14 Aug Neuroscience Explains Why 5 Minutes of Awe Each Day Makes You a Better Person
The science of Positive Psychology has been dominated, somewhat, by the positive emotion of happiness.
Happiness is great.
But so too are other positive emotions such as gratitude and joy, satisfaction and calm.
In addition to these, and without diminishing the importance of happiness, there are several positive emotions that are too often overlooked. And one of these is awe …
via Inc.com by Minda Zetlin
Awe can help you collaborate better, become more creative, and make better decisions.
The sensation of awe can enhance your creativity, help you collaborate better, improve your decision-making, and turn you into a better leader. And five minutes of awe a day is enough to make a meaningful difference.
That insight comes from Dacher Keltner, psychology professor at UC Berkeley and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Research backs him up. In a fascinating experiment, researchers hooked up 32 subjects to functional MRI machines and scanned their brains while they watched one of three types of videos. One type of video was a neutral landscape, such as a video of a running brook. The second type was funny, for example an elephant playing with balls. And the third was designed to elicit awe, for example vistas from the series Planet Earth.
Their scans showed a definite difference in subjects’ brains while watching the awe videos compared with the other two types–and what didn’t happen was surprising. During the funny and neutral videos, the fMRI scans registered activity in participants’ default mode network regions of the brain. The default mode network activates when people let their minds wander or think about themselves. When participants watched the awe video, their default mode network regions stayed quiet. The scans showed something that you’ve likely learned from personal experience: The feeling of awe causes us to think about things other than ourselves.
A very different experiment produced a similar finding. In this research, participants were given the assignment to walk for 15 minutes outdoors once a week. Some of the participants were instructed to seek feelings of awe during their walks. Participants filled out a daily survey about their emotions, and at the beginning and end of each walk, they were asked to take a selfie.
Over time, the awe group’s selfies changed in interesting ways. First, expert facial expression readers (who didn’t know who was in which group) saw more genuine happiness on the faces of the awe participants compared with the control group. Even more interesting, the selfies themselves changed noticeably. Subjects in the awe group took up less space in their own selfies, and included more of the scenery around them. Their daily surveys also revealed an increase in emotions such as gratitude and compassion.
Does it sound like awe might help you be a better leader? Would you like to experience more awe in your own life? Keltner says that just five minutes a day can make a real difference. In a short piece, or “nano-tool,” for Wharton, he lays out eight five-minute practices that can increase your own experience of awe. It’s worth checking out all eight. Here are three of my favorites …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE