In this issue:

• Embracing joy

• Building blocks of a happier day

• A mood-boosting bowl

• The awe factor Challenge: find a moment of awe this week

Where to find it. How to keep it.

What is happiness? Is it an unexpected moment that brings a smile to your heart? An attitude? Or the accumulation of positive feelings when everything's going right?

I used to think happiness was fleeting — a lucky happenstance. But as I grew older, I realized that true happiness was a practice, something not born but built over time and repeated until it became part of my DNA. The more I used this power, the more it helped me get through some truly tough times.

Somewhere in that process, I discovered thumos — an ancient Greek word for spirited, courageous vitality that philosophers believed lived in all of us, waiting to be tapped. I didn't know the word existed until I went looking for it. Finding it changed me; it became central to understanding what kept me from realizing more of the joy life holds.

This issue is my attempt to share some of those insights with you. Not as a lecture on positive thinking, but as an honest look at what the science says about happiness and how it might be closer and more attainable than imagined.

  —   Pam Miller, Editor-in-Chief

SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

Embracing contentment

Happiness has a reputation for being something that just happens. The research tells a more useful story: a meaningful acceptance of it as a skill rather than an accident.

The oft-cited model on this topic is by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues. She breaks happiness into roughly three sources: genetics (about half), life circumstances like income (a surprisingly small slice, around 10%), and intentional habits and choices, which make up the rest. 

Lyubomirsky has since noted that the numbers were always meant as a rough illustration rather than an exact formula; other researchers have argued that the "intentional activity" slice may be smaller than originally proposed. But the underlying point has held up well across two decades of follow-up research: 

Circumstances matter far less than we assume, and daily choices matter more.

Some of what's happening is simply chemical, driven by ordinary moments. Our mood runs on a handful of brain chemicals working together — dopamine fuels motivation and reward, serotonin stabilizes mood and sleep, oxytocin is released through real connection and trust, and endorphins show up after exercise or a good laugh. None require anything exotic to activate.

There's a curious comfort in research that keeps getting confirmed around the world: happiness, on average, doesn't decline steadily as we age. It dips in midlife and then climbs — and for many of us, that climb is happening right now.

Economists studying well-being across more than a hundred countries have consistently found life satisfaction bottoming out around age 50, then rising through the late 50s and into the 60s. Journalist Jonathan Rauch built an entire book, The Happiness Curve, around this pattern. He found that the anxious comparisons, career pressures, and caregiving load that make midlife challenging tend to ease, giving way to increased gratitude and perspective.

However, it's important to acknowledge that some of the more dramatic claims — such as happiness steadily increasing to a peak in your 70s or later — become less certain upon closer examination. A reanalysis of European research shows that the happiness curve flattens once people over 70 are accounted for. This suggests that some of the supposed "rebound in old age" was partly due to the original studies' design, rather than an inevitable reality. What remains consistently supported across the research is the important point for our age group: the rise from the midlife dip into the late 50s and 60s is indeed real.

Researchers point to a few reasons: fewer ego-driven comparisons with peers, a growing ability to regulate emotions, and the freedom that comes with an empty nest or a shifting career. None of it requires doing anything differently. But there's real evidence that a few specific habits can help the upswing.

Among the strategies researchers at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center point to most consistently are:

• Social connection, more than any other single factor, tends to predict happiness; not proximity to people, but the depth of real relationships.

• Practicing gratitude appears to physically shift how the brain's reward system responds over time, which helps counteract the tendency to adapt to good things and stop noticing them.

• Small acts of kindness toward others reliably boost the giver's own mood and life satisfaction, not just the receiver's.

• Choosing experiences over things, when there's a choice to be made; adaptation to a new purchase happens fast, while a memory tends to keep paying dividends.

LIFESTYLE & NUTRITION

The building blocks of a happier day

Happiness isn't only a mindset — a fair amount of it comes from simple daily choices. None of these require an overhaul. Small, consistent habits tend to outperform dramatic ones.

• Protect your sleep like it's a meeting you can't miss. Poor sleep reliably worsens mood and stress regulation the next day, and the relationship runs both ways. Better mood also tends to mean better sleep.

• Move most days, but don't overthink intensity. A daily walk has been linked to a meaningful improvement in mood, and the research doesn't require anything more strenuous to see the benefit.

