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.

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.

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

Joy’s power is that small moments can spark big changes. A whimsical outfit might prompt a smile, which inspires a chance kindness toward a stranger, which helps someone who is struggling to get through her day. Even the tiniest joyful gestures add up over time, and before we know it, we have not just a few happier people but a truly joyful world.

For all the commotion, the painting might have seemed a prank by a particularly brazen mischief-maker. But this wasn’t an act of graffiti, and the commissioning artist was no ordinary street vandal. He was the mayor. Edi Rama won the World Mayor award in 2004 for his stunning success at restoring the capital city of Albania, just four years after he was elected.

when psychologists use the word “joy,” they mean an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion, one that can be recognized by certain telltale signs: smiling, laughing, and a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. While contentment is curled up on the sofa, and bliss is lost in tranquil meditation, joy is skipping, jiving, twirling, giggling. It is a uniquely exuberant emotion, a high-energy form of happiness.

In the man-made world, color sits on the surface—a thin veneer, a finishing touch. This is reflected in the root of the word “color,” which comes from the Latin celare, “to conceal.”

Historian John Stilgoe writes that until the turn of the last century, educated people were apt to study chromatics, the interplay of light and color across a scene.

The difference between energetic, joyful colors and more somber hues has to do with how pure and how bright the pigments are. Designers use the terms “saturation” and “lightness” to describe these properties.

A saturated color is its purest version, the kind you might find on a children’s building-block set. The truest blue and the sunniest yellow: these colors are strong and intense. To desaturate colors, you add gray to them, making them duller versions of themselves. Spring green becomes olive; cerulean becomes slate. Beige is a desaturated yellow—a yellow with all the joy sucked out of it! Gray is the ultimate desaturated color, containing only white and black.

The lightness of a color has to do with how much white or black is mixed into it. White reflects light, while black absorbs it. So adding white makes a color lighter and more reflective, while adding black makes it darker and more muted. Light pink and sky blue are more energizing than burgundy and navy because they reflect more light, imbuing a space with life. Dark, desaturated colors absorb light, bringing down the energy in a space.

Once, when Stamberg and Aferiat were stuck on choosing a color for a house they were designing, they turned to a good friend of theirs, the painter David Hockney, who said, “Do what I do whenever I have a color problem. Look at Matisse.”

In A Pattern Language, a landmark collection of observations on the ways that people use space, architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues note that the single most important fact about a building is this: “People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.” In a study of a residential street in Berkeley, Alexander found that residents on the north side of the street didn’t use their backyards. Instead, they sat in the small front yards next to the sidewalk while the backyards collected junk. Shaded yards and plazas create dead zones, while those that face south ensure “the building and its gardens will be happy places full of activity and laughter.” The same is true indoors. 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.

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. In a meta-analysis of twenty studies, researchers reached the startling conclusion that light therapy can be as effective at treating depression as antidepressants. And among Alzheimer’s patients in long-term-care facilities, bright light reduced both depression and cognitive decline.

Studies affirm that people generally prefer lighting that is variable, rather than uniform. These hills and valleys of light attract our eyes to points of interest within a space, but even more important, they draw us together. As Alexander emphasizes in A Pattern Language, because people are unconsciously attracted to light, the brightest spots will be the ones where people congregate, making these the most lively and joyful hubs of activity in a space. If a space feels dead, a powerful remedy is to create focal points of light where you want people to be. A sofa by the fireplace, a window seat, a dining table bathed in the warm light of a pendant lamp: these places are always alive because we, like moths, cannot resist the light.

We think of color as an attribute, but really it’s a happening: a constantly occurring dance between light and matter.

The very best pigments for creating light are fluorescent colors, because they absorb photons at higher-energy wavelengths that lie in the invisible ultraviolet range and reflect them back at visible wavelengths. This makes them look brighter than normal colors, almost as if they’re glowing.

“When you would screw in a light bulb that you bought at the supermarket,” says Shaver, “you knew that it was always going to burn at a color temperature of twenty-seven hundred degrees Kelvin, which is warm and very flattering to the skin.”

“People don’t know they should be looking for three thousand degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with four thousand or five thousand degrees Kelvin, which is cool light.”

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.

