1. Let your heart be present. Friends, I want you to watch this video and think about sex.

That handsome guy is Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the world’s leading experts on mindfulness, the moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness of what’s happening in our bodies and minds.

So what might mindful whoopee look like? Well, you’re not supposed to be running a porno in your brain or agonizing about next year’s marketing budget. You’re not evaluating your own studly performance or dwelling upon what your beer gut looks like from a feminine point of view. You’re not sorting experiences and thoughts in negative and positive buckets.

Instead you’re taking Jon’s insights and applying them to making the Buddha with two backs: paying attention to your breathing and to your partner’s breathing, to your moans and to those of your partner, to the feel of skin on skin, to ... whew, pardon me, my computer’s getting warm.

In other words, you’re absolutely present with your partner and with the moment. As Jon says, “When you hear the word ‘mindfulness,’ you have to understand that it is ‘presence of heart.’”

To some people, mindfulness during sex comes naturally. But, alas, it’s also very natural for our minds to wander or for anxiety to eat away at the edges of our awareness (and enjoyment). This seems especially true for parents of young children. My wife and I both fret that our son will wake up in the night and try to find mommy and daddy while we’re having special mommy and daddy time. But worrying about that possibility doesn’t make it any less likely to happen, does it? So why not just go with it, and let the future take care of itself?

Or so I tell myself. Do I listen? Not usually, no. But do as I say, gentlemen, not as I do. Your wife will thank me for it.

2. Think like a zebra. If you’re a zebra and a lion attacks, stress makes sense. As neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky points out in a Greater Good Science Center talk he gave last year, our bodies secrete adrenaline and many other hormones to deal with short-term physical crises. Evolution bequeathed us this stress response so that we could escape lions, and it’s great for that.

It’s not so great for erections. Because when we’re running from lions, erections are kind of silly. That’s just not the time for pleasurable reproductive activities.

The problem is, that same stress response kicks in for the modern gentleman when he’s faced with his everyday worries, from traffic jams to utility bills to tomorrow’s Powerpoint presentation. And he stinks at turning off those worries when he enters the bedroom.

The zebra doesn’t have that problem: When he’s not running from the lion, he’s pretty carefree. There’s no such thing as performance anxiety when you’re a zebra. That’s why the freaking zebra has a better sex life than you do. While you’re sitting there worrying about your job evaluation, there are zebras having special mommy and daddy time.

The point, my friend, is that you need to get a grip. Daily stress is a sex-killer. In 21st century America, it’s also pervasive, possibly inevitable. As I write, I’m actually stressed that I won’t finish this article in time for Valentine’s Day. People are depending on me. Guys like you need this article, or your Valentine’s Day is going to suck. So how can we deal with the pressure and think more like zebras, and thus enjoy the same firm, dependable erections they do?

Lucky for you, Greater Good is filled with excellent tips for preventing stress. In her Raising Happiness blog, Christine Carter suggests a few: making a list of all the things that make you stressed so that you can deal with them; changing your routine and make plans that take the stress out of your day; building your coping capacity through sports or yoga or whatever else floats your boat; and prioritizing your own health and happiness. Many studies suggest that practicing compassion and forgiveness reduce stress.

This especially applies to our intimate relationships, where we can stress ourselves out over the wrong word or a sideways glance. “What we don’t like is that when we trust somebody intimately… we’re opening ourselves up to pain because we are unprotected and they’re seeing us naked, physically and emotionally,” says forgiveness expert Fred Luskin in a recent talk for our Science of Meaningful Life series.

Lots of guys can’t deal with that—being vulnerable—and the result is sex-killing stress.

Fred’s advice? Instead of stressing about how the ruling superbabe in your life may or may not have done you wrong, look for what’s awesome in her, and work on accepting the things that make her as screwed-up as you are.

3. Don’t fear the astronaut. Communication. Are you for it or against it? I know the answer should be obvious, but I ask because some guys are against it. I know I am. Oh, sure, I have many pious and high-minded rhetorical points to make about the value of communication, and, hell, I communicate for a living. But, um, sometimes my ideals and professional experience doesn’t translate into actions—or rather, words—at home. Just ask my wife.

“I met recently with a man whose marriage is being smothered by the weight of everything unsaid,” writes neuroscientist Rick Hanson, who I’m pretty sure was not thinking of me. “But not talking is what’s actually blowing up their relationship—and, in fact, when people do communicate in a heartfelt way … it usually evokes support and open-heartedness from others.” Hanson provides some terrific tips for breaking the silence barrier, such as…

• Ground yourself in good intentions, whatever they may be. To discover and express the truth. To help yourself and the other person.
• Get a basic sense of what you want to say. Focus on your experience: thoughts, feelings, body sensations, wants, memories, images, the dynamic flow through awareness.
• Be confident. Have faith in your sincerity, and in the truth itself. Recognize that others may not like what you have to say, but you have a right to say it without needing to justify it.

OK, now, try applying these principles when you bring up the death of oral sex in your relationship. Or a secret desire to dress up as an astronaut and a ballerina. Or whatever.

Look, when you’ve been with someone for a long time, it’s normal to fall into a rut. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But you’re not going to stir things up if you clam up. Speak, my friend. You might find out that your girlfriend wants to be the astronaut and you to be the ballerina. Why not? Try it.

Of course, sexual communication goes beyond saying what you want. It also involves asking questions. So use your ears as well as your tongue, and perhaps even strive to understand before you try to be understood.

And don’t stop with the ears and the tongue. Use your fingertips, too. Greater Good Science Center Faculty Director Dacher Keltner has documented how well touch can convey emotions like compassion and get the love hormone oxytocin pumping.

But be warned: He found differences between men and women when they try to communicate emotions through touch. “When a woman tried to communicate anger to a man ... he had no idea what she was doing,” writes Dacher. “And when a man tried to communicate compassion to a woman, she didn’t know what was going on!”

My conclusion? Practice. Touch your mate early and often, and train each other to feel what the other is feeling.

OK, now it’s your turn. Don’t be shy; leave a comment. Ladies, what tips do you have for the emotionally intelligent gentleman? And guys, please do share your wisdom based on your vast and worldly experience. We’re all waiting. With eyes wide open. And lips parted.

One of the things that made me a forgiveness teacher was this couple that I worked with a long time ago. I remember the wife telling the husband that he had to stop acting a certain way because it reminded her of her father. And she had had a bad relationship with her father.

So she was telling him to stop, because he said something critical of her. And it wasn’t enough for her to just respond to his criticism. She wanted to stop him because it brought up childhood wounding, and she had mentioned to him many times that her father was unkind.

Now, what I saw on her part was phenomenal insensitivity. On her part. Not his. Because she was blaming him for her not having healed. From my point of view, she owed him an apology along with the request to stop his criticism. Like, “Honey, I’m really sorry. I had this painful childhood that I haven’t gotten over so I’m extra raw and sensitive, I’m asking for your help.” But she didn’t put it that way. Instead she said, “I’m triggered, and you need to stop.”

Of course, he had a responsibility. He could have been her friend as well, and said, “Hey, I know how hard this is on you.”

But she wasn’t being his friend at all. In our psychotherapeutic world, we tend to see her point of view as more normative than his. But I don’t think it is normative. I think when we carry our wounds with us, and we don’t apologize, or at least make amends for them, we’re committing a form of violence. A very low level violence, but we’re still committing a form of violence.

All of forgiveness work is about us, not them. And all of forgiveness work is to widen our hearts. It’s not to change somebody else. It’s to recognize that part of the problem is that we bring to our relationships a Grinch heart – a heart that’s a couple of sizes too small, that makes us more demanding than is necessary, that makes us insensitive to the flaws of the people we have chosen to love.

What makes an intimate relationship so important and special is that you’re willing to endure their bad qualities too. That’s the space we offer people. It’s not like when you enter into an intimate relationship you’re going to be able to say, “Well, I’ll take this stuff that they bring that’s pleasant but I’m still going to disregard what’s not so pleasant.” That’s not intimacy.

Intimacy does involve taking what’s pleasant, but that’s no big deal. Most of us are willing to take what’s pleasant from people. It’s a rare person who will choose to take what’s unpleasant from another person. It doesn’t mean we have to be abused or mistreated, but in an intimate relationship we’re going to get the full person.

So the question is: Are you willing to put up with your partner’s bad qualities? If you’re not, leave. But the bad qualities are the test of the relationship; your commitment is to their bad qualities. You don’t have to commit to their good stuff. You just do that, that’s pleasant. If somebody wants to cook me dinner, how much of a commitment does it take to show up? Right? Or having my laundry done. I can deal with that. I can show up for that any time you want.

But, if they’re defensive in a fight, for example, that’s when your commitment comes in. That’s where the choice comes in. They’re going to be defensive; that’s who they are. Maybe you can help them, maybe you can’t. They’re going to bring their issues all the time. But are you willing to forgive the fact that they bring these particular issues?

Because one thing is for sure: You are going to be with somebody who brings issues. When you choose a partner, you’re just choosing which issues you’re willing to negotiate with.

That’s a much more mature perspective, one that is grounded in a kind of existential forgiveness: I forgive the fact that my partner is flawed. I forgive the fact that they had childhoods, which wounded them, and I forgive the fact that they had experiences that may require my forbearance to serve them. That’s what a relationship is.

What’s a deal breaker?

It’s guaranteed that you will be hurt by the people you care about. The question is: Have you learned to grieve your losses? To feel the pain of disappointment without having to make somebody our enemy? Relationships involve pain. They also involve good stuff—but they’re painful. They require work. You are trusting another human being all the time. They’re going to let you down. 

There comes a time when we just have to ask ourselves: Is this a deal-breaker or not? If it is a deal-breaker, you have the prerogative to end the relationship, not talk to them, doing anything you want within legal bounds. If it’s a deal breaker, you’re saying what happened is sufficient enough to fracture the relationship.

If it’s not a deal-breaker and you want to maintain the relationship, then you have to use skills that repair, fix, maintain the relationship.

It’s essential to know what your deal breakers are. But it’s also important to know how to soothe yourself and practice repair in the relationship if you choose that some hurt is not a deal breaker. Most of us struggle to soothe ourselves; we rely on our partner for that. But when our partner does something that hurts us, and we’re dependent on them for soothing, it becomes really hard—it’s hard to have the one who nurtures us be the one hurting us. If we haven’t found a space in our hearts to soothe ourselves, it’s quite difficult.

People are going to hurt us. People are going to cause us pain. But if that hurt is not a deal breaker, how can we ensure it doesn’t completely screw up the relationship?

