Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health.

On bad days, rather than feeling overwhelmed and helpless, I discovered small things that could reliably lift my spirits. I started incorporating what I learned into my home and began to feel a sense of excitement as I put my key into the lock each evening. Over time, it became clear to me that the conventional wisdom about joy was wrong.

Joy isn’t hard to find at all. In fact, it’s all around us.

I needed to know exactly how the physical world influences our emotions and why certain things spark a feeling of joy.

And the common thread among bubbles, balloons, and hummingbirds also became clear: they were all things that floated gently in the air. Seeing it all laid out, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and ephemeral, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes. Specifically, it is what designers call aesthetics—the properties that define the way an object looks and feels—that give rise to the feeling of joy.

In all, I identified ten aesthetics of joy, each of which reveals a distinct connection between the feeling of joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us: Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves

Schools are complex systems, making it challenging to isolate the impact of color on academic outcomes. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence reveals that significant changes follow in the wake of a Publicolor intervention. Graffiti almost completely disappears, and principals report that both student and teacher attendance improves. Some principals say they have noticed a difference in test scores as well. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that teachers and students consistently say they feel safer in a school that has been painted by Publicolor.

Because the sun travels from east to west across the southern half of the sky, houses where the most important rooms face south tend to be cheerful and convivial. Meanwhile, houses where the main rooms face north are often dark and gloomy, causing people to retreat from the common areas toward the lighter rooms at the edges of the house. (In the Southern Hemisphere, the sun passes through the northern part of the sky, so these directions should be reversed.)

The joy we find in a sunlit room is matched by tangible measures of well-being. Research consistently shows that increasing exposure to daylight reduces blood pressure and improves mood, alertness, and productivity.

In a study of elementary schools, students in classrooms with the most daylight advanced as much as 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math over the course of a year.

Sunlight is best, but when it isn’t available, broad-spectrum artificial light can provide similar benefits. Scientists have known for years that seasonal depression can be alleviated by spending up to an hour a day in front of a glowing box that radiates twenty-five hundred lux, but newer research shows that light therapy can be effective for nonseasonal depression as well.

And among Alzheimer’s patients in long-term-care facilities, bright light reduced both depression and cognitive decline.

So Shaver’s advice is to look at the color rendering index (CRI) of a bulb. Incandescent bulbs have a rating of 100, a fact that fuels demand for them even though they have been banned by many countries. But newer LED bulbs have recently been developed that give off light as warm and vibrant as those old Edison bulbs. Choosing bulbs with a CRI close to 100 will keep you and your spaces looking bright and colorful.

People are quick to blame habits, and to dismiss this as mindless eating, but I believe that ignores the root cause. In our humdrum environments, we live with a sensorial hunger, and without any other means to satisfy it, we feed it.

Food offers sensory satiation, not just physical nutrients, and it doesn’t take much effort to create food that is as beautiful as it is filling.

Playing with color doesn’t require fancy equipment or plating, just an attention to a side of food we often overlook. Hasselbrink also talks about the importance of texture. Something as simple as how you slice your food can dramatically change the experience. For example, shaving a carrot into long ribbons not only looks beautiful, but it creates a lighter, crisper sensation than just cutting the vegetable into rounds.

I’m not going to lie. It felt good. But what I realized is that Kondo’s philosophy isn’t really minimalism. It’s sanity.

And now that we can see the things we have, our place actually feels more abundant, not less. That’s because abundance isn’t about just accumulating things. It’s about surrounding yourself with a rich palette of textures that enliven your senses.

It’s a process of removing the background noise to create a canvas on which to build a joyful home. Yet it’s also worth remembering that just weeding alone doesn’t create a beautiful garden. You have to plant flowers, too.

Labor-intensive artwork, produced beautifully and abundantly, is like a handmade peacock’s tail. It says that you possess such copious energy and verve that you have plenty left over to devote to the joy of pure embellishment.

It turns out that the word “gaudy” has roots in the Latin gaudere, “to rejoice” or “delight” in something, which happens to be the same root that gave us the word “joy.” Choosing abundance is not a moral failing. It’s an expression of deep, human delight. It’s an acknowledgment that we are here to do more than eke out an existence between birth and death and chores.

We are here to see rainbows and paint them, to be tickled and enthralled, to eat a second cupcake if we choose. And, occasionally, to feel the truth of Mae West’s famous aphorism, that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Some of the most joyful moments in life are the ones in which we gain a kind of freedom. Think of the ecstatic opening of the school doors on the last day before summer break

Joy thrives on the alleviation of constraints.

The delicious stretch you feel in your legs on stepping out of the car at a rest stop after many hours of driving is a joyful freedom. So is sleeping under the stars, riding in a convertible, and ...

We fight so hard for freedom because it enables us to pursue joy—as well as everything else that matters in life.

How do our senses know when we’re free? It seems to run along a continuum, one that we define in relative terms. The playground is freer than the classroom, the picnic freer than the formal banquet. But at each end of the spectrum there are absolutes. On one end lie places we all agree are restrictive, like the tunnel of an MRI machine or a solitary-confinement cell. On the other are places that feel entirely unconstrained—fields and lakes, parks and beaches. As I thought about it, I realized that the most liberating places are, with few exceptions, found in nature.

And while teachers sometimes worry that windows in a classroom will be distracting to schoolchildren, it turns out that nature views actually improve students’ attention while also decreasing stress. Views of natural settings let the eyes rest and refocus between periods of staring at screens or work materials and have what researchers call a “micro-restorative effect” on our minds, relieving fatigue and refreshing our ability to concentrate.