Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1594630992
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
We all know love matters, but in this groundbreaking book positive emotions expert Barbara Fredrickson shows us how much. Even more than happiness and optimism, love holds the key to improving our mental and physical health as well as lengthening our lives.
Using research from her own lab, Fredrickson redefines love not as a stable behemoth, but as micro-moments of connection between people—even strangers. She demonstrates that our capacity for experiencing love can be measured and strengthened in ways that improve our health and longevity. Finally, she introduces us to informal and formal practices to unlock love in our lives, generate compassion, and even self-soothe.
Rare in its scope and ambitious in its message, Love 2.0 will reinvent how you look at and experience our most powerful emotion.
shape your motives and behaviors in subtle ways, yet ultimately, their actions serve to strengthen your relationships and knit you in closer to the social fabric of life. In the sections that follow, I’ll shine the spotlight on each of these three main characters in turn, to help you see how each forges and supports those life-giving moments of positivity resonance for which your body thirsts. Love on the Brain When you and another truly connect, love reverberates between you. In the very
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
energizes this whole system and sets it into motion. There’s a lot going on here. It’s no wonder that love puzzles us. Adding to the confusion, the word love is commonly affixed to different parts of the system. So when you tell someone that you love him, you may well be invoking a range of different, albeit closely related concepts. You might, for instance, mean to say that you crave the time you two spend together. Alternatively, you could mean to say that you trust that person and intend to
mother during these difficult weeks, Laura drew on many of the same resources she used in her doula work, which she said are “hard to describe, because they don’t come from words.” A first step, she shared, is to know that “you can’t fix someone else’s pain” but can only “be fully present with it, with awareness and calm.” Laura’s caring for her mom before she died translated into sleeping at her mother’s side while holding her hand. That way, Laura could meet the first signs of her mother’s
impulses isn’t always a wise move. Discerning which pleasure-seeking urges actually represent healthy pursuits, like the age-old cellular cry to connect, is foundational to emotional intelligence. All it may take is to step out of the marketplace, and to trust the wisdom inherent in your body to draw you to connect with others in meaningful ways. Infants and toddlers follow their positivity instincts as a matter of course. Yet once impulse control becomes possible, all bets are off as to when