One way is to not count every single time we’ve been hurt. As a forgiveness teacher, I notice most of us don’t fight fair. For instance, if we have been hurt by our partner in, say, 2003, and we never got over it, then they hurt us again in 2006 and we never got over it, and they hurt us again in 2009, I’m not sure it’s fighting fair to bring up 2003. Just because we didn’t get over it, that’s not their problem. We stayed because it wasn’t a deal breaker, and then we didn’t repair it well.

Running from vulnerability

Here is what I have found is the nub of this experience. What we don’t like is that when we trust somebody intimately—let down our guard, take off our clothes, make ourselves intimate—we’re opening ourselves up to pain because we are unprotected and they’re seeing us naked, physically and emotionally. And we don’t like the fact that once we choose that, we are now more raw and hurtable. And when our partners remind us of the consequences of that choice, we try to punish them. Our reaction is, “You hurt me!” rather than, “Wow, I’m much more hurtable because you matter so much to me. I’m less guarded.”

What we don’t like and what none of us want and what we’re running from is our vulnerability. Accepting one’s vulnerability is an essential part on this path of forgiveness.

The only thing we can trust other people to do is act like themselves. There is no way we can trust them to act in the way we want them to act. Trust people to behave in the way that they have behaved. That’s what real trust is. Don’t trust them in a fantasy where they behave the way you want them to behave rather than the way they want to behave.

The only thing we can control is our own internal process of grieving. What we’re grieving at some level is our loss of control. So in relationships, it comes down to these basic questions: Do we look more for our partner’s good qualities or do we react more to the stuff that triggers us? And do we spend more of our time armoring up to make sure they don’t hurt us—or do we spend more time actively looking for their good?

This debate on the best type of work style has important implications for workspace design and office environment. It also delves into fundamental questions about human nature. While we are social animals, drawn instinctively to work and cooperate with others, we are also territorial creatures who enjoy and guard our personal autonomy.

For now, open-plan workspace advocates have the upper hand. Collaboration is in vogue, the much-touted ingredient in the magic alchemy to enhance worker well-being and productivity, and the spark to make companies more innovative and creative, as psychologist R. Keith Sawyer describes in his Greater Good essay on “group flow.”

“Decades of scientific research have revealed that great creativity almost always springs from collaboration, conversation, and social networks,” writes Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. “And research shows that when a group is in flow, it’s more likely to resolve problems with surprising and creative solutions.”

As a result, open workspaces are the hot new trend in office design. Numerous predictions about the “future of work” envision minimalist office environments devoid of walls, not a cubicle in sight, vast plains of people working alongside each other. Take out the dividers, the thinking goes, and people will naturally gravitate toward meaningful collaborations.

Even freelancers, telecommuters, and all kinds of remote workers who could shun the office are now being wooed back by coworking and collaborative workspaces that allow them to rent a desk for an hour, a day, or a year, working shoulder to shoulder with like-minded independent professionals. Coworking spaces are proving to be seedbeds of innovation and collaboration.

But in the rush to open-plan, collaborative offices, we might be forgetting the virtues of solitude, and undervaluing the insights and contributions of introverted personalities. It may seem odd to look for lessons in collaboration from the introvert’s point of view, for collaborative workspaces are natural playgrounds for the gregarious extrovert. But as the debate on the “power of the quiet” continues, there are some simple lessons worth considering for those eyeing collaborative workspaces—but worry about loss of privacy and personal boundaries.

Group collaboration catalyzes creativity

Collaboration isn’t just trendy. Many studies offer evidence for the group in helping people work better. In R. Keith Sawyer’s study of jazz performances, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Sawyer made this observation: “The group has the ideas, not the individual musicians.”

According to Sawyer, more often than not, true innovation emerges from an improvised process and draws from trial-by-error and many inputs, “with sparks gathering together over time, multiple dead ends, and the reinterpretation of previous ideas.” Sawyer’s conception of group flow is a permutation of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s theory of flow, the heightened state of consciousness among individuals at their creative peaks. To Sawyer, the group can be remarkably more creative than the individual because of the epiphanies and discoveries that come out of the sharing of ideas.

Google is the classic case study of the success of the group. Many of Google’s flagship products—Gmail and Google News—were dreamt up and developed by informal groups that got together. Google has since deployed “grouplets” for initiatives that cover broader changes throughout the organization. One Google grouplet got engineers to write their own testing code to reduce the incidence of bugs in software code. The intrepid grouplet even came up with a creative campaign based on posting episodes discussing new and interesting testing techniques on the bathroom stalls. “Testing on the Toilet” spread fast. The campaign ultimately developed enough momentum to become a de facto part of the coding culture.

And throughout history there are innumerable examples of artists, scientists, and thinkers who came up with groundbreaking ideas after long bouts of consultation with others. Albert Einstein’s most famous contribution to science, his theory of relativity, may have benefitted from conversations with his longtime mathematician friend, Marcel Grossman.

Grossman convinced Einstein to consider an altogether new mathematical framework drawn from geometry and differential calculus to elucidate his theories. Goaded by his friend, Einstein looked up the work of another mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, who specialized in geometry. Einstein read everything he could by Riemann, which ultimately unlocked his theory of relativity. Einstein had struggled to find the right mathematical language to capture his ideas; Riemann’s work gave him the vocabulary he needed to express his ideas.

This experience—a connection or conversation with other people that unblocks or illuminates a problem—has been dubbed “accelerated serendipity” by collaborative work advocates.

The case for the solo spirit

And yet, as Susan Cain and others have shown, there is also evidence that draws these pat conclusions about working in groups into question. It makes me wonder: maybe, there’s more to toiling in solitude, away from teamwork and brainstorming, than collaborative advocates (myself included) would like to admit.

Cain cites a study where psychologists found many workers unhappy with open floor plans, with no dividers and very little personal space. In this workplace design, people felt more like crammed battery hens in an industrial coop, rather than an enlightened group of collaborators. Giving people places to hide actually made them more productive, the study concluded. People were happier away from distractions and needless interruptions, and less stressed as a result of having the ‘quiet’ zones to concentrate.

There are also numerous cases that show that group-focused brainstorming sessions can actually backfire or hinder creative thinking. When we’re in groups presenting a new idea to others, we might defer too quickly to people who disagree with us. People succumb to peer pressure. More dominant, charismatic members of the group can take over and dictate an agenda. This phenomenon is dubbed “Groupthink,” an unfortunate but common outcome in which the majority thinking of the group overwhelms the quirky, unusual ideas from individuals. In the fuss over whether or not to knock down those cubicle walls, we might be overlooking the virtues that working alone can have on the collaborative and creative process.

Collaboration lessons from introverts

So what are the implications of recognizing the value of solitude and introversion in the era of collaborative workspaces? In other words, what lessons can we glean from introverts who might be discontented with too much togetherness and networking?

1. Balance having open spaces with private spaces.

As much as I enjoy coworking spaces with their open designs, I’ve also visited collaborative offices where people worked in warren-like rooms, but then came together when a project called for it, or during lunch or coffee breaks. Even with all its nooks and crannies for people to escape to, the office was a very social place: they swapped ideas, laughed together, and visited each other for chitchat. While they weren’t working alongside each other, a distinct collaborative community was present nonetheless.

Some collaborative workspaces are recognizing the complementary dynamic of having open and private spaces. ThinkSpace in Redmond, Washington offers a hybrid model of shared office space for those looking for the best of both worlds— the openness of a coworking space with the privacy of an office. “We basically have a cross between the traditional coworking spaces and executive office suites,” says its founder, Peter Chee. “We do have open coworking spaces here, but we also have private office space within our entire building, as well.”

It’s this flexibility that the businesses there enjoy. “What we keep hearing from people is that they like the community, but they also like being able to keep some privacy,” says Chee. “Something that we’ve tailored our model to do is create a sense of community, but also give people their privacy to run their businesses.”

Satellite Telework Centers in Northern California attracts remote workers who may not be looking for outright collaborative relationships within spaces but who want the opportunity to network. According to co-founder Jim Graham, “Although we believe collaboration and an environment of community are really important, we also recognize that a good number of our members do their collaboration with co-workers, bosses and clients somewhere else and come to the Satellite for the uninterrupted time they need to focus on getting their work done.”

Jim insists that it’s all about providing options and offering a more muted collectivist buzz for members. “Some people want more privacy, so the farther into the space you go, the more privacy you have via screens and cabinets mounted on the cubicle walls. Our goal was to make it as effortless as possible for someone to walk in, select a workspace, and get to work.”

2. Let the collaboration develop naturally.

Even the most reserved writer, designer, or engineer can benefit from being around others. Sometimes, all you need is just the right momentum or little nudge that others can provide to reach that unexpected insight that will enhance a project you’re working on.

But if you’re not keen on small talk by the water cooler during the workday, try attending social events with colleagues and co-workers after hours. Videogame developer Parker Whitney, based in IndyHall, a coworking space in Philadelphia, proposes saving most of your social efforts for outside events. “Attend the happy hour events. These events are great times to meet people. You don’t need to pull their headphones off during the day and tell them your life story.” Brownbag lunches, Meetups with fellow coworkers, and scheduled lectures and talks are other opportunities to be social with others in measured, unstructured doses.

3. Invention is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration—so give people the privacy and time to work.

Collaborative workspace advocates argue that our best ideas come from from the cross-pollination of different people working in different fields, different projects. In many ways, this is absolutely true, but we shouldn’t overlook the crucial steps that often go on behind-the-scenes. Before ideas are shared in a collaborative setting they must be first developed. This means alone time.

Companies and coworking spaces should provide a refuge not only in terms of space but also in terms of work demands. Alone time doesn’t signify that you’re a misanthrope or antisocial. Sometimes the constant chatter, networking, and pressure to “contribute” to boundless conversations can be tiring after awhile. One example is the constant convening at meetings and brainstorming sessions that can kill creativity when nascent ideas are stamped out too soon.

Ideas need time to simmer and develop on their own before they are flung out into the world of public scrutiny. While our best ideas may come after consulting others, those ‘Eureka!’ moments often occur when we are alone with our thoughts, ruminating over piles of notes on our desk, or when we’ve had time to think and connect the dots. Epiphanies are less likely to take place in the heat of conversation and activity.

4. Don’t underestimate your quiet members.

In a New York Times op-ed, Susan Cain writes: “Culturally, we’re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, we’ve seen a profusion of myths about the company’s success. Most focus on Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak.”

In the best scenario of creative collaboration, ideas we couldn’t have developed further on our own, acquire new life in the company of others. Others take your idea, which may never have fully matured in your hands alone, and generate new ideas or new leads that enhance and build on your own thinking. But before that wonderful chain reaction can be set into motion, there’s work that needs to be done, and that exceedingly takes place with the individual.

