Glimmers: How Tiny Moments of Joy Can Improve Your Health

We spend a lot of time talking about our triggers: the situations, people and experiences that make us feel stressed, anxious or overwhelmed. But there’s another side of the nervous system conversation that gets considerably less attention. What about the tiny experiences that make us feel good?

The warmth of the morning sun on your skin. Your dog wanting to play. The first sip of coffee on a quiet weekend morning. Walking down a street you’ve never explored before. Laughing with friends until you temporarily forget everything else that’s occupying your mind.

These small moments have become known as glimmers. Unlike life’s big milestones, glimmers are easy to overlook precisely because they’re so ordinary. They might last only a few seconds, yet they can create a brief feeling of joy, calm, safety, curiosity or connection.

There’s something about this concept that immediately resonated with me. We spend so much time trying to improve our lives that perhaps we don’t spend enough time noticing the moments when they’re already good. And while “looking for glimmers” may sound like another wellness trend, the psychology behind deliberately noticing and appreciating positive experiences has a surprisingly interesting body of research behind it.

What Are Glimmers?

The term glimmer was popularized by therapist Deb Dana through her work with Polyvagal Theory. Glimmers are often described as the opposite of triggers. While a trigger can alert us to threat, stress or distress, a glimmer is a small cue associated with feelings of safety, connection or well-being.

A glimmer doesn’t need to make you overwhelmingly happy. In fact, that’s part of what makes the concept so appealing. It might be sunlight coming through a window, hearing a song you love, noticing a beautiful garden, your pet resting beside you, the smell of freshly brewed coffee or an unexpected conversation that makes you smile.

The experience itself isn’t necessarily unusual. What matters is that you actually notice it. That’s easier to say than it sounds. We can drink our morning coffee while answering emails, walk through beautiful surroundings while looking at our phones or barely acknowledge our dog greeting us because we’re mentally planning what we need to do next. The positive experience happened, but our attention was somewhere else.

Why We’re So Good at Noticing the Bad

Humans aren’t exactly designed to give equal attention to everything that happens around us. Negative information tends to capture our attention particularly effectively, a phenomenon psychologists have studied extensively as part of the broader negativity bias. From an evolutionary perspective, being highly responsive to potential threats had obvious survival value.

The threats competing for our attention today may look very different. An unpleasant email, an argument, a looming deadline, bad news or financial worries aren’t predators, but they can still dominate our thoughts. A day can contain dozens of perfectly pleasant moments, yet one irritating comment can be the thing we’re still thinking about that evening.

Glimmers encourage us to become more deliberate about noticing the other side of our experience. This isn’t about ignoring problems or forcing ourselves to be positive. It’s simply about becoming better at registering the moments that feel good instead of allowing them to pass unnoticed. And this is where glimmers become more interesting than a catchy social-media term.

The Science Behind Glimmers

The term glimmer itself is relatively new, but a closely related psychological process has been studied for years: savoring.

Savoring is the deliberate process of attending to, appreciating and sometimes prolonging positive experiences. Instead of immediately moving on from something enjoyable, you allow yourself to experience it more fully. A glimmer might therefore be the positive moment you notice, while savoring is what happens when you give that moment your attention.

A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis examined 20 randomized controlled trials involving 4,805 participants and found that savoring interventions improved emotional outcomes, including increasing positive psychological states and reducing negative emotional symptoms. The researchers describe savoring as a form of emotion regulation through which people consciously generate, maintain or enhance positive emotions.

What I particularly like about this research is how ordinary savoring can be. It doesn’t require a retreat, a complicated meditation practice or another wellness gadget. Savoring can happen while eating something you enjoy, listening to music, looking at photographs, walking outside or spending time with other people.

In other words, many of the positive experiences are already there. The practice is learning to pay attention to them.

Glimmers and Your Nervous System

Glimmers are frequently discussed in relation to the nervous system because the concept grew out of Deb Dana’s work with Polyvagal Theory. The idea is that our nervous system is continuously receiving information from our surroundings, with some experiences contributing to feelings of threat or tension and others contributing to feelings of safety and connection.

You don’t need to understand nervous-system theory to recognize the physical difference between these states. Think about how your body feels during a stressful confrontation compared with sitting somewhere beautiful with someone you love. Your breathing, muscle tension, facial expression and general feeling in your body can be completely different.

A glimmer can be one of those brief moments when you notice yourself relaxing, smiling or feeling connected to what’s around you. Perhaps your shoulders drop slightly when you step outside into the sun. Maybe playing with your dog temporarily pulls you out of whatever you’ve been worrying about. The change might be subtle, but that doesn’t make the experience meaningless.

I think this is also why the idea of glimmers fits so naturally into a broader conversation about stress. We often focus on removing stressors from our lives, which isn’t always possible. Becoming more aware of positive moments gives us another way of looking at the same problem: not only what is stressing me?, but also what makes me feel good, connected or at ease?

Glimmers Aren’t Quite the Same as Gratitude

I’ve written before about gratitude and its relationship with health and well-being, and there is obvious overlap between gratitude and glimmers. Both encourage us to pay more attention to positive aspects of our lives, but I think there’s an important difference between them.

Gratitude often involves reflection. You might sit down at the end of the day and think about what you’re grateful for, or write three good things in a journal. A glimmer is more immediate. It’s the moment you’re sitting with friends and suddenly become aware of how much you’re enjoying yourself. It’s noticing that the sun feels wonderful on your skin rather than remembering later that it was a beautiful morning.

