I Always Knew Photography Made Me Happier. Then I Found Out Why.
- Maja Kerin
- 7 days ago
- 3 min read
What the research actually says about creativity, photography, and wellbeing — and why it confirmed what I already knew.
Earlier this year I completed Yale University's Science of Well-Being programme — and what I found in the research confirmed something I had known intuitively for years.
The programme covers a remarkable range of evidence-based strategies for living better — kindness, social connection, gratitude, meditation, time affluence, healthy practices. Each one backed by decades of research. Each one offering a genuinely different route to a more meaningful, more contented life.
What struck me most, studying all of it, was something the course makes very clear from the beginning: knowing is not enough. Understanding the science of happiness intellectually changes very little. What changes things is practice. Consistent, daily, embodied practice.
I already knew this. I had known it for years — not from research, but from experience.
I am not someone who manages a perfect daily practice. Life doesn't always allow for that — there are children, commitments, the ordinary demands of a full life. But on the days that I do pause — camera in hand or simply stopping to notice, at any moment the day offers — something shifts. The noise quiets. The mental chatter steps back. What remains is just this: light on a wall, colour in the sky, the texture of something I might have walked past without seeing.
The research gave me the language for what I had been experiencing.
Psychologist Jaime Kurtz at James Madison University found in 2015 that participants who took photographs in a mindful, creative way — with genuine attention to what they were seeing — reported significantly better mood, greater appreciation, and more motivation than those who photographed the same scenes in a neutral, factual way. The act of seeing with intention changes how we feel about what we see.
This is not about photography as a hobby or a skill. It is about photography as a practice of presence — a daily return to what is real and immediate and beautiful, before the mind rushes ahead to what comes next.
The neuroscience supports this too. Creative presence — genuine, absorbed attention to making something — quiets the prefrontal cortex, where anxiety lives, and activates the default mode network, where insight and calm reside. Fifteen minutes of real creative noticing produces measurable relief. Not distraction. Not escape. A genuine shift in neural state.
What the Yale programme reminded me — and what the research confirms — is that these benefits don't arrive from knowing about them. They arrive from doing them. Every day. Not perfectly. Not for hours. Just a moment of genuine attention, regularly returned to.
Through creativity and pause, we come back to ourselves.
You don't need a camera to begin. You need only a willingness to notice — the light on this wall, the colour of the sky, the texture of something you have walked past a hundred times without seeing.
That is where Your Daily Pause begins. And it is where my own practice begins too — at any moment the day offers, whenever I remember to stop.
If this resonated with you, Your Daily Pause is a gentle weekly creative practice rooted in mindful photography and the science of wellbeing. A quiet note in your inbox — a reason to pause, notice, and make something small.
With warmth, Maja
