"It's almost like you're peering into a world that you hadn't seen before. If you stop and try to understand how that petal is made, you may start to realize there's way more to this tiny, soft petal than you previously thought. But wonder and awe can also come from things that are conceptually vast, says psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo.Ĭonsider a petal on a rose flower. The night sky generates this feeling because it's physically vast. "It seems to just help us calm down a little bit in a powerful way."
When you remember how little you truly know about the world, that can be humbling and give you a new perspective, she says. So much bigger than my problems.' No matter how real they are. "You can look at that sky and think, 'Wow, that's big,' " she says. Take, for example, looking up at the night sky. It puts your problems into perspective, Shiota says. The feeling can also reduce stress, studies have found, because it makes you think beyond yourself and your own problems. "People feel an impulse to stop moving and really just take in the information about what's happening before acting next." "I've found evidence that activation of our fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system dials back a little bit," says Shiota, who's at Arizona State University.
It makes you pause a bit, which in turn calms your nervous system. Psychologist Michelle Shiota and her colleagues have found that feeling wonder and awe does a bunch of good things to our bodies and minds. Wonder and awe are the emotions you feel when you encounter something so vast or so extraordinary that it makes you literally stop what you're doing and think, "Wow, what is that?" You can't explain it entirely because it doesn't fit neatly into your knowledge of how the world works. Chickens are an enormous source of wonder and awe. So that you can make that emotion much more easily in the future," she says.Īnd that's where the chickens come in. "It may sound hokey in the abstract, but I guarantee it, that if you practice awe, that practice is essentially helping to rewire the brain. When you start to feel an unproductive emotion, such as anger, you can more easily swap that negative feeling for a positive one, such as awe, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University. All you need to do is practice having these positive feelings, and then over time, these emotions become easier to access. This idea is extremely powerful because it means people can, in a way, choose to feel positive emotions, such as awe and wonder, more frequently. Specifically, our brains select an emotion as a response to a situation, and that selection depends heavily on which emotion it has selected in the past. But, as NPR has reported, neuroscientists now realize that's not true, and people have more influence on which emotions arise than previously thought. For a long time, scientists thought these emotions were hard-wired and uncontrollable. Our brains generate emotions in order to react and respond to a situation we're in. In the past decade, neuroscientists have begun to change how they think emotions arise in our brains. Want to feel more wonder? Start practicing
REMIND ME YOU TUBE HOW TO
They've also helped my family learn how to swap negative emotions, such as anger, for positive emotions, such as wonder and awe. They give us a reason to go outside every morning and evening, often around sunrise and sunset, to feed them, give them water and make sure they're safe in the coop for the night. Instead, our family began to raise chickens because I thought they might help with our mental health. Don't get me wrong: Fresh eggs are wonderful! But holy smokes, it is an expensive – and stinky – way to get breakfast. That's right, I ordered 15 chicks in the mail. "Well," I said to my husband, "we're now chicken people." They looked like 15 black-and-white fluff balls, jiggling around.
When I returned home and opened up the box, a pile of baby chicks – just a few days old – rolled onto the floor.
I hopped into the car, rushed to the post office and sure enough, as I walked up to the counter, I could hear the box – or what was inside it – literally chirping. And the box is making a lot of noise," he said. Nobody has to tell them it's bedtime." / Michaeleen Doucleff/NPRīack in October, I was working at my desk when the phone rang. Among Rosy's discoveries: "When the sun goes down, they all go up into the coop and go to bed. The author's daughter, Rosy, with two of the family chickens.
0 kommentar(er)