5. Recognize that collaboration can take many forms.

The brand of collaboration that open workspace designers and coworking advocates envision can sometimes be a bit overwhelming to people who require quiet zones and long bouts of concentration to work. In fact, the fear of noise and distraction is the number one reason many of my freelancer and entrepreneur friends refuse to work at a coworking space. For many people, the open plan can be unsettling. These are creative people that understand that ideas emerge from interaction—they just don’t want constant interaction.

As Shareable.net editor Neal Gorenflo puts it, “The innovation process is an essentially social one. Ideas emerge from a milieu, and then some subset (a small team or individual) of that milieu goes away to focus on a single idea. There are moments where individuals work on a small piece of the idea alone, but in the context of a larger social process.” Workspace designers need to recognize the collaborative dynamic that emerges at the group and individual level.

Ultimately, with just the right tweaks, workspaces can let us indulge our two very human impulses: our craving for privacy, and our need to be around other people. “The workplace needs to allow for more than the simple binary of alone vs. together,” says Allison Arief, a writer on design and architecture. “There are many reasons for densify-ing office spaces, varying from a more efficient use of resources to a more connected workforce. Achieving flexibility, creating spaces that serve a diverse workforce—that is where workplace design should be headed.”

In the meantime, maybe designers should consider leaving a few walls up.

The article is based on “Coworking for Introverts,” which originally appeared on Shareable.net.

They developed the show in a small suite of rooms on the sixth floor of 130 West 56th Street in Manhattan. Caesar created a fun and improvisational environment, where the team would riff on each other’s ideas constantly. “Jokes would be changed 50 times,” Mel Brooks later remembered. “We’d take an eight-minute sketch and rewrite it in eight minutes.” They constantly reworked the same scene until something really great emerged. The writers felt like they belonged to something greater than themselves. Critics and TV historians call this comic gold. I call it “group flow.”

Famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly coined the term “flow” to describe a particular state of heightened consciousness—what some people refer to as being “in the zone.”

Csikszentmihaly discovered that extremely creative people are at their peak when they experience “a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.” When they enter the flow state, people from a wide range of professions describe feeling a sense of competence and control, a loss of self-consciousness, and they get so absorbed in the task that they lose track of time.

Researchers have spent a lot of time studying how individuals achieve flow, and how it benefits them and their work. But as Mel Brooks and his partners in Sid Caesar’s laugh factory could confirm, sometimes super-creative groups like jazz ensembles, theater troupes, or comedy writing teams get into flow together.

Indeed, group flow is important for all of us, because so many of our personal and professional activities are spent in groups, and we all want these groups to be more effective and more fun—whether they’re a sports team, a business meeting, a non-profit board, a PTA, or a boy scout troop. Decades of scientific research have revealed that great creativity almost always springs from collaboration, conversation, and social networks—challenging our mythical image of the isolated genius. And research shows that when a group is in flow, it’s more likely to resolve problems with surprising and creative solutions.

So how can business managers, coaches, and the rest of us foster group flow? I first explored this question while working on my Ph.D. with Csikszentmihaly at the University of Chicago. A jazz pianist myself, I started my research by studying jazz ensembles; then, I branched out to study improv theater groups, business teams, and sports teams.

I discovered that group flow isn’t just a matter of luck. Rather, it tends to emerge when 10 key conditions are in place. In these 10 conditions we can find lessons for workplaces, sports teams, and just about any other group that wants its work to be more effective and gratifying.

The keys to flow

To understand the roots of group flow, it helps to understand a bit more about how individuals find flow.

Drawing on research with mountain climbers, club dancers, artists, and scientists, Csikszentmihalyi found that people are more likely to get into flow when their environment has four important characteristics.

First and most importantly, they’re doing something where their skills match the challenge of the task. If the challenge is too great for their skills, they get frustrated; if the task isn’t challenging enough, they simply get bored.

Second, flow occurs when the goal is clear, and third, when there’s constant and immediate feedback about how close you are to achieving that goal.

Fourth, flow occurs when you’re free to fully concentrate on the task.

Building on this research, I found that group flow requires conditions that overlap with and go beyond these four. Here are the 10 factors I identified for group flow.

1. The group’s goal

First, I found that it’s essential for groups to have a compelling vision and a shared mission—they need to be clear about what their collective goal is. But how we define a group’s goal can vary depending on what type of group it is.

Jazz and improv theater are relatively unstructured. The only goal is intrinsic to the performance itself—to perform well and to entertain the audience. This is problem-finding creativity because the group has to “find” and define the problem as they’re solving it.

But the groups in which we participate during the workday—task forces, project groups, and committees—usually have a specific goal in mind. Business teams are expected to solve specific problems. If the goal is well-understood and can be explicitly stated, it’s a problem-solving creative task.

Problem-finding and problem-solving creativity can both foster flow, depending on the context. Either way, the key to group flow is managing a paradox: establishing a goal that provides focus for the team—just enough focus so that team members can tell when they get closer to a solution—but one that’s open-ended enough for maximum creativity to emerge.

2. Close listening

Actors and musicians both talk about group flow using metaphors like riding a wave, gliding across a ballroom with a dance partner, or lovemaking. Group flow is more likely to emerge when everyone is fully engaged—what improvisers call “deep listening,” in which you don’t plan ahead what you’re going to say, but your statements are genuinely unplanned responses to what you hear. Innovation is blocked when one or more participants already has a preconceived idea of how to get to the goal; improvisers frown on this practice, pejoratively calling it “writing the script in your head.”

Here’s an example from an improv performance with no group flow. A pair of improv actors, a man and a woman, are walking slowly across the stage, hand in hand, taking a romantic walk in the park, when this exchange occurs:

Woman (pointing to the side of the path): Oh look, what’s that?
Man: It’s just a pile of dog shit.
Woman (bending closer to look): No, it’s a lottery ticket!

When the woman pointed to the side of the trail, she was already “writing the script” that they would find a discarded lottery ticket in the park. She was probably already thinking that it would be a winning ticket and that it would change their lives. That “scripting” kept her from listening to what her partner really said and riffing off of that.

3. Keep it moving forward

After deep listening, team members need to keep moving the conversation forward, meaning that they follow the most important rule of improv: “Yes, and…” In other words, listen closely to what’s being said, accept it fully, then extend and build on it. This often leads down an unexpected and improvised path, a problem-finding process that can result in surprising new ideas.

Nothing staunches creativity quicker than negating or ignoring your partner. “Yes, and…” builds on deep listening, and it’s critical to group flow.

4. Complete concentration

In basketball, complete concentration is required because the game moves fast—everyone’s constantly moving around you, and yet you need to remain constantly aware of your teammates and opponents. One of the basketball players Csikszentmihalyi interviewed said, “If you step back and think about why you are so hot all of a sudden, you get creamed.” When a player is in flow, time becomes warped, minutes seem like hours, and the basketball can appear to move in slow motion.

To enable a similar degree of concentration—and flow—in group settings, it helps to wall the group’s work off from other activities, giving them the space to devote their full attention to their work. Perhaps this is why many high-performing groups have a strong feeling of group identity, of standing apart from the world.

5. Being in control

People get into flow when they’re in control of their actions and of their environment. In the same way, group flow increases when people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Many studies of teams have found that if a team knows that their managers trust them and will, in the end, accept and support what they decide, that team performs better.

But in group flow, unlike solo flow, control results in a paradox: Each participant must feel in control while at the same time remaining flexible, listening closely, and always being willing to defer to the emergent flow of the group. The most innovative teams are the ones that can manage that paradox.

6. Blending egos

Jazz musicians know that they need to control their egos; every jazz player can tell a story about a technically gifted young instrumentalist who was nonetheless a horrible jazz musician. What they’re lacking is the ability to submerge their ego to the group mind, to balance their own voice with deep listening.

Group flow is the magical moment when it all comes together, when the group is in sync and the performers seem to be thinking with one mind. In group flow, each person’s idea builds on the ones that their partners just contributed. Small ideas build together and an innovation emerges.

“He is animated and engaged with you,” one executive said of a colleague who often participated in groups in flow. “[But] he is also listening and reacting to what you are saying with undivided attention.”

7. Equal participation

Group flow is more likely to occur when all participants play an equal role in the collective creation of the final product or performance. Group flow is blocked if anyone’s skill level is significantly below the rest of the group; all of the members must have comparable skill levels. This is why professional athletes don’t enjoy playing with amateurs: Group flow can’t happen, because the professionals will be bored and the amateurs will be frustrated. It’s also blocked when one person dominates, is arrogant, or doesn’t think they have anything to learn in the conversation.

8. Familiarity

By studying many different work teams, psychologists have found that when we’re more familiar with our teammates, we’re more productive and make more effective decisions. When members of a group have been together awhile, they share a common language and a common set of unspoken understandings—what psychologists call ”tacit knowledge.” Because it’s unspoken, people often don’t even realize what it is that enables them to communicate effectively.

In improv, group flow happens only when all the players have mastered a body of tacit knowledge. Improv actors learn a set of guiding principles that help make it work, rules such as “Don’t deny” and “Show, don’t tell.”

This shared understanding gets group members on the same page about the group’s goals—and clear goals are a cornerstone of group flow. Familiarity with one another’s communication style also helps them respond to each other quickly, and we know from Csikszentmihalyi’s research that immediate feedback is critical to flow.

9. Communication

Indeed, group flow requires constant communication. Everyone hates to go to useless meetings. But the kind of communication that leads to group flow often doesn’t happen in the conference room. Instead, it’s more likely to happen in free-wheeling, spontaneous conversations in the hallway, or in social settings after work or at lunch.

10. The potential for failure

Jazz ensembles rarely experience flow during rehearsal; group flow seems to require an audience, and the accompanying risk of real, meaningful failure. Jazz musicians and improv theater ensembles never know how successful a performance will be. Professional actors learn not to ignore the feeling of stage fright but to harness it, using it as a powerful force to push them toward flow.

Research shows us over and over again that the twin sibling of innovation is frequent failure. There’s no creativity without failure, and there’s no group flow without the risk of failure. These two common research findings go hand in hand, because group flow is often what produces the most significant innovations.

Finding the balance

As this list suggests, group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: between convention and novelty, between structure and improvisation, between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling, outside-the-box mind, between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out with your own individual voice. The central paradox of group flow is that it can only happen when there are rules and the participants share tacit understandings, but with too many rules or too much cohesion, the potential for innovation is lost.

The key question facing groups that have to innovate is finding just the right amount of structure to support improvisation, but not so much structure that it smothers creativity. Jazz and improv theater have important messages for all groups, because they’re unique in how successfully they balance all of these tensions.

