Love 2.0 (12 page)

Close study of what makes some marriages more resilient than others bears this out. John Gottman, perhaps the world’s leading scientific expert on emotions in marriage, tells couples that they can “bank” their shared positive emotions to help them through later tough times. Through decades of meticulous research, Gottman discovered that couples who experience higher ratios of positive to negative emotions with each other are better able to navigate disagreements and upsets. When discussing difficult topics, for instance, they tend to refrain from mirroring each other’s distress and negativity with their own. Instead, they de-escalate any conflict (or potential conflict) by meeting their partner’s negativity with something altogether different, often making some caring, affirming, or lighthearted comment or gesture that creates space for reflection. Put differently, couples with rich recent histories of positivity resonance are better equipped to defuse the emotional bombs that threaten them both.

You can “bank” positivity resonance and draw on it later because momentary experiences of love and other positive emotions build resources. In other words, the small investments you deposit in the so-called bank don’t just sit there. They accumulate, earn interest, and pay out dividends in the form of durable resources that you can later draw on to face future adversity. Moreover, just as money earned in one arena can be spent in other arenas, the positivity resonance that you create in certain relationships can build personal resources—values, beliefs, and skills—that help you navigate all manner of social upsets and difficulties. Having a loving marriage, then, can help you be more resilient in
your work team. Sharing more moments of positivity resonance in schools and neighborhoods, for instance, may help whole nations be more resilient during tough times.

Resilience matters now more than ever, both your personal resilience, as well as the collective resilience that you cultivate within your family, your community, your nation, and our world. No matter how resilient you are today, higher levels of resilience are readily within your grasp. That’s because genuine positive emotions are available to you at any time. And when you connect with others over these good feelings, you create a positivity resonance that energizes and strengthens the metaphorical connective tissue that binds you. Love and resilience are renewable resources.

Becoming Wise.
Imagine having at your fingertips all the knowledge and experience to allow you to properly discern which of the many paths ahead of you to take. Imagine how it would feel to so readily grasp just the right thing to do and the right way to do it. You can accept yourself fully, even in light of your shortcomings and missteps. You’re able to shake free of your nagging self-criticism, worry, and rumination and enjoy the added mental capacity that this escape frees up. And you can now fully take in the whole of your surroundings. You effortlessly assess the core meanings of your current circumstances, as well as its more subtle, seemingly insignificant, details. Imagine not having to puzzle through how to make a good first impression, or how to add value to a group process. You can now understand the wide variety of people in your midst—and truly accept them. You intuitively understand their unique perspectives, know just what they want and need, and how best to connect with them. Imagine being able to glide through rough terrain—even complicated entanglements marked by suffering, uncertainty, or both—instinctively knowing how to move forward, while calming hearts and allaying fears, your own and those of others present.

We call people who meet these ideals wise. They have what
scientists call “expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life.” They judiciously draw on their past experiences and values to arrive at practical and fitting courses of action for themselves and others in nearly any situation. They not only grasp the human condition and the meaning of life but are also able to translate these lofty philosophical insights into down-to-earth plans and advice. Wise people, studies show, are especially discerning because they are able to see holistically and integrate seemingly contradictory perspectives to achieve balance and well-being in everyday life.

Broadened awareness, or being able to “see the big picture” and “connect the dots,” can thus be viewed as a core facet of wisdom. The tightly controlled laboratory experiments (described earlier in this chapter) convincingly reveal that the scope of your awareness changes dynamically over time, depending on your current emotional state. Your awareness narrows with negative emotions and broadens with positive ones. It’s when feeling good, then, that you’re best equipped to see holistically and come up with creative and practical solutions to the problems you and others are facing.

Your wisdom, then, ebbs and flows just as your emotions do. Let’s face it, sometimes you’re just not able to access and integrate all the knowledge and experience you’ve gained over the years. Think back to when you’ve made your most unwise choices, and odds are you’ll uncover images of yourself during particularly strained times—stressed beyond your limits, overwhelmed, in pain, wholly alone, or otherwise adrift from the moorings of your most-cherished values. By opening the doors of perception, positive emotions provide you with the much-needed space to recognize disparate points of view and weigh your various options for action.

Positivity resonance allows you access to the wisdom of your past experiences and, more generally, makes you intellectually sharper. Spend just ten minutes in pleasant conversation with someone else and your performance on a subsequent IQ test gets a boost. Conversing
with valued others makes you wiser on the fundamental pragmatics of life as well. Suppose you’ve been called on to offer advice. Say an older colleague of yours at work confides in you that he hasn’t achieved what he had once planned to achieve. What would you advise him to do and consider? Or your fourteen-year-old niece calls you to say that she absolutely wants to move out of her family home immediately. What would you advise her to do and consider? While your off-the-cuff advice to these troubled souls may not be altogether bad, studies suggest that you’d be considerably more pragmatic and discerning if you could first discuss these dilemmas for a few minutes with someone whose perspective you really value, say your spouse, your best friend, or a mentor, and then think about the situation a bit more on your own. More generally, studies show that positivity resonance unlocks collective brainstorming power, making it easier for you to solve difficult problems when working and laughing together with others, compared to when you face those problems alone. Love, then, defined as positivity resonance, momentarily expands your awareness, which boosts your IQ and unlocks your wisdom.

