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Wonder
Defining wonder is really interesting, it’s something of a shapeshifter of a word. So we have wonder as a verb, which is to wonder, sort of the curiosity element, but we also have wonder as the noun, which would be a wonder, something that might inspire or be a catalyst for awe. And my goal was to link those two concepts into a single emotional experience. And so the way I describe wonder is it starts with openness, moves into curiosity, then into absorption, and then into awe. And what’s really interesting is it’s not just a single emotional experience, it almost is a type of cycle, because the more we experience each one of these components, the more likely we are to experience them in the future.
One of the reasons I wanted to do the level of research around wonder that I did is because I want to prove to people that it is very tangible and that there’s so much evidence, scientific evidence that supports the way that wonder can help us, both psychologically and physiologically. And so, really it’s that hardening up of the notion that it’s not just something amorphous and spiritual, and it can be that, but that it’s also very grounded and concrete.
Concrete Benefits
Wonder is a pro-social emotion, and what that means is it’s an emotion that makes us want to help other people. People who are wonderprone are more generous, more humble, more empathetic, more successful in their relationships in work and in school. The physiological impacts of wonder are really, I find, very compelling. We know that people who experience wonder have lower stress hormones, so lower cortisol. They have lower blood pressure, and they also have lower pro-inflammatory cytokines, proteins that are released that happen generally when we’re ill. But if we release them when we’re not ill, then it can lead to illness, things like heart disease, Alzheimer’s. So what we know is that people who experience wonder actually have lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines. And I think that that’s fascinating.
Expanding Your Emotional Portfolio
We are a world obsessed with happiness, even America’s founding documents say “the pursuit of happiness.” We have Chief Happiness Officers and World Happiness Reports, but the challenge is, is we’re so terrible at knowing what will make us happy. And so we think something in the future will make us happy, and then, in the end, it doesn’t. Rather than seeking happiness, I think it’s more realistic and more achievable for people to seek wonder. And the reason for this is that our happiness baseline is pretty much set by our personality. While we might experience something that gives us a little boost of happiness, we usually come back to our happiness baseline.
Another challenge with happiness is that it’s what’s known as a single-valenced emotion. So most emotions sit on a pole, positively valenced or negatively valenced. So happiness would be an emotion that would be positively valenced, and sadness would be negatively valenced. But what’s amazing about wonder is that it’s dually valenced, which means that it holds both positive and negative at the same time. And what we know about complex and mixed emotions is that they offer us so much more benefit than just these single-valenced emotions. People who have a higher degree of emodiversity, which means that they have a broader number of emotions that they can call up at any time, have a greater degree of resilience, and are better able to cope with what happens in the world.
And there’s a fascinating piece of research that really supports this. There was a study done with widows and widowers, and when they were asked to reflect on their deceased partner, those that remembered both the positive and negative attributes of their partner were better able to manage their grief. And one of the reasons for this is that if we focus so heavily on toxic positivity, and I’ve heard expressions like happy-chondriacs, that everything is happy, the glass always half full, we’re missing out on the richness of both negative emotions, but also these mixed emotions that are so helpful to us. And so having a greater emotional portfolio, being able to tap into a lot of different types of emotions to express how we’re feeling, helps us make sense of our world in a more effective way. Life sometimes is very, very hard. Happiness is not a realistic steady state, but we can still be in wonder, we can always find the wonder.