The most effective business teams balance these tensions in the same way: They listen closely, they are concentrated on the task, they communicate openly so that everyone gets immediate feedback, and they trust that genius will emerge from the group, not from any one member. When that happens, groups find flow—and with it, studies show, comes more effective team performance, greater innovation, and higher workplace satisfaction. It’s good for the organization, and it’s good for its workers, too.

Now, of course, everyone in the world knows that Gingrich himself was having an affair at the time, then lied about it to both his wife and the public.

When the affair was discovered by his wife, he reportedly asked her for an open marriage—that is, one in which they could both have multiple sexual partners; she declined. (This is part of a lifelong pattern. He cheated on his first wife with the woman who became his second, then cheated on his second wife with the woman who became his third.)

These bare facts do not seem to have hurt Gingrich’s campaign to become President of the United States. Right after his second wife, Marianne Ginther, gave a devastating interview with ABC News, he handily won the South Carolina primary and went on to give a widely praised performance in the Florida GOP primary debate. For many GOP voters, apparently, being an untrustworthy husband does not make him an untrustworthy candidate for President.

Politics isn’t our forte here at the Greater Good Science Center, and we will let Republican voters decide who will best represent them against President Obama later this year. However, we do specialize in translating scientific research into tips for having better relationships with spouses and other people in our lives, and we’ve been especially interested in the role of trust in healthy relationships. So, whatever our personal failings, we feel somewhat qualified to provide marriage advice to Newt Gingrich, as well as to anyone else who might be facing similar issues in their marriages. What can we learn from Mr. Gingrich’s mistakes?

1) Put trust first. When researcher John Gottman and colleagues studied couples around the country, he found that the number one most important issue on their minds was trust and betrayal. As Gottman said in a talk for our Science for a Meaningful Life series, spouses want to know, “Can I trust you to be there and listen to me when I’m upset? Can I trust you to choose me over your mother, over your friends? Can I trust you to work for our family? To not take drugs? Can I trust you to not cheat on me and be sexually faithful? Can I trust you to respect me? To help with things in the house? To really be involved with our children?”

If Gingrich really believes, as he has stated many times, in the ideal of lifelong, monogamous marriage, then he probably shouldn’t have undermined the trust that is at the core of such a relationship. Gottman’s graduate student Dan Yoshimoto broke the foundations of marital trust down into seven components with the acronym ATTUNE, which stands for:

• Awareness of your partner’s emotion;
• Turning toward the emotion;
• Tolerance of two different viewpoints;
• trying to Understand your partner;
• Non-defensive responses to your partner;
• and responding with Empathy.

“Trust isn’t just important for couples,” Gottman reminds us. “It’s also vital to neighborhoods and states and countries. Trust is central to what makes human communities work.” Something, perhaps, GOP primary voters should bear in mind.

2) If you do betray your partner, make amends—as opposed to, say, first asking for permission to sleep with other people, as Gingrich did.

Studies consistently show that around 15 to 22 percent of people have ever had an extramarital affair. (Incidentally, people routinely overestimate the amount of cheating that is going on. One 2007 survey, for example, found participants “guessed that twice as many people are having extramarital affairs as really are.”)

According to marriage and family therapists, if those marriages end, it’s likely because of the problems that triggered the affair in the first place. “I see a lot of couples in my psychotherapy practice whose relationships have been rocked by infidelity,” writes therapist Joshua Coleman in his Greater Good essay “Surviving Betrayal.” While many of these marriages dissolve, Coleman has found that “people on both sides of a betrayal can work to restore feelings of trust, and so repair their relationship.”

Coleman’s first advice for the betrayer is to take complete responsibility for your actions. “No matter how driven you felt to have the affair, nobody made you do it,” writes Coleman, author of The Lazy Husband and Imperfect Harmony. “The more you blame your partner, the longer it will take him or her to believe that you are trustworthy and to want to forgive you.”

In that light, Gingrich’s explanation of why he had an affair seems like a clear violation of this principle. “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” he explained in 2010. While Gingrich may indeed have been driven by his passion for the US of A, it is unlikely that that “this country” is responsible for his actions.

3) Look at the root causes of the betrayal. Gingrich no doubt has a story to tell about his marriage(s); there are nuances to relationships that might be invisible to outsiders. It may be the case that a spouse cheats because he or she feels emotionally, sexually, or financially abandoned, or feels trapped in a relationship with an unreliable or problematic partner.

In his essay, Coleman describes a couple, Janice and Robert, troubled by infidelity. In therapy, he writes, “it became clear that it wouldn’t be enough for Robert to end the affair with his co-worker, rededicate himself to Janice, and repair how hurt and humiliated she felt. It was also necessary for Janice to admit that she had shut down sexually since she had become a mother and had ignored Robert’s complaints about their sex life. Janice had to acknowledge that Robert, in his own way, felt hurt and betrayed by her turning away from him and neglecting what had been an important form of connection with her.”

“There’s no singular root cause for betrayal,” says Coleman. “Ideally, both people have to look at the ways both might have contributed to the conditions that made the affair more likely. For me the biggest predictor of whether a marriage can recover from betrayal is if both people can talk about the underlying dynamics and how it came to happen.”

4) If you do want an open marriage, ask for one before you cheat. Research into the success of open or polyamorous heterosexual marriages is rare, but studies of gay men in open relationships suggest certain guidelines that Gingrich might have followed. Nearly all emphasize a very high level of transparency and equality as a prerequisite for opening a relationship to other sexual partners, as in this list from psychotherapists Michael Shernoff and J. Morin:

• Both partners want their relationship to remain primary;
• The couple has an established reservoir of good will;
• There are minimal lingering resentments from past hurts and betrayals;
• The partners are not polarized over monogamy/non-monogamy;
• And the partners are feeling similarly powerful and autonomous.

By the account of both Gingrich and his second wife, most of these preconditions had not been met. “He wanted an open marriage, and I refused,” Marianne Ginther told ABC News. “That is not a marriage.” With two such polarized views on monogamy, it is unlikely the marriage could have succeeded as an open one.

“There may be occasions where opening the marriage up is the best thing for a couple,” says Joshua Coleman. “But it has to be something that really works for both people and is good for both people, and is coming from a place of health and trust. It can’t be something that one spouse imposes on another.”

Newt Gingrich has systematically lied to at least two of his wives. People do learn and evolve, but does Gingrich’s private behavior make him more likely to lie to the American people?

That’s not for us to say, but it’s worth mentioning that trust has been declining in America for decades, quite often in response to the behavior of its political leaders.

As sociologist Pamela Paxton and I write in our essay “America’s Trust Fall,” the General Social Survey, a periodic assessment of Americans’ moods and values, shows a 10-point decline from 1976 to 2006 in the number of Americans who believe other people can generally be trusted. The General Social Survey also shows declines in trust in our institutions, although these declines are often closely linked to specific events such as Watergate or church sex scandals. As we argue, declines in trust have had measurably bad effects on our economy, democracy, and society.

If we are going to restore trust in America, leaders like Newt Gingrich are going to have to earn our trust, and we’re going to have to ask more of ourselves.

Henry wouldn’t linger long, since she was always on her way to work. But during the few minutes that she spent at the center each morning, she’d frequently chat with the other parents who bustled in around her—about their children, usually, but often the talk would turn to work, or families, or other issues that happened to be on their mind.

Before long, they’d head back out into the cold and on to work. These conversations were small, uncomplicated encounters, soon forgotten in the bustle of the rest of the day.

But how small were they? New research suggests that Henry’s morning routine might have had more impact on her well-being than she realized. In fact, as incidental as her childcare stops seemed, at least one scientist believes she was doing far more than dropping off her kids and chitchatting.

According to research by University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small, Henry was also building “social capital,” the complex system of interpersonal ties and networks that scientists have linked to a host of benefits, from better health to stronger job prospects.

This is an unusual way of thinking about childcare, especially since the national debate over it usually concerns its impact on children’s emotional, behavioral, and intellectual development.

Research conducted by psychologists John Bowlby and Jay Belsky, for instance, as well as studies published by groups such as the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), do suggest that under some circumstances, kids in full-time childcare settings may be worse off than their stay-at-home peers. Yet these negative findings have been contradicted by other studies finding that kids in childcare aren’t at a disadvantage.

But what hasn’t been well studied, at least until recently, is the hidden benefits childcare may bring to parents, especially mothers. In a provocative line of research, Small has found that mothers using childcare reap social, psychological, and even financial rewards; these rewards are especially pronounced for low-income mothers. Even when mothers make few friends through a childcare center, they still benefit from the resources they find there.

Small’s work has profound implications beyond childcare. It suggests that at a time when many are lamenting the decline of strong social connections, many of us may actually be building valuable social capital without realizing it—and these “invisible ties” may carry real rewards.

The perks of friendship

For years, studies have found that enjoying greater social capital can improve quality of life for breast cancer survivors, reduce dropout rates for high school students, and increase the chances that job-seekers find employment, among other benefits. At the same time, researchers such as Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, author of the book Bowling Alone, warn that Americans have been experiencing a steady decline in social capital, with most people having fewer friends, participating in fewer civic organizations, and engaging less with their neighbors than they did fifty or sixty years ago. In other words, we’re learning both how vital our connections with each other are, and how elusive.

It was against this scientific backdrop that Small and his colleagues explored how childcare centers broker social capital for mothers. They drew on rich and varied data sources, including a national survey of 3,500 mothers in 20 large U.S. cities, a survey of 300 childcare centers in New York City, 67 in-depth interviews with mothers who had enrolled their children in childcare, and 23 case studies and observations of specific childcare centers.

When the team compared mothers who used childcare with those who did not (controlling for income, race, age, education, employment, and marital status), they discovered that mothers with children in childcare experienced fewer incidences of financial hardship—events such as having insufficient funds to see a physician, falling behind on rent or mortgage, or borrowing money to cover utility bills—than their counterparts. In fact, poor mothers who were struggling financially before they started to use childcare saw their risk of such events decrease after their child’s enrollment.

What’s more, the analysis revealed psychological benefits: Mothers who enrolled a child in childcare were less likely to experience non-clinical depression than those who did not.

Making friends with other parents through childcare was especially beneficial. Poor mothers who formed friendships at childcare centers were more than 40 percent less likely to be depressed than those who made no friends; for mothers of higher income, the figure was nearly 60 percent. And for mothers of higher income, forming friendships through childcare reduced their likelihood of facing material hardship by more than 40 percent—a benefit that disappeared if they made no friends.

“At first,” Small admits, “I assumed mothers would only make superficial friends through childcare centers. Who has time to sit and gossip when more often than not, mothers need childcare in the first place because they work outside the home?

