Dr. Maya Shankar

So all of this to say, find community with people, not necessarily who are going through exactly the same thing that you're going through.

In fact, one of the theses of my book is that we can learn from people whose stories don't look anything like ours.

In fact, the cancer patient had way more in common with the woman whose husband had had an affair because they both experienced feelings of betrayal.

So just find community with people who are struggling with the lack of closure they have in their lives, right?

Like, why did this happen to me?

They're asking those sorts of questions.

You can learn a lot.

The second piece of advice is to seek out awe-inspiring experiences.

So...

Awe can come in all sorts of forms.

We already talked about moral beauty.

That's one source of awe, just other people's extraordinary ways of being.

But there's also other types out there, right?

Nature, music, art, the complexity of a math theorem.

Psychologist Dacher Keltner defines awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.

And so it might be this epic skyscraper or it might be a beautiful vista or an incredible hook that was written by a pop musician.

You name it, but so many things can fill us with this feeling of wonder.

And what awe does to the brain is that it reduces activity in the areas of our brain that are devoted to self-immersion.

And what that does is allows us to step outside of ourselves, to remember that we are part of a collective whole, and to gain some distance from our current preoccupations and worries and anxieties.

We almost have all gives us these transcendent moments where we can see our situations for what they are and see them with much greater perspective, like cosmic perspective, which I have found to be very helpful.