It was a dreary afternoon not long ago, one of those days when the sunlight is wan and somehow sooty, flattening everything into a halfhearted pencil sketch. Sitting at my desk, I quit staring at my cuticles long enough to open a YouTube link from a friend—a newsclip about Jason McElwain. You might remember Jason, the autistic high school student from Rochester, New York, who scored 20 points in four minutes during his one-and-only stint in a game with his school's basketball team. In the clip, the coach gets choked up retelling Jason's story; tears sprang to my eyes, too. As I watched the elated home crowd rushing the court after Jason's final three-pointer, I felt borne aloft on a wave of happy pandemonium.
I started forwarding the video, hoping my friends would feel what I felt: awe, surprised delight, teary joy.
Within a few minutes, the replies started coming in:
"Crying."
"Oh no, I'm crying at work!"
"I'm Facebooking this now. Amazing."
"Wow—just what I needed. Thanks!"
And then I wondered: Does this feeling come in prescription form?
Especially in our current moment of doom and gloom, stories like Jason McElwain's seem like just what the doctor ordered. When forces beyond our control have upended what we thought we knew for sure (about our savings, our homes, our country, our future) and a drizzle of apprehension settles over us, we hunger for uplift. We want a nudge toward happiness, a little magic to open the pressure valve of everyday life—the sublime thrill of transcendence to be found in a Mendelssohn symphony or a Turner landscape, in a perfect kiss or perfect morning jog, in time spent with our families and friends. And then we want to hit Forward on that feeling: because the more we share it, the stronger it grows.
But a yen for uplift isn't just a sentimental reflex (grumps and pessimists, stick with us!). The physiology that makes McElwain-brand exhilaration possible is also the bedrock of our instincts for compassion, caretaking, and connection. The capacity for uplift is part of what makes us essentially, euphorically human. According to a growing body of scientific research, it's critical to our health and well-being. And luckily, lifting our spirits doesn't depend on finding YouTube miracles in our in-box. (Well, not entirely.) For the most part, it's up to us.
We can start in the general vicinity of our cleavage, with that serene warm-chest feeling that washes over us when we're moved by an extraordinary act or by a person of great virtue (whether it's Nelson Mandela, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, or the amazing woman who runs your local soup kitchen). But to reach the physiological root of those sensations, we need to take a close look at the vagus nerve—actually a bundle of nerves that starts at the base of the brain and branches out through the body, linking up with the facial and vocal muscles and the heart, lungs, and gut. Acting as a messenger between the central nervous system and the major organs, the vagus nerve slows the heart rate (through the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine), calms the immune response (by controlling the release of proteins called cytokines), and communicates with the muscles that control respiration and digestion.
When we give a reassuring smile or sigh in sympathy with another person, the vagus nerve is quietly at work behind the scenes, "reducing our heart rate to a more peaceful pace [and] enhancing the likelihood of gentle contact in close proximity with others," social psychologist Dacher Keltner writes in his recent book, Born to Be Good. The mellowing vagus is also closely associated with oxytocin, the all-important hormone of human trust and devotion. For a study published last year, researchers Jonathan Haidt and Jennifer A. Silvers invited nursing mothers to bring their babies and watch a clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show in which a musician paid moving tribute to his former teacher for steering him away from a life of crime and gangs. The moms who watched (and, sometimes, cried through) the elevating Oprah clip were more likely to nurse and hug their babies—suggesting heightened levels of oxytocin, which cues lactation—than another group who laughed along with a video of Jerry Seinfeld telling jokes.
Oxytocin, often released along the smooth and orderly Route Vagus, is essential to uplift, according to Haidt, an associate professor in social psychology at the University of Virginia. (His name, aptly, is pronounced "height.") In his view, human happiness derives neither from external validation nor solely from within, but from "between": through the relationships created by love, work, and "something larger than yourself"—whether it's a religious group, a volunteer organization, or a political campaign. "If happiness comes from between," Haidt says, "then oxytocin is the hormone of between. It's the catalyst that helps bond people together."
I started forwarding the video, hoping my friends would feel what I felt: awe, surprised delight, teary joy.
Within a few minutes, the replies started coming in:
"Crying."
"Oh no, I'm crying at work!"
"I'm Facebooking this now. Amazing."
"Wow—just what I needed. Thanks!"
And then I wondered: Does this feeling come in prescription form?
Especially in our current moment of doom and gloom, stories like Jason McElwain's seem like just what the doctor ordered. When forces beyond our control have upended what we thought we knew for sure (about our savings, our homes, our country, our future) and a drizzle of apprehension settles over us, we hunger for uplift. We want a nudge toward happiness, a little magic to open the pressure valve of everyday life—the sublime thrill of transcendence to be found in a Mendelssohn symphony or a Turner landscape, in a perfect kiss or perfect morning jog, in time spent with our families and friends. And then we want to hit Forward on that feeling: because the more we share it, the stronger it grows.
But a yen for uplift isn't just a sentimental reflex (grumps and pessimists, stick with us!). The physiology that makes McElwain-brand exhilaration possible is also the bedrock of our instincts for compassion, caretaking, and connection. The capacity for uplift is part of what makes us essentially, euphorically human. According to a growing body of scientific research, it's critical to our health and well-being. And luckily, lifting our spirits doesn't depend on finding YouTube miracles in our in-box. (Well, not entirely.) For the most part, it's up to us.
