A study found that a one-week web-based program called the Big Joy Project, which involved simple daily acts of kindness and gratitude, significantly boosted participants’ wellbeing, reduced stress, and improved sleep.
A team of researchers led by UC San Francisco explored the impact of a unique, weeklong online program designed to boost well-being, called the Big Joy Project.
The program invited participants to complete simple daily activities, such as asking someone to share a joyful or inspiring moment, creating a gratitude list, or performing a small act of kindness. Around 17,600 people from across the globe joined the study. Most participants were from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and the majority identified as women, white, and had at least some college education.
What They Discovered
After the seven-day intervention, participants reported higher levels of well-being and positive emotions, and a stronger belief that one’s own behavior can promote happiness. They also reported decreased stress, and improved health and sleep quality.
Younger, Black, and Hispanic, and socially disadvantaged participants benefited the most.
Why It Matters
Improvements in well-being are associated with a lower risk of future mental illness and better physical health. “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,” said senior author Elissa Epel, PhD.
Web-based wellbeing interventions that last several weeks and take 3 to 4 hours a week to complete have shown favorable results. But this is the first time that a short intervention has shown such strong benefits, and it could work for more people.
“Many people lack the time, motivation, and resources to commit to these lengthier programs, and they may be more likely to drop out,” said first author Darwin Guevarra, PhD, who is also affiliated with Miami University. “We were excited to get positive results in a program that required just a few minutes each day for a week.”
Reference: “Scaling a Brief Digital Well-Being Intervention (the Big Joy Project) and Sociodemographic Moderators: Single-Group Pre-Post Study” by Darwin A Guevarra, Yoobin Park, Xuhai Xu, Jin Liou, Jolene Smith, Peggy Callahan, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Elissa S Epel, 2 February 2025, Journal of Medical Internet Research.
DOI: 10.2196/72053
Funding and Disclosures: Smith and Callahan are from the nonprofit that partially funded the Big Joy Project.
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3 Comments
“Happiness”? I’d settle for neutral contentment. … I’ve been a chronic worrier and negative thinker almost my entire life, even making myself sick by it as a child. Indeed, I’d really like to have stated on my grave/urn marker someday that, “He spent his life worrying sick about things that never happened.”
I cannot recall much of my half-century-plus life, and almost nothing positive, probably because I spend my ‘present’ anxious about my future and depressed over my past. For me, that includes a fear of how badly I will emotionally deal with the negative or horrible event — which usually doesn’t occur — and especially if I’ll also conclude that I’m at fault.
It would be great if there could be some valuable academic or clinical use from it all — to create or extract from it some practical positivity and purpose — so it wouldn’t have been all in vain.
Meanwhile, I’ll try talking to a woman I find attractive but then mentally freeze up with anticipations of, among other disasters, a potential relationship’s inevitable failure, right up to signing divorce papers a few years later. … And this curse goes beyond being ‘negative’.
hi Frank
metoo, however some years back I participated in a trial, where you multible times every day recieved an sms reminding you to enter a specific site, where you should answer a few basic question like: how are you right now, what are you doing etc. To my immense surprize I found out that I was borderline happy or at least content most of the day, it had a big impact on my live, so maybe you should try it too? I am sure you can find an app, that can do the same thing. Good luck.
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