week? The researchers did not report what proportion of individuals improved, neither to what percentage did they improve. Instead they used within-subject effect sizes (Cohen’s d�”) to describe the changes. It isn’t a very intuitive measure–it denotes the average size of change across all participants–but once translated into more intuitive language, the intervention produced roughly a 7-10% improvement in emotional well being and stress in just one week, with a noticeable subjective lift at the group level.

In other words, the shift wasn’t dramatic, but it felt real, enough to register subjectively for many participants.

These beneficial results weren’t spread evenly. Those in lower education, greater financial strain, lower social status, and minority groups (black and Hispanic) tended to experience larger improvement in outcomes. Also, younger participants were more likely than older ones to benefit from practicing the activities.

Based on Guevarra findings, should you, or anyone, start practicing mini-acts of joy? The answer is most likely, maybe. On one hand, the practice didn’t show any dramatic effects and the study–measuring the effects of mini-acts of joy wasn’t designed to measure long-term effects (it was limited to one week only). On the other hand, practicing mini-acts of joy takes only a few minutes a day and is easy to follow. It also follows the values that most decent people believe in: be kind to yourself and others, be conscientious and self reflect in a positive way.

The take away is this: mini-acts of joy, of kindness to yourself and others, and of self reflection, can have at least a short term benefit for your well being. It’s a way to nudge yourself into a more joyous state, even if it’s for a short while.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Shahar Madjar, MD, MBA, is a urologist and an author. He practices at Schoolcraft Memorial Hospital in Manistique, and in Baraga County Memorial Hospital in L’Anse. Find his books on Amazon or contact him at smadjar@yahoo.com.