Smell the roses

Stop, pause, and discover the suprising power of the perfectly ordinary to spark your delight, writes Anita Chaudhuri

- Anita Chaudhuri

"It was the spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson who wrote: 'Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognise how good things really are. This is a sage observation. Trouble is, even on the languid, lazy days of summer, it can be all too easy to dwell on what's going wrong, on what we haven't achieved or can't afford.

So how might we break this habit, which has been widely identified as the human negativity bias? Designer Ingrid Fetell Lee is the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power Of Ordinary Things To Create Extraordinary Happiness (Ebury, £12.99). She believes that joy has a visual component, and that humans implicitly associate curved forms and circles with safety and positivity, and that the brain's fight or flight response is more active when a person is looking at an object with sharp angles.