It was called Bioscleave House, and it had a strange subtitle: “Lifespan Extending Villa.” I discovered that its creators were an artist and a poet couple, Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who claimed not just that the house was a delightful place to live but that it could actually prolong the lives of its inhabitants.

Arakawa and Gins believed that the dull comfort of modern buildings lulls our bodies into a stupor that hastens our demise. In their view, our flat floors and white walls numb our senses and our muscles, leading them to atrophy. To combat this problem, they advanced a provocative theory they called reversible destiny, which states that people can prevent aging and thwart death by living in a stimulating environment that challenges their bodies on a regular basis.

A little research shows that Arakawa’s estimate of “thousands” might be excessive, but scientists do count somewhere between twelve and twenty-one. We have senses of time, equilibrium, and direction. We have internal senses, like stretch sensors that tell us when our bellies are full and proprioception, which tells us where our bodies are in space. The sense that we call touch actually comes from four distinct receptors—pain, temperature, pressure, and tactility—which combine to give us a remarkably robust sense of the world.

What this quirky loft and its even-quirkier designers were making me realize is that the kind of abundance that really matters is not material accumulation but sensorial richness. The circus and the flea market are so joyful because of the collection of rich, delightful sensations they offer. The abundance aesthetic is defined by a layering of color, texture, and pattern, and you don’t need a lot of stuff to achieve it.

The potential therapeutic value of sensory stimulation is well known in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, where a therapy called Snoezelen is used to treat developmental disabilities, brain injury, and dementia. Snoezelen, a portmanteau of two charmingly onomatopoeic Dutch words, snuffelen (to sniff) and doezelen (to doze), is a practice of creating multisensory environments and letting patients gravitate to sensations that feel good to them. Snoezelen rooms look a little bit like psychedelic lounges from the 1970s, complete with cushy furniture, swirly holograms, moving light displays, and colorful bubbling tubes of water that resemble Lava lamps. Many include aromas, like orange or strawberry, and music as well. Trippy as they seem, the intensely pleasurable sensations they offer can have a real influence on mood and behavior, without the side effects that come with medication.

I realized that in Hawaii I was surrounded all day by the lush textures of the jungle, the whoosh of the ocean, and the smell of salt water. I had my feet in volcanic sand and a lei of plumeria flowers around my neck. I was satiated, head to toe. Sure enough, by 11:00 a.m. on that first day back in the office, I had my head in the snack cabinet, hunting for almonds. 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.

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.

eg tinting the quinoa with beet juice

But what I realized is that Kondo’s philosophy isn’t really minimalism. It’s sanity. After all, we still have plenty of stuff. 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 took me a little while to understand why confetti, polka dots, and stripes have such an outsize effect. The reason is deceptively simple: small things repeated many times create a burst of joy much bigger than each individual piece could. Think about it this way: Each confetto (yes, that’s the singular of “confetti”) is just a speck of paper. If you saw one on your shoe, you’d probably pick it off without another thought. But multiply that confetto a thousand times and you have a handful of one of the most potent joymakers in the world, a pocket-sized jubilee.

But in the longer arc of evolutionary history, displays of abundance often signify health and vitality.

Minimalists tout the idea that nature builds with perfect thrift, when in fact the evidence of her extravagance is everywhere. In what economical world does a fruit fly perform dances or a moose carry a coat rack on its head? Spectacles that require a substantial investment of energy—colorful patterns or exuberant movements—demonstrate that an organism is vigorous enough to afford such a lavish expenditure.

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.

In 1993, a pair of dissident Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid began an unusual project. Curious about the diverse artistic tastes of people around the world, they commissioned a ten-country survey about the kind of art people liked to look at, delving into specific details like favorite colors, styles, and subject matter. When it was all done, they created a Most Wanted painting for each country, a visual summary of the responses.

But for a group of evolutionary theorists, the startling consistency of the Most Wanted paintings has a different significance. Not only is this type of landscape common in artwork, they point out, but it also appears in real-life contexts, from the celebrated English gardens created by Lancelot “Capability” Brown to the urban parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, such as Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. People often go to great lengths to transform a piece of terrain into one of these landscapes. For example, to create their beloved parks, Brown and Olmsted cleared trees, planted grasses, dug ponds, and sculpted earth. In Central Park alone, Olmsted oversaw the movement of 2.5 million cubic yards of rock, soil, and clay. These landscapes aren’t exactly native. Instead, they bear a striking resemblance to another part of the world, one that most of the designers and artists creating them had never visited: the African savanna.

