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Mind

What makes a good day a good day, according to science

Surveys that ask thousands of people how they spend their time have revealed some surprising activities that seem to make any given day a good one

By Elizabeth Hlavinka

17 March 2025

Socialising, particularly with friends, could be a sure-fire way of having a good day

Ingram Publishing / Alamy

We may finally know what constitutes a good day – and it can involve working and even commuting.

Dunigan Folk at the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues wanted to identify the building blocks of a happy life by distinguishing what separates a good day from an average one.

To get a grasp on this, they used machine learning to analyse data from the 2013 and 2021 American…

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