How a Daily Delight Practice Can Boost Joy and Gratitude

For years I have wanted to start a delight practice. If you’ve never heard of a delight practice, I’m so excited to tell you about it. The idea comes from one of my favorite books of all time, The Book of Delights by poet Ross Gay. 

In 2017, Gay started a daily practice writing about one thing during his day that delighted him. The rules were that he couldn’t edit or censor himself. He had to write about the thing freely, much like writing a journal entry. His book of essays on delight became The Book of Delights. These essays are beautiful, uplifting, and inspiring. I have dog-eared my favorite chapters and about half the chapters are marked.

Recently, Ross Gay came out with a second installment, The Book (of More) Delights. While his first book will always be my favorite, the second is also, pardon the obviousness of this descriptor, delightful. His books have inspired me to start my own delight practice. I hope you will join me in this practice as well!

In this post, I’ll talk about how to start a delight practice, the value of a delight practice, and give examples of things that have brought me delight. I hope you find it inspiring and, even more, I hope you pick up a copy of Ross Gay’s books yourself at the library or your local bookstore.

How to Start a Delight Practice

The great thing about the practice of delight is that it should be joyful for you. Consequently, you can modify the guidelines to fit your preferences. However, I feel strongly (and I’m guessing Ross Gay would agree) that you’ll get the most benefits from the practice if you are consistent.

How You Will Signal Delights?

In Gay’s first book, he notes that he will point at delightful things and say “delight” to solidify that thing in his memory. It’s a little like taking a mental picture. Doing so can move that thing from your short-term into your long-term memory and help you remember it so you can write about it later.

You might copy Gay. If you feel self-conscious or are in a public space, you might take a mental picture, take a literal picture, make a note about it in your phone (though don’t then get distracted by your phone!), or just strive to remember it. However, if you pick the latter and find you keep forgetting the things that delight you, it might be a good idea to try one of the other options.

How You Will Reflect on Delights?

At the end of the day, or whenever works best for you, write about your moments of delight. I recommend finding a journal that is delightful to you to write in. Describe what you saw or experienced and why it was delightful. This isn’t meant to be an expose, it’s more about giving yourself space to relive the delight of that moment and to help you uncover what you find delightful. Thus, you can write as much or as little as you want and in whatever format you most enjoy.

How Often Will You Pursue Your Delight Practice?

Try to maintain a daily delight practice. Or cultivate the practice regularly enough that you start recognizing delight more often in your daily life. If you struggle to remember to practice delight, you might start by going on a delight walk and intentionally looking for things that bring you delight. Hopefully, over time, the process will become more natural and integrated into your everyday life. Reflecting on delight on a daily basis can also give you a record of delights to look back on when you’re feeling down.

The Benefits of a Delight Practice

Which brings me to the benefits of starting a delight practice, of which there are many! 

Delight Can Support the Practice of Gratitude

First, noticing things that bring you delight can help you practice gratitude. This is especially the case for the small things in our everyday lives. For example, Gay expresses delight about a soft scarf his friend knitted him, seeing a mother and child carrying a grocery bag together, eating deliciously ripe fruit, and even peeing his pants when he really had to go.

Often when we start a gratitude practice we focus on the big things. For example, we might express gratitude for our health, family, etc. Expressing delight is a good way to call attention to those little things we might not otherwise notice. However, those little things still make our lives fuller and more joyful.

Boost Our Mental Health

Additionally, a delight practice can help improve our mental health. Considerable research shows that expressing gratitude leads to declines in symptoms of anxiety and depression and improvements in feelings of happiness. These benefits are especially great the more regularly we practice gratitude.

While the study of delight is new, gratitude and delight practices are very similar. Moreover, researchers found that delight is often triggered by curiosity. The experience of delight can then help us enter a flow state. When we’re in a flow state, we are generally focused and lose track of time doing something we generally find enjoyable. Flow states are great for productivity, memory, learning, and enjoyment.

And as mentioned above, having a journal or set of pictures of things that delight you can be an important balm when you’re feeling down. It can become a little bit like your own personal happiness vitamin.

Cultivate Positivity

Plus, anecdotally, I’ve experienced a big boost in happiness and optimism when I notice the good things in the world. Daily delights help inject a dose of positivity when we often focus on the negative. For example, seeing friends laughing together or family members supporting one another helps counter the narratives we frequently see about our population and how divided it is.

The more regularly we notice delight, the more it will become a default way of thinking. As a result, we can become more prone to positivity and seeing the good in the world. That’s something we could all use because, after all, no one changes the world if they’re stuck in the belief that it’s bad and unchangeable.

Turn Our Focus to the Present Moment

​Finally, in our everyday life, we are frequently focused inward on ourselves. The practice of delight can bring us outside of our own self to examine the outside world in the present moment. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, tuning into the present can help our mental health. Indeed, when we savor the moment, we experience a boost in mental health and happiness. Research backs up those findings.

Second, many of us fill our lives with screens and internal monologues. If we instead turn our focus outward to look for delight, we a) avoid those screens and b) actually pay attention to the other people and things around us. By noticing the people around us we can become more attentive and compassionate. Plus, noticing other people can help give us perspective on our own lives. In this way, a daily dose of delight can quickly become a spiritual practice that connects us the lives and world around us.

My Own Delight Practice

My personal delight practice is very new. However, I’ve already found it useful for shifting my default way of thinking. Recently, I’ve written about the following things that I’ve found delightful:

A picture of my niece on Christmas morning eating the breakfast casserole I made. She’s giving a thumbs-up in the picture and has (what I think at least) is the most hilarious, deadpan facial expression. It makes me happy every time I see it because, first, I’m absolutely obsessed with my nieces and nephews. Every time I see a picture of them it makes me happy. And second, my niece is a legitimately hilarious kid. The picture perfectly encapsulates her. Third, it’s Christmas morning, so nuff said.

Birds coming to my bird feeder in the Winter. Specifically, we have these little birds called Dark-Eyed Juncos that frequent our bird feeder. Dark-Eyed Juncos are these round little balls of black and brown feathers that are getting chonkier by the day. They didn’t seem to have much use of the feeder in the Summer. However, now that it’s Winter they’re eating from it all the time. I get so much delight out of seeing them enjoying the seeds and feeling like I’ve helped make their little lives better. Yes, our deck is covered in little white pellets of bird poo, but it’s so worth it.

Getting cozy on the couch. I love putting on my pajamas, wrapping myself in a soft robe, wearing my thick socks that are meant for hiking but that I only wear to keep my feetsies warm in winter, and snuggling under a blanket. My fluffy blanket and pajamas were gifts from my sister and the robe was a gift from Andrew, so I also delight in the memories of these presents.

Final Thoughts on Starting a Practice of Daily Delight

A delight practice can boost your mood in the short- and the long-term. It can help you appreciate the wonderful things in your life. And it can support and enhance any gratitude practice you might have. If you don’t have a gratitude practice, it can naturally help you become grateful for those small and large joys in life.

Plus, it can shift how you view the world by helping you find the positive. While I don’t endorse toxic positivity that neglects or gaslights suffering, I do believe we need positivity in order to feel empowered to change the world for the better. As we move closer to spring and start to feel the hopefulness of new life, I hope that’s something we can all keep in mind.

If you enjoyed this blog post, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others. It’s always a big help! Interested in related content? Obviously check out Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. And check out my posts on setting goals for the New Year, couple goal setting, the link between eating disorders and mental health, and setting boundaries at work and home.