“Surprisingly,” he continues, “many made strong friendships—they used the word ‘family’ to describe them—in which they would go to the theater and plan trips together out of state.”

This makes sense to Sarah Diwan, who runs BabyPhd, a childcare network comprising 18 home childcare providers and 60 families in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. “There’s a shared vulnerability when mothers wonder what’s going to happen to their relationship with their child when they go back to work,” says Diwan. “They often come together over the emotional aspect of dropping off a child.”

Henry, who enrolled both her children in a Baby PhD childcare center, agrees. “The immediate empathy formed through that shared experience,” says Henry, “made it easy for friendships to start.” Today, Henry regularly emails and meets for coffee with three other mothers who used the same center.

“Hi and bye” relationships

Other discoveries about social connections emerged from Small’s study. For instance, many mothers formed relationships that were deeply personal, but only within the domain of childcare. These “compartmentally strong friendships,” as Small calls them, extended mothers’ support systems, even though they rarely resulted in meetings outside the center.

Mothers also made weak “hi and bye” relationships that were nevertheless valuable, because they were made trustworthy by the mothers’ shared ties to the center. “If I were to ask if you would hand your child over to somebody whose name, address, and job you didn’t know, any rational person would answer no,” adds Small. “In the context of childcare centers, many mothers were willing to do just that.”

These types of connections wouldn’t necessarily show up in a survey of social networks, because they aren’t what comes to mind when respondents are asked to list their ties—yet they, along with traditional friendships, dramatically increased mothers’ available social capital. “There’s a kind of psychic safety net,” says Small, “that comes from knowing an extra three or four people in this context. You can stay late at your meeting. You can miss your bus. And you have someone you trust to call. It takes the edge off a lot of things.”

This kind of practical support has been invaluable to Virginia Pace, who also found childcare through Diwan’s network. “It’s really nice to be able to compare notes about things like discipline,” she says, “or what to do when a child is sick.” Although Small could not say quantitatively how long after they enroll their children mothers might begin drawing on this kind of social capital, his interviews with mothers suggest that benefits often appear after as little as six months.

But one of the study’s most striking discoveries was that, for poor mothers, the benefits of social capital accrued regardless of whether they made friends at a childcare center. How could this be? Social capital, it turns out, doesn’t just emerge from relationships with people. It can also be the result of relationships with institutions.

For many mothers, enrolling a child in childcare opened up a world of other resources: access to free healthcare through referrals to government-funded health programs that they might not otherwise have known about, help with finding housing and filing taxes, domestic abuse counseling, museum discounts, and referrals to resources like learning disability experts. By plugging into childcare centers that were themselves connected to other nonprofits and government organizations, mothers effectively multiplied the size of their support networks with no effort required on their part.

In a twist that overturns traditional social network analysis—which predicts that neighborhood poverty reduces access to resources—Small found that childcare centers located in poor neighborhoods were more connected to valuable resources than those in affluent areas. “Government organizations and non-profits that offer social support reach out more to childcare centers in poor neighborhoods,” he explains, “inviting them to inform their clients about the services they provide.”

How to choose childcare

Importantly, not all childcare centers do a good job of brokering social capital—they don’t all try to introduce parents for the sake of friendship, for instance. Instead, when social ties form, they tend to do so as an accidental result of center policies.

One surprising factor has to do with timing. “Some centers allow you to drop off your child anytime in the morning and pick them up anytime in the evening,” explains Small. “Others want you to do so within a certain strict window, with cash penalties for being a few minutes late. So everybody beelines to the center after work. And naturally, they sit and talk to other parents.” Furthermore, parents in these centers have an incentive to get to know each other immediately. They exchange numbers, agreeing to help each other out if one of them has a meeting that runs late.

Another factor that encourages social ties is the existence of frequent field trips. In the classroom, one adult can easily supervise ten children. “But,” Small points out, “when you’re at a museum with vases that break or at the zoo with monkeys that bite off toes, you simply need more adults per child. And most centers are not lucrative enterprises. So they need volunteers—and the most obvious ones are parents.”

In both these cases, friendships result unexpectedly—first, from a seemingly burdensome rule, and second, from financial constraints that require childcare centers to rely on parents for practical assistance.

Small, who has no children of his own but has become an expert on childcare by default, suggests the following tips for parents in search of a childcare center that fosters social capital.

• Look for a center that holds yearly elections for its parent association, rather than one that’s been led by the same parent for several years in a row.
• Look for one in which parents are expected to participate in activities such as fundraising.
• Scout around for centers that go on a lot of field trips.
• Though it’s counterintuitive, look for a center that sets strict windows for drop-off and pick-up times.
• Figure out whether a center is well-connected to other local organizations. This can be tricky—but one sign to look for is a frequently-updated bulletin board full of flyers, posters, and notices advertising local resources.

Grab a coffee, make a friend

This research has implications even for those who take care of their children at home or don’t have children at all, as it reveals a broader truth about how we build social networks. Policymakers and scholars argue passionately for fostering civic engagement as a tool against crime, poverty, and inequity; business experts say who you know is more important than what you know; and self-help writers are eager to teach “networking” for happiness and success. But most of these voices focus on the consequences of social connections, and ignore how they’re formed.

Small’s research points to the fact that many of our most valuable social ties are made in the context of our involvement with institutions. We connect with others, almost without noticing it, in the coffee shops we visit, the churches, synagogues, and mosques at which we pray, and the gyms in which we exercise.

“These are not incidental aspects of our connections,” says Small. “They are the core. To the extent that we are our social networks, we are also the organizations we participate in.”

For more than 40 years, I’ve studied what makes marriages work. I’ve observed thousands of couples, and many of them—the masters—can skillfully solve their problems.

Yet many others get stuck in their conflicts. Even couples who attend one of my institute’s workshops or therapy sessions have a hard time putting what they learn into practice.

I’ve found that we can help 70 to 75 percent of these couples. But what about the other 20 to 25 percent? How do we help them? What separates them from the masters?

To answer this, I looked at focus groups we did around the United States, involving couples at every social class level and from every ethnic and racial group in the country. I looked at work we did that was funded by the federal Administration of Children and Families, looking in particular at couples about to have a baby. I looked at a large study we did of newlyweds, starting a few months after their wedding. I looked at work we did with the families of soldiers who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

What I found was that the number one most important issue that came up to these couples was trust and betrayal. I started to see their conflicts like a fan opening up, and every region of the fan was a different area of trust. Can I trust you to be there and listen to me when I’m upset? Can I trust you to choose me over your mother, over your friends? Can I trust you to work for our family? To not take drugs? Can I trust you to not cheat on me and be sexually faithful? Can I trust you to respect me? To help with things in the house? To really be involved with our children?

Trust is one of the most commonly used words in the English language—it’s number 949. When I went to Amazon.com and typed in “trust,” I was surprised that 36,000 books came up. Now, a lot of these were business books, on how to set up a financial trust. But most of them were really about trust in relationships, and trust in general.

On PsychInfo, the database that psychologists use to do a literature review, there were 96,000 references to “trust.” And it turns out that when social psychologists ask people in relationships, “What is the most desirable quality you’re looking for in a partner when you’re dating?”, trustworthiness is number one. It’s not being sexy or attractive. It’s really being able to trust somebody.

Through my research, I’ve found that trust is essential to healthy relationships and healthy communities—and I’ve started to learn how we can build trust.

Why trust is important

Trust isn’t just important for couples. It’s also vital to neighborhoods and states and countries. Trust is central to what makes human communities work.

In a recent line of research on “social capital,” sociologists ask people: “Do you think people can be trusted?”

This research shows there are low- and high-trust regions of the United States. Nevada is a very low-trust region. (Nobody seems to be very surprised by that.) Minnesota is a very high-trust region. The Deep South is a very low-trust region.

We see similar disparities internationally. In Brazil, two percent of people say they trust other people. In Norway, 65 percent say they trust other people.

So what are the characteristics of low-trust regions? Few people vote, parents and schools are less active. There’s less philanthropy in low-trust regions, greater crime of all kinds, lower longevity, worse health, lower academic achievement in schools.

And low-trust areas have greater economic disparities between the very rich and the very poor—and the greater the discrepancy between the very rich and the very poor in a country, the more it predicts economic decline in that country.

Clearly, there are vast implications of low trust for states, for neighborhoods, for countries. Isn’t it amazing that it’s in the best interests for us to care economically about the people who are disenfranchised in this country? Yet over the last 50 years, CEOs in the U.S., on average, have gone from making 20 times what the average worker makes to 350 times what the average worker makes.

Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam wrote the classic book on social capital, Bowling Alone, which documents the dramatic decline of trust and community in the United States over the last 50 years. Yet when Putnam was asked, “Okay, how do you change all this?”, he had to say, “I don’t really know.”

I think part of the answer involves first defining trust and measuring it scientifically. Science requires us to be precise and objective. When we measure something objectively and precisely, we automatically get a recipe for how to fix it.

The trust metric

So how can we define trust? To find out, I went back to relationships and asked: Can we create a metric of trust and betrayal?

We usually think of betrayal as a big terrible event, like discovering that your partner is having a sexual affair. But it can be more subtle. It can happen in just one interaction.

Let me explain what I mean. In my research, we filmed an interaction between a couple and had each partner turn a rating dial as they watched their tape afterward.

On this graph (at left), you can see how one couple rated their interaction. The blue dots represent the wife’s ratings over 15 minutes of conversation; the red dots represent the husband’s ratings. When you add them together, these ratings are a constant, which means that in this interaction, her gain is his loss and his gain is her loss.

This is what’s called in game theory a “zero-sum game.” You’ve probably all heard of the concept. It’s the idea that in an interaction, there’s a winner and a loser. And by looking at ratings like this, I came to define a “betrayal metric”: It’s the extent to which an interaction is a zero-sum game, where your partner’s gain is your loss.

On the other hand, by trust we really mean, mathematically, that our partner’s behavior is acting to increase our rating dial. Even though we’re disagreeing, my wife is thinking about my welfare, my best interests.

When we scientifically tested these so-called trust and betrayal metrics, we found that a high trust metric is correlated with very positive outcomes, such as greater stability in the relationship.

In a 20-year longitudinal study of couples in the San Francisco Bay Area that I recently completed with UC Berkeley psychologist Bob Levenson, we found that about 11 percent of couples had a zero-sum game pattern, like in that graph. Every six years, we would re-contact all of the couples in the study, and they would come back to Bob’s lab at Berkeley. Yet we noticed that many of the zero-sum couples weren’t coming back. I thought maybe they dropped out because they found the whole thing so unpleasant.

