Dr. Elissa Epel

speaker

631 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 23 Jun

Dr. Elissa Epel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee · The Science of Deep Rest: How Relaxation Calms Stress & Slows Ageing with Dr Elissa Epel #668 · 23 Jun 2026 podcast

And we can increase positive affect within minutes, just like we can reduce stress within minutes.

So we tested out a handful of these micro acts of joy, being kind to a stranger, talking with someone about something they experienced recently that they're proud or happy about and really experiencing their joy with them.

We had other ways of inducing joy like gratitude, making a short gratitude list.

And we studied this in about 20,000 people over a week.

And anyone can try this platform of Micro Acts of Joy.

We still are collecting data for our studies.

So you could just type in the Big Joy Project if you want to try this.

What we found were several things.

Number one,

Even in this remote, massive study, when people read about how to try out this microactive joy, it boosted their positive affect to various extents, but that positive affect

often lasted through the evening.

When we again measured their feelings of positive and negative emotions, we see lasting effects.

And over the week, we see a buildup of joy, this positive cycle where the next day when they woke up, they actually felt a bit more positive than the previous day.

So that was a beautiful shift really in their baseline

emotional tone.

And at the end of the week, we found improvements in feelings of altruism and pro-sociality.

So this social aspect of joy, helping others, being kind, sending love and kindness, these are very powerful and they increased

how much people felt like they wanted to make sacrifices so that others could live a better life.

So that's remarkable, that love, that kind of attitude of altruism that we could change that just with these small boosts and positive emotion.

Absolutely.

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