How To Be More Joyful

Forget mindfulness – yes, really! By making some tweaks to your surroundings, you can create a happier, healthier life

- Sharon Walker

Joy. That delicious feeling of pure pleasure that lifts us out of the humdrum of daily life. If only we could have a little more of that. If only it wasn’t so fleeting, so unpredictable. What if we could wave a magic wand and tap into that exuberant vitality whenever we fancied?

According to Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of a brilliant new book, Joyful, that’s exactly what we can do. We don’t need to wait for joy to bubble up from within. Nor do we need to spend years cultivating a particular technique for inner happiness. Instead, we can design our lives to be more joyful.

After a year canvassing colleagues, friends and people on the street in 16 different countries, Fetell Lee discovered certain aesthetics are guaranteed to lift the spirits. So here’s how to make your environment more delightful…

OUR EXPERT

INGRID FETELL LEE is the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness (Little, Brown Spark). A designer by profession, Fetell Lee was surprised when someone commented that her creations were joyful. “We’ve been taught to think that joy comes from within. But what if we could create that feeling through the things that surround us?”

1 LIGHT UP YOUR LIFE