We can start in the general vicinity of our cleavage, with that serene warm-chest feeling that washes over us when we're moved by an extraordinary act or by a person of great virtue (whether it's Nelson Mandela, Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, or the amazing woman who runs your local soup kitchen). But to reach the physiological root of those sensations, we need to take a close look at the vagus nerve—actually a bundle of nerves that starts at the base of the brain and branches out through the body, linking up with the facial and vocal muscles and the heart, lungs, and gut. Acting as a messenger between the central nervous system and the major organs, the vagus nerve slows the heart rate (through the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine), calms the immune response (by controlling the release of proteins called cytokines), and communicates with the muscles that control respiration and digestion.
When we give a reassuring smile or sigh in sympathy with another person, the vagus nerve is quietly at work behind the scenes, "reducing our heart rate to a more peaceful pace [and] enhancing the likelihood of gentle contact in close proximity with others," social psychologist Dacher Keltner writes in his recent book, Born to Be Good. The mellowing vagus is also closely associated with oxytocin, the all-important hormone of human trust and devotion. For a study published last year, researchers Jonathan Haidt and Jennifer A. Silvers invited nursing mothers to bring their babies and watch a clip from The Oprah Winfrey Show in which a musician paid moving tribute to his former teacher for steering him away from a life of crime and gangs. The moms who watched (and, sometimes, cried through) the elevating Oprah clip were more likely to nurse and hug their babies—suggesting heightened levels of oxytocin, which cues lactation—than another group who laughed along with a video of Jerry Seinfeld telling jokes.
Oxytocin, often released along the smooth and orderly Route Vagus, is essential to uplift, according to Haidt, an associate professor in social psychology at the University of Virginia. (His name, aptly, is pronounced "height.") In his view, human happiness derives neither from external validation nor solely from within, but from "between": through the relationships created by love, work, and "something larger than yourself"—whether it's a religious group, a volunteer organization, or a political campaign. "If happiness comes from between," Haidt says, "then oxytocin is the hormone of between. It's the catalyst that helps bond people together."
We're sweating out stress at the gym, too, which also hits the V-spot: Aerobic exercise and yoga enhance vagus nerve output—as does meditation. The Equinox fitness club chain, with locations nationwide, reports an 18 percent increase in usage of its gyms since last autumn; attendance at Curves, a women's-only national chain, was up 22 percent in January 2009 compared with the previous year. Memberships at Life Time Fitness, which has locations in 18 states, are up 14 percent. And yoga teachers appear to be the new first responders to (economic) emergency. Invoke, a yoga and Pilates studio in Indianapolis, has seen higher revenues and attendance since last fall, according to owner Amy Peddycord, whose $5 community yoga classes are always packed. David Sunshine, owner of Dallas Yoga Center, laments that he has to keep turning people away from his new yoga-for-stress classes.
Evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy likewise looks outward to find "momentary joys." "I'll take a walk and wait for little flashes of discovery in the natural world," she says. "Recently, I watched my dog leap through the air, over a creek, to chase a wild turkey—something I'd never seen her do before. I can't jump creeks anymore, so I enjoyed being part of her abandon!"
Any minor shift in outlook—including a little vicarious creek jumping—can make a dismal picture less dispiriting. Yale psychology professor Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, an expert on depression, has studied our penchant for self-punishing rumination when we face a problem—a tendency that many of us have indulged during the past eight months. She found that a simple, ten-minute imagery task (such as picturing clouds in a bright blue sky or a cheery stack of watermelons in a pickup truck) can turn brooding into focused action. "The quality of your problem-solving markedly improves," says Nolen-Hoeksema. "When you're ruminating, the negative thoughts are so strong that it's hard to inhibit them. But even after a moment of distraction, those thoughts aren't activated anymore. It's like pressing the restart button when your computer is acting up."
Remember, too, that crafty reprogramming of the mind doesn't necessarily depend on what you're thinking about, but how you're thinking about it. Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer once assembled three groups of football-averse women to watch the Super Bowl; the group assigned to make six "novel distinctions" about the game ("It didn't matter if it was about the players' rear ends—anything," Langer explains) enjoyed themselves significantly more than the group that had to take notice of just three things, or nothing at all.
What we can learn from the mindful Super Bowl party, Langer says, is that "when times are tough, the way out is in actively noticing new things. The essence of happiness is that feeling of engagement with the world and with other people."
In other words, instead of waiting for this daunting moment to pass, we can try to seize and shape it, to lighten it—however we please.
So send the link. Start the conversation. Report for duty. Make the novel distinction. Move. Roll your eyeballs around. Go to the game. Grab somebody's hand. And, yes—if you do just one thing—only connect.
A friend tells a story about going to see an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She was drawn to a room where a crowd had gathered in a semicircle before a canvas, obviously mesmerized. As she approached the painting—Vincent van Gogh's breathtaking Starry Night—and joined the group, she felt gathered up into their shared, awestruck stillness. Tears welled in her eyes: For one transcendent instant, she'd found her hive, had found her between.
"We are incomplete creatures," says Jonathan Haidt. "We cannot live alone; we cannot find our own meaning alone. We realize our potential, we become alive, only when we find the 'between.'"
Chances are, the between is closer than you think. It could be waiting for you in someone's eyes, in a phrase of music, in a starry night. You can find it. Just keep looking up.