Well, it turns out that they didn’t drop out. They died.

Fifty-eight percent of zero-sum game couples’ husbands died over this 20-year period, whereas among “cooperative-gain” couples, who didn’t have that pattern, only 20 percent of husbands died in that 20-year period. This was true even after controlling for the husband’s age and initial health.

Now this is an outcome that’s pretty reliably measured: You can really tell if somebody’s dead or alive.

In a second study, we tried to find out how this could be. And we discovered that if a wife trusts her husband, both of their blood consistently flows slower—not only during their conflict discussion but at other times as well. That’s associated with better health and a longer life. So maybe that’s the mechanism through which men with a high “betrayal metric” are dying. But why are the men dying and not the women?

It turns out that trust is related to the secretion of oxytocin, which is the “cuddle hormone,” the hormone of bonding. It’s also a hormone we secrete when we have an orgasm; the stronger the orgasm, the more oxytocin we secrete.

Interestingly enough, men don’t just secrete oxytocin after an orgasm; they secrete vasopressin as well. Vasopressin is a hormone associated with aggression. After a male rat has had an orgasm with a female rat, he not only is enjoying the experience, he’s also trying to ward off rivals.

So there is evidence that the bonding experience of having an orgasm with somebody—secreting oxytocin, that trust hormone—is very powerful, it suspends fear. But it doesn’t have as protective an effect in men as it does in women.

Building trust

But how do you build trust? What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.

Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night, I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom.

As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment.

I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, “I don’t want to deal with her sadness tonight, I want to read my novel.” But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hair and asked, “What’s the matter, baby?” And she told me why she was sad.

Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think only about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that build trust.

One such moment is not that important, but if you’re always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship—very gradually, very slowly.

My graduate student Dan Yoshimoto has discovered that the basis for building trust is really the idea of attunement. He has broken this down with the acronym ATTUNE, which stands for:

• Awareness of your partner’s emotion;
• Turning toward the emotion;
• Tolerance of two different viewpoints;
• trying to Understand your partner;
• Non-defensive responses to your partner;
• and responding with Empathy.

By contrast, the atom of betrayal is not just turning away—not just turning away from my wife’s sadness in that moment—but doing what Caryl Rusbult called a “CL-ALT,” which stands for “comparison level for alternatives.”

What that means is I not only turn away from her sadness, but I think to myself, “I can do better. Who needs this crap? I’m always dealing with her negativity. I can do better.”

Once you start thinking that you can do better, then you begin a cascade of not committing to the relationship; of trashing your partner instead of cherishing your partner; of building resentment rather than gratitude; of lowering your investment in the relationship; of not sacrificing for the relationship; and of escalating conflicts.

I believe that by understanding the dynamics of trust and betrayal, we can work to make relationships more trusting. But more than that, we can help people become more trustworthy.

Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.

Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that “war is not an instinct but an invention.”

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

A history of violence

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, that statement might seem hallucinatory or even obscene. But if we consider the evidence, we find that the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon: We can see the decline over millennia, centuries, decades, and years. When the archeologist Lawrence Keeley examined casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers—which is the best picture we have of how people might have lived 10,000 years ago—he discovered that the likelihood that a man would die at the hands of another man ranged from a high of 60 percent in one tribe to 15 percent at the most peaceable end. In contrast, the chance that a European or American man would be killed by another man was less than one percent during the 20th century, a period of time that includes both world wars. If the death rate of tribal warfare had prevailed in the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million, horrible as that is.

Ancient texts reveal a stunning lack of regard for human life. In the Bible, the supposed source of all our moral values, the Hebrews are urged by God to slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. “Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites,” reads a typical passage in the book of Samuel. “Make war on them until you have wiped them out.” The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one’s parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.

But from the Middle Ages to modern times, we can see a steady reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence. Many conventional histories reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of punishment for infractions that today would result in a fine. In Europe before the Enlightenment, crimes like shoplifting or blocking the king’s driveway with your oxcart might have resulted in your tongue being cut out, your hands being chopped off, and so on. Many of these punishments were administered publicly, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment.

We also have very good statistics for the history of one-on-one murder, because for centuries many European municipalities have recorded causes of death. When the criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured the records of every village, city, county, and nation he could find, he discovered that homicide rates in Europe had declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people per year in the Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 people in modern Europe.

And since 1945 in Europe and the Americas, we’ve seen steep declines in the number of deaths from interstate wars, ethnic riots, and military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, the number of battle deaths has fallen from 65,000 per conflict per year to less than 2,000 deaths in this decade. Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, we have seen fewer civil wars, a 90 percent reduction in the number of deaths by genocide, and even a reversal in the 1960s-era uptick in violent crime.

Given these facts, why do so many people imagine that we live in an age of violence and killing? The first reason, I believe, is that we have better reporting. As political scientist James Payne once quipped, the Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars across the globe than were 16th-century monks. There’s also a cognitive illusion at work. Cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall an event, the more likely we are to believe it will happen again. Gory war zone images from TV are burned into memory, but we never see reports of many more people dying in their beds of old age. And in the realms of opinion and advocacy, no one ever attracted supporters and donors by saying that things just seem to be getting better and better. Taken together, all these factors help create an atmosphere of dread in the contemporary mind, one that does not stand the test of reality.

Finally, there is the fact that our behavior often falls short of our rising expectations. Violence has gone down in part because people got sick of carnage and cruelty. That’s a psychological process that seems to be continuing, but it outpaces changes in behavior. So today some of us are outraged—rightly so—if a murderer is executed in Texas by lethal injection after a 15-year appeal process. We don’t consider that a couple of hundred years ago a person could be burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes. Today we should look at capital punishment as evidence of how high our standards have risen, rather than how low our behavior can sink.

Expanding the circle

Why has violence declined? Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don’t like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, the Saw movie franchise, Grand Theft Auto, and hockey.

What has changed, of course, is people’s willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a “civilizing process” marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today’s cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans have increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our behavior has come under the control of the better angels of our nature, but there are four plausible suggestions.

The first is that the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short—not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors and steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don’t strike first, retaliate if struck—but to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta.

These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence. States can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Manuel Eisner attributes the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.

James Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one’s own life, one feels less compunction about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.

A third theory, championed by journalist Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.

Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people’s moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the Golden Rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one’s own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.”

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

Undeterred, Fenton searched the online student database at the University of Iceland, extracted names and email addresses of 1,500 students, and sent messages like “Hey Bjorn, I am coming to Iceland. Can I stay on your couch and hang out with you for the weekend?” Within 24 hours, he received 50 invitations saying, “Hang out with me.” Fenton had his pick of where and with whom he wanted to crash.

After that trip, Fenton decided he wanted to keep traveling this way. He started programming a website called CouchSurfing.org, which allowed would-be travelers (“surfers”) to find free or very cheap places to stay at their destinations. By February of 2010, there were more than 1.7 million CouchSurfers in more than 70,973 cities across 235 countries worldwide.

CouchSurfing is just one example of “collaborative consumption,” a rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading, and renting, facilitated by the latest online technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces.

Collaborative consumption involves product sharing systems, like tool sharing, which enable people to use an item without needing to own it outright, as well as redistribution markets, like eBay, that move things from where they’re not needed to somewhere they are—either as a gift, in exchange for currency, or as a direct like-for-like swap. These business models represent a new way of exchanging goods and services, one that allows people to make better use of their resources and save money.

But collaborative consumption is more than just a cost-saving ploy. It’s also a way to build community among people who might not otherwise meet, connecting folks who share values like sustainability while helping to reduce social isolation. The movement is gaining steam at a time when a growing body of research is pointing to the immense benefits of social networks for our health and happiness. In fact, it seems that collaborative consumption doesn’t just require a certain level of trust among participants; studies suggest it may also foster trust and create ripple effects of cooperation across social networks.

The strength of weak ties

Peripheral relationships, like those created through CouchSurfing and other online collaborative exchanges, can powerfully bind us together, according to Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford University. He calls this force “the strength of weak ties,” meaning that links to people we don’t really know can bolster our opportunities and well-being.

Diana Mutz, a professor of political science and communications at the University of Pennsylvania who studies online markets, says that weak tie relationships expand our social networks, which has several positive benefits. Most practically, a larger social network gives people an advantage when looking for jobs, mates, or other hard-to-find items (“like a rototiller”), because your chance of finding these items increases with more social connections.

But perhaps more importantly, research suggests that people who have a more diverse social network—encompassing friends, family, work, and community ties—tend to be happier, healthier, and live longer.

Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University has found that people with a variety of social relationships have less cognitive decline as they age and greater resistance to infectious disease. In a 1997 study in which he and his colleagues artificially infected subjects with a common cold virus, those people with more diverse social networks were less likely actually to get sick.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith of Brigham Young University have analyzed 148 previous studies and discovered that social relationships have as great an influence on our life expectancy as well-established risk factors like smoking or alcohol consumption.

And the benefits go well beyond personal health. CouchSurfing estimates that more than 111,000 close friendships have been created through its website, and approximately 18 percent of visits are reciprocated directly. When you talk to CouchSurfers, they regale you with stories of kindness and of meeting people they otherwise would have not met as a regular tourist. Mutz, who believes that Americans are hungry for social connection, thinks these interactions could have important effects on society at large.

“People who experience a wider radius of face-to-face contacts, encompassing members of other groups, find that they have greater tolerance for people who are different than them,” she says. “When this happens, people are better able to understand the rationale for other people’s viewpoints and are more willing to uphold the civil rights of others.”

In the web we trust

But not all forms of collaborative consumption share CouchSurfers’ face-to-face component, especially when they’re conducted through online transactions and networks. Do relationships online have similar positive effects?

Mutz became interested in this question more than 10 years ago when she bought a car online from a stranger in Ohio. Colleagues had ribbed her for sending a check to someone she’d never met face to face. But later, as she watched her car roll out of a delivery truck into her driveway, she noticed feeling “a warm glow inside” that she traced to having her positive view of humanity confirmed.

Inspired by that experience, she decided to conduct an experiment in which she induced people who’d never bought anything online to use a free coupon for a CD of their choice. Before and after the experiment, Mutz measured everyone’s levels of generalized trust—a measure of their overall trust in humanity’s goodness. Studies have shown that people with higher generalized trust are happier and healthier, and countries with higher generalized trust have happier citizens.

Unbeknownst to the people in Mutz’ experiment, the exchange was fixed so that some of them received their reward gifts promptly and in good condition while others received broken or blank CDs with no contact information for replacing them. Mutz found that those who initially had low trust levels and experienced the positive online transaction became significantly more trusting of people in general. The group that was burned, on the other hand, became less trusting.

