Copyright hellomagazine
For South African writer Bridget McNulty, daily moments of joy are important. It could be the first sip of tea in the morning, seeing the sunlight streaming through the window, or noticing a new leaf has unfurled on a houseplant. These micro-moments - what she calls "glimmers" - last just three seconds. Yet, she says, they’re powerful enough to ease anxiety, calm the nervous system and reconnect us with the quiet joy woven through ordinary life. "Glimmers are micro-moments of joy that regulate your nervous system," she explains. "They’re tiny, but their cumulative effect is huge. Every time you notice a glimmer, there’s this pause and your nervous system gets this moment of calm to recover. It gives you a little hit of serotonin. And when you string all those together, they start having a real impact on your mental health. "Noticing glimmers is a coping practice… a moment of calm. That cumulative response is what’s really valuable, because in the moment, an individual glimmer might not make you feel any better, but it’s the accumulation - morning, afternoon, evening - that starts shifting how you feel." Bridget lists more than 1000 possible glimmers – including hearing your favourite song from childhood, hearing a child’s laughter, waking up without an alarm and watching a rainbow brighten – in her book, Daily Glimmers, which is structured so you can dip in daily and according to the season you’re currently in. She says that noticing glimmers interrupts autopilot and brings us into the moment – which is especially meaningful in today’s distraction-heavy world. It’s also a low-effort tool. "It doesn’t cost anything and it doesn’t add anything to your to-do list," she says. The problem is, we are wired not to notice glimmers on a regular basis. "Humans are wired to notice things that put us in danger - so we have this negativity bias," explains Bridget. "We’re constantly stressed now. And even though these days there’s no lion to run away from - we’re just living in this perpetual cycle of stress. So if we let ourselves just be natural, we’re going to keep noticing all the negative things. If we can train ourselves in the other direction and lower our bar for delight all the way down, our lives are just going to be so much better." These glimmers of joy are different to happiness, though. "Happiness is when everything is going well… Joy is available despite all the other stuff. Happiness depends on external conditions; joy is always accessible," she says. The beauty of glimmers is that they really are accessible to everyone – even during dark or depleted periods when traditional self-care feels impossible. Bridget – also the author of The Grief Handbook and the novel Strange Nervous Laughter – first noticed their importance after the sudden loss of her mother, and more recently, another family bereavement. They offered brief moments of lightness when everything felt dark. "They work because they’re the only thing that works," she says. "Even when things are awful, you can still recognise how lovely it feels to lie down in bed at the end of the day. Those tiny lamps of light stop life feeling hopeless." So where do we start? "At first just try to find one good thing a day," she suggests. "Knowing that you have to report on one good thing that happened that day means you’re going to be on the alert for it. If you specifically look for glimmers, you start noticing more and more of them, and the whole point is that it’s not a big thing… most of the time it’s tiny. It’s the noticing that’s the art and it’s a practice that you can train yourself to do."