• Favor a Mediterranean-style eating pattern including vegetables, olive oil, fish, and whole grains. Multiple studies have linked this diet to lower rates of depression, likely tied to its effects on inflammation and the gut-brain connection.

• Keep blood sugar steadier throughout the day. Pairing carbohydrates with protein or fat, rather than eating them alone, helps prevent energy and mood dips that come with sharp spikes and crashes.

• Get outside in daylight, especially earlier in the day. Morning light exposure helps regulate the body's internal clock and improves sleep and mood.

• Protect real social contact, not just proximity to others. A phone call or a shared meal does more for well-being than being in a crowded room while scrolling on your phone.

If you like to cook, the mood-and-food research gives you an unusually good excuse to shop with intention. For me, I shop like my mood is on the ingredient list, right alongside dinner. A few of these appear again and again in the research on food and mood:

• Fatty fish: Salmon, sardines, and mackerel provide the omega-3s linked to better mood regulation and lower depression risk in Mediterranean-pattern studies.

• Fermented foods: Yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, and miso, which researchers studying the gut-brain connection cite as supporting the microbiome in ways that may influence mood.

• Leafy greens and legumes: The folate these foods provide is linked to mood regulation.

• Walnuts, dark chocolate, and berries, all rich in the kind of antioxidants studied for their anti-inflammatory effects, which researchers increasingly connect to mental as well as physical health.

• Extra virgin olive oil as your primary fat and the ingredient that does much of the work in Mediterranean-diet research.

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A mood-boosting bowl

This isn't so much a recipe as it is a formula. Use whatever's good that week:

Serves 1, easily multiplied

For each bowl, add a:

• Base of cooked whole grain (farro, quinoa, or brown rice)

• Serving of fatty fish (grilled salmon or canned sardines both work) or a scoop of chickpeas

• Generous handful of leafy greens, wilted or raw

• Spoonful of fermented something — a dollop of yogurt-based dressing, a few forkfuls of sauerkraut, or a spoon of kimchi on the side

• Sizzle of good olive oil and a squeeze of lemon

• Scatter of walnuts and a few berries, for the finish

Layer everything over the grain, dress simply, and treat it as you would any dish worth plating properly. This one's earned it twice over, for the ingredients and for the heavy mood lift.

WELLNESS

The awe factor

If there's one emotion with a surprising amount of research behind it right now, it's awe — that indescribable feeling of encountering something vast enough to make your ordinary concerns feel smaller for a moment. A mountain view. A piece of music that stops you mid-sentence. A night sky far from city light.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner, who directs UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, has spent two decades studying it, and the findings go well beyond a nice feeling in the moment. Awe has been linked to lower inflammation, better immune markers, and reduced activity in the stress-response system. It also has a distinctive psychological effect researchers call "self-shrinking" — a temporary quieting of self-focus that tends to leave people feeling more generous and more connected to others immediately afterward.

That’s awe-inspiring in itself.

Keltner's team designed a specific practice called an "awe walk," tested with active older adults, and found it measurably improved emotional well-being compared to an ordinary walk. The only difference was a deliberate focus on noticing something vast or unexpected along the way, rather than walking on autopilot.

I've walked the same route around my neighborhood for years. Last week, I left my home after sunset and looked up to see the vast universe above me. I saw a shooting star. That's the whole practice, and as simple as it was, it lifted my mood and set a more relaxed pace for my walk.

A few ways to experience awe include:

• Taking a familiar walk, but go looking for one thing you've never noticed before.

• Sitting outside for the last twenty minutes of daylight, phone away, purely to watch it happen.

• Revisiting a piece of music or art that once genuinely moved you, and give it your full attention again.

• Reading or watching something documenting an act of real moral courage; awe doesn't require nature; it just requires vastness.

DESIGNING YOUR BEST LIFE

Challenge: find a moment of awe this week

Take your pick, whether it be a walk, a sunset, a piece of music, and give it your full, undistracted attention at least once this week. Not multitasked, not half-watched. The research suggests the benefit depends on actually noticing, not just being present.

_{The content provided here is for general informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider before making any changes to your health routine, and never disregard professional medical advice based on information you read here.}