“This was an important finding,” says Mutz, “because it shows that positive online exchanges can directly build trust.” Luckily, she adds, research indicates that most online exchanges have positive outcomes, so they hold great potential for increasing generalized trust.

To that end, collaborative markets, such as eBay, craigslist, and Swap.com, offer ways for users to check the reputations of others. CouchSurfing, for example, requires participants to respond to open-ended questions before acting as a host or surfer; after the exchange, the host rates and provides a reference for the guest, and vice versa.

“It’s not a perfect translation from how we would create trust in real life,” Fenton explains, but “the trust features combine to give a holistic view on trust, which is probably how it works in real life, too.”

Cascading cooperation

Even as sites like CouchSurfing have enabled millions of people to engage in collaborative consumption, their actual reach may be many times more than that, affecting people far removed from the original transaction.

That’s according to researchers James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University, the authors of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks.

Fowler and Christakis studied collaboration in social networks using a method called the “Public Goods Game,” where participants are given tokens and asked to anonymously contribute as many as they want to a shared pot; those tokens are then multiplied and distributed evenly among all participants. The game measures how much people are willing to collaborate (contributing some, none, or all of their tokens) in order to benefit the entire group. Fowler and Christakis wanted to see how collaboration influences future giving patterns as people move from one game to another.

In a 2010 study, Fowler and Christakis found that people who behaved in a collaborative way in the Public Goods Game—by contributing some or all of their tokens to the pot—positively influenced the collaboration of people up to three degrees removed. In other words, if a person collaborated in the game, partners in that game would give more to the shared pot in the next game with other people, then the people in that game would share more in the next game—and then the players in that game would again share more in the next game. The experimenters concluded that collaboration cascades through social networks like a cold.

“Each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met,” they write. “When [people] copy the cooperative behavior of others with whom they interact, it causes them to deviate even more from rational self-interest.”

In collaborative markets, the same principles are at work. But to participate in collaborative lifestyles, you must first “reorient your personal compass a little bit,” as Bill McKibbon writes in his book Deep Economy.

Collaborative lifestyles require you to “shed a certain amount of your hyper-individualism and replace it with a certain amount of neighborliness,” writes McKibbon. “If we let go a little bit of our individualism (at the moment, we have plenty to spare), we recover something we have been missing.”

What collaborative consumption offers, then, is a way of not only reducing strain on the environment but of using everyday interactions to build communication, connection, and trust between strangers who may eventually become friends.

Or, as another CouchSurfing co-founder, Dan Hoffer, puts it, “The more we network and the more we understand each other, the better chance we have of this world being a better place.”

There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.”

It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know.

In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states—which, in turn, means we can strengthen them. Because as the famous saying by the Canadian scientist Donald Hebb goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind.

But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain.

Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse.

For example, more activation in the left prefrontal cortex is associated with more positive emotions. So as there is greater activation in the left, front portion of your brain relative to the right, there is also greater well-being. That’s probably in large part because the left prefrontal cortex is a major part of the brain for controlling negative emotion. So if you put the breaks on the negative, you get more of the positive.

On the other hand, people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting.

For example, adults who have had that history of stress and have lost up to 25 percent of the volume of this critically important part of the brain are less able to form new memories.

So we can see that as the brain changes, the mind changes. And that takes us to the second fact, which is where things really start getting interesting.

Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes.

These changes happen in temporary and in lasting ways. In terms of temporary changes, the flow of different neurochemicals in the brain will vary at different times. For instance, when people consciously practice gratitude, they are likely getting higher flows of reward-related neurotransmitters, like dopamine. Research suggests that when people practice gratitude, they experience a general alerting and brightening of the mind, and that’s probably correlated with more of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.

Here’s another example of how changes in mental activity can produce changes in neural activity: When college students deeply in love are shown a picture of their sweetheart, their brains become more active in the caudate nucleus, a reward center of the brain. As the mind changes—that rush of love, that deep feeling of happiness and reward—correlates with activation of a particular part of the brain. When they stop looking at that picture of their sweetheart, the reward center goes back to sleep.

Now the mind also can change the brain in lasting ways. In other words, what flows through the mind sculpts the brain. I define the mind as the flow of immaterial information through the nervous system—all the signals being sent, most of which are happening forever outside of consciousness. As the mind flows through the brain, as neurons fire together in particularly patterned ways based on the information they are representing, those patterns of neural activity change neural structure.

So busy regions of the brain start stitching new connections with each other. Existing synapses—the connections between neurons that are very busy—get stronger, they get more sensitive, they start building out more receptors. New synapses form as well.

One of my favorite studies of this involved taxi cab drivers in London. To get a taxi license there, you’ve got to memorize the spaghetti-like streets of London. Well, at the end of the drivers’ training, the hippocampus of their brain—a part very involved in visual-spatial memory—is measurably thicker. In other words, neurons that fire together wire together, even to the point of being observably thicker.

This has also been found among meditators: People who maintain some kind of regular meditative practice actually have measurably thicker brains in certain key regions. One of those regions is the insula, which is involved in what’s called “interoception”—tuning into the state of your body, as well as your deep feelings. This should be no surprise: A lot of what they’re doing is practicing mindfulness of breathing, staying really present with what’s going on inside themselves; no wonder they’re using, and therefore building, the insula.

Another region is the frontal regions of the prefrontal cortex—areas involved in controlling attention. Again, this should be no surprise: They’re focusing their attention in their meditation, so they’re getting more control over it, and they’re strengthening its neural basis.

What’s more, research has also shown that it’s possible to slow the loss of our brain cells. Normally, we lose about 10,000 brain cells a day. That may sound horrible, but we were born with 1.1 trillion. We also have several thousand born each day, mainly in the hippocampus, in what’s called neurogenesis. So losing 10,000 a day isn’t that big a deal, but the net bottom line is that a typical 80 year old will have lost about 4 percent of his or her brain mass—it’s called “cortical thinning with aging.” It’s a normal process.

But in one study, researchers compared meditators and non-meditators. In the graph to the left, the meditators are the blue circles and the non-meditators are the red squares, comparing people of the same age. The non-meditators experienced normal cortical thinning in those two brain regions I mentioned above, along with a third, the somatosensory cortex.

However, the people who routinely meditated and “worked” their brain did not experience cortical thinning in those regions.

That has a big implication for an aging population: Use it or lose it, which applies to the brain as well as to other aspects of life.

That highlights an important point that I think is a major takeaway in this territory: Experience really matters. It doesn’t matter only in our moment-to-moment well-being—how it feels to be me—but it really matters in the lasting residues that it leaves behind, woven into our very being.

Which takes us to the third fact, which is the one with the most practical import.

Fact three: You can use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better.

This is known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity refers to the malleable nature of the brain, and it’s constant, ongoing. Self-directed neuroplasticity means doing it with clarity and skillfulness and intention.

The key to it is a controlled use of attention. Attention is like a spotlight, to be sure, shining on things within our awareness. But it’s also like vacuum cleaner, sucking whatever it rests upon into the brain, for better or worse.

For example, if we rest our attention routinely on what we resent or regret—our hassles, our lousy roommate, what Jean-Paul Sartre called “hell” (other people)—then we’re going to build out the neural substrates of those thoughts and feelings.

On the other hand, if we rest our attention on the things for which we’re grateful, the blessings in our life—the wholesome qualities in ourselves and the world around us; the things we get done, most of which are fairly small yet they’re accomplishments nonetheless—then we build up very different neural substrates.

I think that’s why, more than 100 years ago, before there were things like MRIs, William James. the father of psychology in America, said. “The education of attention would be an education par excellence.”

The problem, of course, is that most people don’t have very good control over their attention. Part of this is due to human nature, shaped by evolution: Our forbearers who just focused on the reflection of sunlight in the water—they got chomped by predators. But those who were constantly vigilant—they lived.

And today we are constantly bombarded with stimuli that the brain has not evolved to handle. So gaining more control over attention one way or another is really crucial, whether it’s through the practice of mindfulness, for instance, or through gratitude practices, where we count our blessings. Those are great ways to gain control over your attention because there you are, for 30 seconds or 30 minutes, coming back to focus on an object of awareness.

Taking in the good
This brings me to one of my favorite methods for deliberately using the mind to change the brain over time for the better: taking in the good.

Just having positive experiences is not enough to promote last well-being. If a person feels grateful for a few seconds, that’s nice. That’s better than feeling resentful or bitter for a few seconds. But in order to really suck that experience into the brain, we need to stay with those experiences for a longer duration of time—we need to take steps, consciously, to keep that spotlight of attention on the positive.

So, how do we actually do this? These are the three steps I recommend for taking in the good. I should note that I did not invent these steps. They are embedded in many good therapies and life practices. But I’ve tried to tease them apart and embed them in an evolutionary understanding of how the brain works.

1. Let a good fact become a good experience. Often we go through life and some good thing happens—a little thing, like we checked off an item on our To Do list, we survived another day at work, the flowers are blooming, and so forth. Hey, this is an opportunity to feel good. Don’t leave money lying on the table: Recognize that this is an opportunity to let yourself truly feel good.

2. Really savor this positive experience. Practice what any school teacher knows: If you want to help people learn something, make it as intense as possible—in this case, as felt in the body as possible—for as long as possible.

3. Finally, as you sink into this experience, sense your intent that this experience is sinking into you. Sometimes people do this through visualization, like by perceiving a golden light coming into themselves or a soothing balm inside themselves. You might imagine a jewel going into the treasure chest in your heart—or just know that this experience is sinking into you, becoming a resource you can take with you wherever you go.

Believing that children need more than academic training to be successful in life, they envisioned schools as places where students learned to better understand and manage their emotions, develop compassionate concern for others, make ethical decisions, handle conflicts constructively, and form positive relationships both inside and outside of the classroom—a set of skills known as social and emotional learning (SEL).

Goleman and his colleagues formed CASEL as a way to advance the science and research-based practice of SEL. They argued that these skills would help reduce problem behaviors like drug use, bullying, and violence in schools. More importantly, they were necessary to help children grow into responsible, contributing members of society.

Yet since its founding, CASEL has had to fight an uphill battle. Shrinking funds and a “Back to Basics” movement in education have narrowed the scope of what schools are able and willing to provide. With the advent of No Child Left Behind in 2001, schools were pressured to focus more on academic subjects and prepare students to pass standardized tests. Programs that were seen as tangential to this goal—physical education, art, and music classes, for example—often suffered the budgetary ax, while SEL was relegated to the back burner.

