Cultivate joy. It's good for your health.

Catherine Pearson, 3 Ways to Cultivate Joy, NYTimes, May 9, 2025. Person opens by talking about co-hosting the “first-ever Well Festival in Brooklyn, which brought together some of the biggest names in health for a day of conversations.” Sounds like the Grey Lady is getting with the Homo Ludens program.

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. [...]

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. [...]

3. Live every day like it’s your first.

Suleika Jaouad, the memoirist and author of a new best seller, “The Book of Alchemy,” was diagnosed with leukemia in her 20s. Last summer, she had a recurrence, and the advice a lot of people offered was to live each day like it was her last. But every time she heard that sentence, she felt an “intense sense of panic,” Jaouad said.

There’s more at the link.