Beyond these momentary effects, however, positivity resonance also triggers enduring, long-term gains in cognitive abilities and wisdom. The more frequently older adults connect with others, the lower their risks for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Yet love isn’t just about staving off age-related cognitive decline. Scientists have also demonstrated clear links between how often people connect socially with friends, neighbors, and relatives, and their lab-tested cognitive functioning, even in far younger people who are in their twenties or thirties. One way that your recurrent connections with loved ones make you lastingly wiser is by giving you inner voices to consult. Suppose you’re called on to navigate some particularly difficult life dilemma, your own, or that of a close confidant. You yearn to talk matters over with your mentor, spouse, or best friend. Yet, for whatever reason, you can’t get a hold of these valued others—perhaps they’re traveling, busy,
or even deceased. Research shows that simply imagining having a conversation with them is as good as actually talking with them. So consult them in your mind. Ask them what advice they’d offer. In this way, a cherished parent or mentor, even if deceased, leaves you with an inner voice that guides you through challenging times. Your past moments of love and connection make you lastingly wiser.

A sizable grain of truth, then, lives on in the closing lines of English poet John Masefield’s poem “Biography” in which he muses on how his own life’s meaning will be utterly missed by historians who reduce his life “to lists of dates and facts” without knowing “the golden instants and bright days”:

Becoming Healthy.
Love is not a magic bullet. You can no more expect to become healthier through a single, isolated micro-moment of positivity resonance than you can by eating just one piece of broccoli per year. Yet just as a steady diet of a wide range of fresh fruits and vegetables does indeed make you healthier, so does a steady diet of a wide range of loving moments.

Some of the most direct causal evidence that love improves your bodily systems in lasting ways comes from that experiment that recently emerged from my PEP Lab, first described in
chapter 3
. People in that study were randomized to either learn how to self-generate love more frequently or not. Participants’ daily reports of love and social connection diverged across the two groups, and these differences accounted for significant improvements in people’s resting levels of vagal tone. Random assignment to the “love” condition, we learned, lastingly benefits the functioning of the physical heart.

Your vagal tone is a key indicator of the health of your parasympathetic nervous system. It helps down-regulate your racing heart so that you can regain calm after a fright or take advantage of a much-needed break in the action. With heart disease being by far the leading cause of death in the United States, your physician can use knowledge of your vagal tone to forecast with some accuracy your likelihood of heart failure, as well as your odds of surviving such a catastrophic health event. Your vagal tone also reflects the strength of your immune system, with a particular tie to chronic inflammation, a known risk factor for not only heart failure but also stroke, arthritis, diabetes, and even some cancers. What our experiment suggests, then, is that by learning to love more frequently, you reduce your risks for many of the worst health conditions that we all dread.

Currently, my PEP Lab is pushing to learn even more about the biological pathways that account for the various health benefits of loving connections by investigating how love changes you at the cellular level. We now periodically draw blood from all our study volunteers and, in collaboration with UCLA genomics expert Steve Cole, we’re tracking how random assignment to the “love” condition changes the ways people’s DNA gets expressed within their cells. Past work discovered that chronic loneliness—a persistent yearning for more positivity resonance—compromises the ways a person’s genes are expressed, particularly in aspects of the white blood cells of the immune system that govern inflammation. We’re testing the hypothesis that learning to increase the frequency of loving connections alters gene expression in ways that fortify disease resistance and in turn keep people in good health.

Insight into how everyday moments of love register and resonate within the human body helps make sense of the groundswell of evidence that links experiences of positive social connections to health and longevity. Mountains of research have documented that people who have diverse and rewarding relationships with others are healthier
and live longer. A more recent wave of longitudinal studies specifically ties positive emotions to healthy longevity. These studies suggest that a lack of positivity resonance is in fact more damaging to your health than smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol excessively, or being obese. Specifically, these studies tell us that people who experience more warm and caring connections with others have fewer colds, lower blood pressure, and less often succumb to heart disease and stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and some cancers. Many of the key conditions that threaten to set you back or shorten your life can thus be staved off by upgrading how and how frequently you connect with others.

Love 2.0: The View from Here

Love, as we’ve seen here, ripples out through space and time. In a moment of positivity resonance, studies show, your awareness automatically expands, allowing you to appreciate more than you typically do. Also quite automatically, your body leans in toward and affirms the other person, and begins a subtle synchronized dance that further reinforces your connection. Over time, these powerful moments change who you are. They help expand your network of relationships and grow your resilience, wisdom, and physical health.

These ripples don’t just affect you. They also affect the people with whom you share your moments of positivity resonance. So as you upgrade your view of love and learn to cultivate more micro-moments of it, you not only get benefits, you give benefits. This repeated back-and-forth sharing, however small or subtle, helps establish and strengthen healthy communities and cultures.

“You are made in the image of what you desire,” Thomas Merton said. My aim in writing this book is to open your eyes to the wisdom of this claim and the scientific evidence that backs it up. Although a single desire may seem fleeting and ephemeral, when repeated and
repeatedly acted on, desires become powerful, life-shaping forces. A single gust of wind, after it moves on, hardly alters the shape of a tree. Yet when you find all the trees in a given area leaning decidedly to the west, you can see the lasting effects of the prevailing winds. The new science of positivity resonance tells us that when you make love your prevailing desire, you remake whole domains of your life. You become appreciably and enduringly different, and better. You uplift others, helping them become different and better as well. My hope is that digesting the science I offer you here in part I has awakened your desire for love, for more positivity resonance in your day. You now know how deeply and pervasively love affects you. Now you are ready to begin making the changes—even very small adjustments—that will help you foster more and better loving moments. In part II, I offer you guidance for doing just that.