What the science of happiness says about the self and others | Aeon Essays

Inevitably, there is much about ourselves we don’t like and want to change. There are also broad areas of our mental and emotional life we don’t want to examine at all and whose existence we would prefer to deny entirely. These are the areas where we feel most vulnerable, most fragile—perhaps most damaged—or those things we are most ashamed of. But

five ways that awe improves well-being: Awe causes “shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning.”

Until recent years, the common belief among scientists was that every person has a mood set point that doesn’t change much over a life span. That explains why people who win the lottery or become paraplegic in an accident will (after some transitional time in elation or depression) return to their mood set point. There is also a relationship betwee

If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a retreat from greed and hatred that could, Jud insisted, potentially lead all the way to the definitive uprooting of negative emotions (in other words, enlightenment). “Why would it stop?” he said. “Evolutionarily, it doesn’t make sense tha