The savanna had distinct advantages for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with more food sources close to the ground than in the forests, where food is primarily found high in the tree canopy, as well as more protein per square mile than any other habitat on earth.

British geographer Jay Appleton first noticed this appealing combination of features, coining the term “prospect and refuge” to describe our attraction to landscapes that offer both broad vistas (prospect) and accessible shelter (refuge).

In a home, taking down nonstructural walls can expand the sight lines and create an airy feel. Or, if that’s not possible, you can create more openness by decreasing the volume of furniture in a room, either by trading in an overstuffed sofa or a giant chest of drawers for a smaller version, or getting rid of unnecessary pieces entirely. Scaling down furniture can create more negative space, a term used by designers to describe the space in a room that isn’t filled up with objects.

A love of wild sensations like these is a critical part of what biologist E. O. Wilson calls biophilia, the innate attraction humans have toward other living things.

In 2015, 305 million people visited US national parks, and Wilson points out that more people visit zoos each year than professional sporting events. Sixty-eight percent of American households have one or more pets. According to Wilson, these experiences with plants and animals are an essential part of our well-being.

One possible reason is that spending time in nature decreases blood flow to a part of the brain called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, which is associated with the tendency to brood over problems. Natural settings literally make us more carefree.

For most of human evolution—eighty thousand generations—nature was not a place we went but a place we lived. A mere six hundred generations have passed since the beginning of agriculture gave rise to permanent shelters and communities, and only about twelve generations since the birth of the modern city, with its hard surfaces and mechanized sounds. From an evolutionary perspective, our current habitat is still an early stage experiment.

Another way to bring nature into the home is through sound. Oakes told me that she sometimes plays the sounds of crickets in the background in her apartment, and this reminded me that nature often has a surprisingly boisterous soundtrack.

Birdsong has even been piped into gas-station restrooms, a move that purportedly raised customer-satisfaction ratings. One possible explanation is that we evolved to rely on ambient sounds, particularly birdsong, as indicators of the safety of our environment. Before a big storm, or in other dangerous moments, birds flee, and the world goes eerily quiet. The noise of business as usual among the animals lets us know we’re free to play and explore.

In Japan, an activity called shinrin-yoku—literally, “forest bathing”—has been promoted as a public-health initiative by the forestry ministry since 1982. The practice, which involves simply relaxing in the presence of trees (no actual “bathing” required), has been shown in several studies to increase the activity of natural killer (NK) cells, a type of white blood cell critical to immune system functioning, particularly in the body’s defense against cancerous and virally infected cells. The researchers attribute part of the forest’s immune-boosting influence to a series of chemicals known as phytoncides, which are secreted by plants to protect themselves from pests and diseases and are present in some essential oils. In a related test, researchers used a humidifier to infuse hotel rooms with essential oils from the hinoki cypress, a tree common in Japan’s forests. Just the presence of phytoncides in the air was enough to decrease stress hormones and raise NK cell activity.

In August I made my way to a small private garden in Hummelo, a couple of hours outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It was an inconspicuous place, with a sign so small that I drove by it twice before finding the entrance. It seemed a perfect reflection of its owner, the seventy-three-year-old Dutch designer Piet Oudolf, who maintains a shy humility despite being one of the most celebrated figures in the world of garden design.

It was Sarah Ryhanen who led me to an answer to this question, via a book she recommended called The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy. A sort of elegy for wildness, the book laments what its author calls “the great thinning”: a precipitous decline of wild species in the British countryside due to habitat loss and the extensive use of pesticides and herbicides.

Our wilderness is getting less wild. Yet because these losses have been gradual, occurring on a generational timescale, most people haven’t noticed. Ecologists call this phenomenon shifting baseline syndrome; essentially it means that we adapt our definition of “wild” to the current condition of our wilderness.

Disorderly environments have been linked to feelings of powerlessness, fear, anxiety, and depression, and they exert a subtle, negative influence on people’s behavior. A series of studies done in the Netherlands in 2008 showed that the presence of graffiti doubled the likelihood that passersby would litter or steal an envelope with a small sum of money in it.

Those who had been exposed to the disorderly environments were more likely to cheat, and to cheat by bigger amounts, than those who had viewed the more harmonious scenes.