The Reset Button
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What insights does Dacher Keltner share about finding joy in everyday life?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In July 1798, an English poet visited the countryside on the banks of the River Wye. On seeing the natural beauty of the area, William Wordsworth composed a poem. It's titled, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. At one point, he describes the effect of the landscape on his psychological state. He writes, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Now, the romantic poets were sometimes given to literary excess.
They felt things deeply, and they wrote effusively. But more than two centuries after Wordsworth composed his poem, some scientists today are asking an unusual question. Were the romantics on to something?
This week on Hidden Brain, we look at what happens when we stop writing. Really stop to smell the roses.
For centuries, one of the central challenges in human behavior has been the problem of suffering. We all have aches and ailments, setbacks at work, and conflicts in personal relationships. Many years ago, the psychologist Dacher Keltner found himself in a world of suffering. He was in his early 30s and had just moved from California to Wisconsin. What happened to me, Shankar, is I lived a life largely in California and in the hills and the mountains and the oceans and the culture and so forth. And I went 2,000 miles away and it was flat and there were storms and there was snow and people rooted for the Packers and they ate bratwurst and, you know, there was no Mexican food and the weather and the cold.
The cold rattled me. I felt like Camus' stranger in a way. Like, I am in a strange land that I just physically, temperature-wise, climate-wise, people-wise, I felt like a fish out of water, even though I look like somebody from Wisconsin. I'm, you know, of Northern European heritage. Dacher, who was just starting his career as a professor, started to experience extreme bouts of anxiety. I come from a family on my mom's side that has a lot of anxiety, and I started to have profound panic attacks, really beginning with the day that I departed to drive across the country to Wisconsin. I had probably, I would say, 70 or 80 a year really technicolor, full-blown panic attacks When I was teaching, when I would go see a movie to try to relax, when I would fly on an airplane to go to a conference, when I would hear from a colleague.
And it really caught me off guard, Shankar, like, wow, why am I feeling so estranged and anxious all the time? Everything around Dakar seemed to remind him of his isolation. Everywhere he went, he experienced vulnerability. He felt that his life was about to end. My God, you know, for those people out in the audience who've had real panic attacks, they are spectacular and they hit you. And you literally, the brain says you're dying. And your body is telling you, you, Dacher Keltner, are dying. And you're about to die right here. It felt really solitary. And I remember there was this book about weird stories from Wisconsin about how anxious people ended up dying in Wisconsin. Because they would go out and start tilling the earth on their farm at 2 in the morning.
And everything was frozen. And the guy froze to death. And I was like... This is going to happen to me. And it was happening to me. Dacker had moved across the country to join the University of Wisconsin, but his work provided no solace. I was getting rejected for grants. Papers were getting rejected. There was a conference on the social nature of emotion, which is what I was writing about and defined my career on. I got rejected from. I started to dream about people broadcasting all the rejections of my papers and ideas and the like. You know, I got a very mediocre to bad reputation. mid-career review, it was a real struggle, to be quite honest, and a lot of suffering. So like many of us who've been through something similar, you tried to do a number of things to make yourself feel better.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What insights does Dacher Keltner share about finding joy in everyday life?
0:00–10:44
2
How did Dacher Keltner's move impact his mental health?
10:44–20:43
3
What role does nature play in enhancing our well-being?
20:43–28:09
4
How can teamwork in sports help alleviate anxiety?
28:09–35:32
5
What is the significance of music in our emotional experiences?
35:32–1:17:30
6
How does Dacher Keltner define awe and its effects?
1:17:30–1:36:40