How to Cultivate Joy

Hello! I’m Catherine, a relationships reporter at The Times, and I’m filling in for my colleague Jancee Dunn this week — which has been an exciting one for those of us on the Well team. On Wednesday, we hosted the first-ever Well Festival in Brooklyn, which brought together some of the biggest names in health for a day of conversations.

A lot of the talks focused on common cornerstones of well-being, like nutrition, mental health and fitness. But as I sat in the audience, I was struck by how many of the conversations touched on joy. Specifically, how essential joy is to building a healthy, meaningful life. And how to cultivate a bit more of it every day.

Here are three of my favorite joy-boosting tips that the panelists shared.

1. Reach out to your people.

Want to live a longer, happier life? Tend to your relationships, said Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who oversees the longest-running study of human happiness. That study has found that strong relationships are one of the biggest factors in people’s well-being as they age.

Investing in connection doesn’t have to be a heavy lift, Dr. Waldinger said, at one point instructing all those in the audience to take out their phones and text someone they hadn’t seen in a while.

“Just say, ‘Hi, I was thinking of you and I wanted to connect,’” he said. Don’t worry if you don’t get a text back, he added. It’s like baseball. You won’t get a hit or a home run every time, and that’s OK.

2. Embrace joyful movement.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, was in a remedial physical education class as a kid. So it’s surprising, she explained, that she has built a career around joyful movement.

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