One asks us to appreciate what we have. The other reminds us to notice it while it’s happening.

They complement each other beautifully, and both counter something I think modern life makes very easy: being physically present for an experience while mentally being somewhere else entirely.

Can Small Positive Moments Really Affect Our Health?

This is where glimmers become particularly relevant to Hacks4Wellness. Health isn’t only about what we eat, how much we exercise or which supplements we take. Our psychological and social lives are part of the picture too, and researchers have increasingly examined relationships between positive emotional well-being and physical health.

A meta-analysis examining positive affect and mortality among older adults found that higher positive affect was associated with lower mortality risk, including in analyses accounting for medical, psychological and social factors. Broader research has also explored several possible pathways connecting positive psychological well-being with physical health, including health behaviors, social relationships and biological processes.

I find this particularly interesting from a longevity perspective because it’s very easy to turn healthy aging into one enormous optimization project. We measure our sleep, count protein, exercise, track steps, think about blood sugar, take supplements and perhaps even measure our biological age. I do many of those things myself.

But a long life is presumably not only about accumulating more years. We also want those years to contain connection, curiosity, enjoyment and laughter. Those things shouldn’t become optional extras that we’ll get around to once we’ve optimized everything else.

My Own Glimmers

When I started thinking about what my own glimmers are, I realized that none of them are particularly extraordinary. That’s probably what I like most about the concept.

Long walks without a plan are one of mine. I walk a lot anyway, but there’s something different about going out without a route, destination or pace to hit. I can simply walk and see where I end up. Sometimes that turns into another glimmer of its own because I love walking through streets I haven’t explored before and looking at houses I’ve never seen. I notice the architecture, gardens and little details, and an ordinary walk suddenly feels like a small exploration.

Playing with my dog is another obvious one. Dogs are remarkably good at being completely absorbed in whatever is happening right now, and playing with mine has a way of pulling me into that same state for a while.

Then there’s weekend morning coffee. Weekday coffee and weekend coffee somehow feel like two entirely different things. On the weekend, there’s often no immediate rush to get somewhere, and I can actually enjoy the smell, warmth and ritual of that first cup rather than drinking it while thinking about everything I need to do.

Morning sun on my skin is another. Getting outside in the morning is something I already prioritize because of the relationship between daylight and our circadian rhythm, but not everything needs to become a biohack. Sometimes sunlight simply feels wonderful, and noticing that feeling is valuable in itself.

And finally, laughing with friends. There are those moments when you’re laughing with people you love and, for a few seconds, nothing else occupies your mind. No to-do list, no worries about tomorrow, no attempt to improve anything. You’re simply enjoying being exactly where you are.

Those are the moments I want to become better at noticing.

How to Find More Glimmers in Everyday Life

The beauty of glimmers is that you don’t necessarily need to create more of them. A good place to start is simply becoming more attentive to the ones already scattered throughout your day.

Your senses make this surprisingly easy. Notice something beautiful when you’re walking, pay attention to how the sun feels on your skin, actually listen when a favorite song comes on or enjoy the smell and taste of your coffee before reaching for your phone. When your pet comes over to you, stop what you’re doing for a moment. When you’re laughing with someone, allow yourself to register the fact that you’re happy.

The important part may be what happens next. Instead of immediately moving on, stay with the experience for a few extra seconds. That’s where the concept of glimmers begins to overlap with savoring: you’re not merely identifying something positive but giving yourself enough time to experience it.

You could even turn your next walk into a small experiment. Look for three glimmers without forcing them. Perhaps you’ll notice sunlight hitting a building in a beautiful way, someone’s garden, the smell of the forest, a dog running toward its owner or the first signs of a new season.

By the time you get home, the surroundings may not have changed at all. What changed was your attention.

Don’t Turn Glimmers Into Another Wellness Task

There is one thing I definitely don’t want to do with this idea: turn it into another metric we need to optimize.

You don’t need to find ten glimmers every day, track them in an app and wonder whether you’re doing glimmers correctly. That would rather defeat the purpose.

Nor is noticing glimmers about pretending that difficult things aren’t happening. Positive and negative experiences can coexist. You can be worried about something and still enjoy the sun on your face. You can have a difficult week and laugh uncontrollably with a friend. You can be grieving something and still notice that the sky looks beautiful.

One experience doesn’t invalidate the other. Glimmers simply remind us that even during complicated periods of life, small positive moments can still exist alongside everything else.

The Bottom Line

We spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to feel better, live healthier and perhaps even live longer. Many of those efforts are worthwhile, but the idea of glimmers offers a refreshingly simple reminder: some of the experiences that make life feel good are already happening around us.

For me, they’re long walks without a destination, exploring unfamiliar streets, playing with my dog, weekend morning coffee, morning sun on my skin and laughing with friends. Yours will probably be completely different.

The point isn’t to manufacture more happiness or pretend that every day is wonderful. It’s to become a little better at recognizing the good moments when they appear and allowing ourselves to stay with them before rushing on to whatever comes next.

We spend so much time trying to improve our lives that it’s easy to overlook the moments when life already feels good. Sometimes we don’t need a bigger experience. We simply need to notice the glimmer.

Frequently Asked Questions About Glimmers