Oh wow! How Getting More Respect Can Improve Your Life - And Even Make You A Nicer Person
A few years ago I went on a solo walking holiday in Lanzarote. The first day I walked up a coastal path and came across a view that I still see in my dreams. Huge ocher mountains pierced the sky. Black sand craters and eerie green lagoons dotted the landscape. It was like Mars. My skin wrinkled with goosebumps. I was briefly, delightfully, insignificant.
The vacation was a week of awesome daily walks - intentionally shifting my attention to my surroundings, letting me be seduced by new details. Many of us have been impressed with walking (whether we call it that or not) over the past few years, as the pandemic has forced us to interact with familiar surroundings in new ways. Use of green space is up from previous years, suggesting that some of us were seeking wonder - an emotion that has fascinated philosophers for centuries.
Also called the sublime, awe is felt, according to the romantics, when our inner, subjective world collides with the objective natural world and overwhelms us. In 1757, the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionized our understanding of fear with his text A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke believed that awe was something felt not only in religious ceremonies (as it was once thought), but also in everyday experiences: music, patterns of light, or a clap of thunder. Fear doesn't need immensity.
Despite centuries of philosophical fascination, fear has only been properly studied in the over the past 20 years. This is now a hot topic. The physiological experience of awe - goose bumps, dropping jaws, gasping for breath - is wonderful on its own, but research suggests that regularly experiencing wonder can have a range of benefits for our physical and mental well-being as well. only to increase our compassion, our generosity and our ability to think critically. . In the words of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, fear “sharpens our brains.”
In 2018 , a white paper from the Greater Good Science Center and the Philadelphia-based John Templeton Foundation found that experiences of dread are linked to decreased markers of chronic inflammation (associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and bowel disease) and reduced rumination associated with depression. A 2021 study argued that the experience of fear “awakens self-transcendence,” helping people get closer to their “authentic” selves. Fear can even broaden our perception of time and, as another study suggests, make us less impatient.
"When you hear 'fear', an image often comes to you in mind: the Grand Canyon," says Keltner. "In our research, people report feeling amazed twice a week — and not all of them fly to the Grand Canyon. More often, the fear is about others. Like, I can't believe how that little girl can climb or, I can't believe how nice that guy was, and you have tears in your eyes. It's not just big buildings. It's true: I realize that I admire my dog's little galaxies of hair...
A few years ago I went on a solo walking holiday in Lanzarote. The first day I walked up a coastal path and came across a view that I still see in my dreams. Huge ocher mountains pierced the sky. Black sand craters and eerie green lagoons dotted the landscape. It was like Mars. My skin wrinkled with goosebumps. I was briefly, delightfully, insignificant.
The vacation was a week of awesome daily walks - intentionally shifting my attention to my surroundings, letting me be seduced by new details. Many of us have been impressed with walking (whether we call it that or not) over the past few years, as the pandemic has forced us to interact with familiar surroundings in new ways. Use of green space is up from previous years, suggesting that some of us were seeking wonder - an emotion that has fascinated philosophers for centuries.
Also called the sublime, awe is felt, according to the romantics, when our inner, subjective world collides with the objective natural world and overwhelms us. In 1757, the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionized our understanding of fear with his text A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke believed that awe was something felt not only in religious ceremonies (as it was once thought), but also in everyday experiences: music, patterns of light, or a clap of thunder. Fear doesn't need immensity.
Despite centuries of philosophical fascination, fear has only been properly studied in the over the past 20 years. This is now a hot topic. The physiological experience of awe - goose bumps, dropping jaws, gasping for breath - is wonderful on its own, but research suggests that regularly experiencing wonder can have a range of benefits for our physical and mental well-being as well. only to increase our compassion, our generosity and our ability to think critically. . In the words of psychology professor Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, fear “sharpens our brains.”
In 2018 , a white paper from the Greater Good Science Center and the Philadelphia-based John Templeton Foundation found that experiences of dread are linked to decreased markers of chronic inflammation (associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and bowel disease) and reduced rumination associated with depression. A 2021 study argued that the experience of fear “awakens self-transcendence,” helping people get closer to their “authentic” selves. Fear can even broaden our perception of time and, as another study suggests, make us less impatient.
"When you hear 'fear', an image often comes to you in mind: the Grand Canyon," says Keltner. "In our research, people report feeling amazed twice a week — and not all of them fly to the Grand Canyon. More often, the fear is about others. Like, I can't believe how that little girl can climb or, I can't believe how nice that guy was, and you have tears in your eyes. It's not just big buildings. It's true: I realize that I admire my dog's little galaxies of hair...
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