New research might make educators think again. A landmark study published earlier this year lends support to the SEL movement, offering perhaps the strongest evidence to date that SEL programs not only reduce problem behaviors and increase kids’ social and emotional skills but boost academic performance as well. The results come at a time when CASEL and the SEL movement is gearing up for a major expansion, possibly giving them the empirical ammunition they need to take their work to the next level.

But the story’s not so simple: Another major recent study has gotten conflicting results. The discrepancy raises questions about whether SEL works—and how it fits into today’s educational landscape.

The good news

Despite the challenges they have faced, the number of SEL programs has grown steadily over the last two decades. In 2003, CASEL sorted through more than 240 different SEL programs before publishing a report called “Safe and Sound,” which narrowed the list down to 22 recommended programs for teachers and principals. The list includes programs like Peace Works, which teaches conflict resolution skills as students work together on group projects, and Caring School Community, which uses class meetings, pairings of older and younger kids, and peer mentoring to help kids form closer, more caring relationships with one another.

Some studies have suggested that SEL programs like these reduce violence, aggression, truancy, and drug use in schools, while improving schools’ overall social climate. But critics argue that SEL programs have limited potential and have not been independently evaluated to prove they work. In addition, SEL programs can require a large effort on the part of schools and teachers, leading many to question whether the investment is worth the payoff.

It was against this backdrop that CASEL’s president and CEO, Roger Weissberg, recently teamed up with Joseph Durlak, a professor of psychology at Loyola University, to conduct one of the largest analyses of the SEL research to date. With Durlak as the lead researcher, the team looked at 213 studies, covering school-wide SEL programs affecting more than 270,000 kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. The researchers wanted to see how participation in SEL programs affected kids’ social and emotional skills, academic achievement, and problem behaviors like bullying.

The results, published earlier this year in the journal Child Development, were encouraging: They suggest that SEL programs significantly increase social and emotional skills, positive attitudes toward oneself and others, and kind, helpful (or “pro-social”) behaviors in children of all ages, while reducing kids’ behavior problems and emotional distress. In addition, when researchers followed up at least six months after an SEL program had ended, they found that those positive changes were lasting.

According to Weissberg, who in addition to being CASEL’s CEO is also a professor of psychology and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the real surprise was in the area of academic achievement. For kids exposed to SEL programs, academic achievement increased by 11 percentage points. This means that if a class were averaging 50 points on a standardized test, the average score would go up to 61 points after participating in an SEL program—an educationally meaningful increase, according to Weissberg.

“If you’d asked me before the study, I wouldn’t have believed it,” says Weissberg. “It’s what we call a ‘twofer’: We showed that SEL programs not only improve social and emotional skills, they also improve academic performance.”

Another important finding from Durlak’s study is that simply teaching SEL isn’t enough to guarantee success—it matters how the program is designed and executed. For example, they found when programs provide kids with an opportunity to rehearse and practice SEL skills—like positive communication or problem-solving—through role-playing and other activities, they are more successful than programs that rely on passive modes of learning, like lectures or books. In addition, those SEL programs that have manuals or lesson plans outlining a sequenced, step-by-step training approach and target specific SEL skills are more successful than those that don’t.

These lessons are invaluable to advocates of SEL, according to Brian Flay, a professor of public health at Oregon State University, Corvallis. Flay has studied the effectiveness of an SEL program called Positive Action, which was developed by his wife, Carol Allred, a researcher who also works at OSU.

“The Durlak study is particularly helpful because there were enough subjects and studies to have statistical power,” he says. “We can be more confident that the interventions we’re making are really affecting the groups studied.”

At the same time, he adds, “We can see that if SEL programs are not well-structured, they don’t work well.”

The bad news

While these results are encouraging to SEL researchers and practitioners, not all large-scale studies have provided such hearty endorsements of SEL lately. Last fall, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, released a report that evaluated seven different SEL programs, including Positive Action, and the results were underwhelming.

In the study, for each SEL program, a research team compared a group of five to seven schools running that program with other schools in the same district not employing the program. When the researchers looked at their results, they saw no significant differences in social and emotional literacy between the schools that received SEL training and those that didn’t, and no increases in academic achievement or decreases in problematic behavior. In other words, the SEL programs appeared to be duds.

“We were pretty surprised by the findings,” says Tamara Haegerich, one of the authors of the report, who is currently a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which co-sponsored the study. “We knew from previous evaluations of the programs that they can work and, frankly, we were hoping for significant effects.”

The report serves as a contrast to the Durlak study. And, since it was conducted by an outside agency with little to no connection to the individual SEL programs, it may seem less biased in its results.

“If you do studies to evaluate your own program, then there is a strong motivation to find positive outcomes,” admits Weissberg. But he doesn’t think that was the case with Durlak’s study.

“When we did the meta-analysis, we asked Durlak to do it specifically because he’s not with CASEL,” he says. “Also, the studies we looked at were the work of other people. Bias just doesn’t enter into meta-analysis quite as easily as in other types of studies.”

Several SEL researchers, including Mark Greenberg of Penn State and Maurice Elias of Rutgers University, have suggested that discrepancies between the two studies can best be explained by problems with the IES study’s methods. For example, IES researchers couldn’t be sure that the supposedly non-SEL schools in their study weren’t using some SEL techniques in their classrooms. This could explain why larger differences weren’t found in the analysis: Kids in the comparison schools may have benefited from some form of SEL instruction even if they didn’t receive a formal program.

In addition, Flay and Greenberg both claim that the IES study was “underpowered”—meaning that researchers did not use statistical measures suited to the kind of data they collected—which would help explain why they found no differences between the schools receiving the programs and those that didn’t. When Flay and his colleagues reanalyzed the IES data using other statistical measures, he says they did find significant improvements in the behavior and attitudes of kids receiving the Positive Action program.

“I think the IES did a disservice to the field, to do an underpowered study and then put it out to the world that SEL doesn’t work,” he says.

Haegerich doesn’t dispute these criticisms. Still, she says, the fact that it produced no significant results and contradicted years of prior research points to at least one important conclusion.

“We need to have more information about what really works in these programs,” says Haegerich. “We wouldn’t want to make policy decisions based on just one study.”

In the meantime, Haegerich says researchers have already identified some programs schools can feel comfortable using. She points to the Blueprints for Violence Prevention website, which lists programs that have been vetted by an independent board of researchers to ensure that the programs listed there have met strict evaluation criteria.

A tipping point?

But SEL is about more than violence prevention, according to Mark Greenberg, whose PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) program is listed on the Blueprints site. Greenberg says many SEL programs market themselves as violence prevention programs, but that sells them short; they are as much about promoting positive behaviors—like compassion, empathy, and altruism—as reducing negative ones. The Durlak study and prior studies bear this out.

The fact that these two large-scale studies were undertaken in the first place suggests that the SEL movement is building momentum. Indeed, now armed with evidence that SEL also increases academic performance, Weissberg and other proponents are pushing to get SEL into classrooms across the country.

To that end, CASEL launched an initiative last spring to implement SEL programs district-wide in several large schools systems around the country. CASEL has already begun implementing programs in Anchorage, Alaska, Austin, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio; researchers plan to evaluate the success of these programs to guide expansion to five other districts.

In support of this initiative, the New York-based NoVo Foundation has committed $4 million in funding to CASEL this year, and it has budgeted a total of $7 million for direct funding to the collaborating school districts over the next three years.

The manager of NoVo’s SEL initiative, Pamela McVeagh-Lally, says the time is right for this broad investment in SEL because education in the U.S. is in desperate need of a course correction.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” she says. “Our education system has become too focused on standardized testing, even though neuroscience tells us that, as humans, our cognitive and emotional development are inextricably linked.”

In addition to spreading SEL across large school districts, the initiative seeks to strengthen the network of universities and programs offering SEL training and research, and to promote widespread state and federal legislation to support SEL education.

CASEL and NoVo came a step closer to achieving this last goal in July, when House Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL) and two Democratic colleagues introduced a bill in Congress—H.R. 2437—which would provide support to train teachers and principals in proven SEL practices. Weissberg hopes the bill will be incorporated into the No Child Left Behind legislation, which is currently being reviewed for revision and reauthorization. 

Yet even as CASEL works toward greater acceptance of SEL, Weissberg continues to press for more and better research on SEL’s application. For instance, he says he’d like to see research like the IES study and Durlak’s study spur efforts to improve social and emotional education by tailoring it to specific groups and problems, such as high school kids abusing drugs.

And because so many teachers and schools have limited time and money, he argues that SEL researchers should try to integrate SEL into the rest of the academic curriculum. He points to programs like Facing History and Ourselves, which is writing SEL into history curricula, making it easier for teachers to incorporate SEL into their classes, especially in middle and high school, where they don’t have the same students in their classrooms all day.

“It isn’t magic,” says Weissberg. “It can happen via good, evidenced-based programs, and should be implemented as well as possible. Let’s keep learning so we can get better and better at it.”

On the train from Washington to Philadelphia, while on my way to my father’s memorial funeral service, I sat down next to an interesting fellow who worked with young boys, particularly those in jail and prison, as part of an inner-city project in Washington, DC. He told me this story.

A young kid, 14 years old, wanted to get into a gang. The way that he proved himself to enter the gang was to shoot somebody—it was an initiation rite. He shot this kid he didn’t know. He was apprehended, brought to trial, and at the end of the trial, convicted.

Just before he is taken away in handcuffs, the mother of the boy who was shot stands up, looks him in the eye, and says, “I’m going to kill you,” and then sits down.

After being in prison for a year or so, the boy is visited by that mother, and he’s kind of frightened. She says, “I’ve just got to talk with you.” They have a little bit of conversation, and as she leaves him she says, “Do you need anything? Cigarettes?” and leaves him a little money.

She starts to visit him. She goes every few months, and over the course of three or four years, she starts visiting him more regularly, talking to him.

When he’s about to get out at the age of 17 or 18, she asks, “What are you going to do?” and he says, “I have no idea. I got no family, no nothing.” And she says, “Well I’ve got a friend who has a little factory—maybe I can help you get a job.”

So she arranges that with the parole officer. Then she asks, “Where are you going to stay?” and he says, “I don’t know where I’m going to go.” And she says, “Well I have a spare room where you can stay with me.” So he comes and stays in the spare room, takes this job, and after about six months, she says, “I really need to talk with you—come into the living room. Sit down, let’s talk.”

She looks at him and says, “Remember that day in court when you were convicted of murdering my son for no reason at all, to get into your gang, and I stood up and said, ‘I’m going to kill you?’”

“Yes ma’am, I’ll never forget that day,” he says.

And she looks back and says, “Well, I have. You see, I didn’t want a boy who could kill in cold blood like that to continue to exist in this world. So I set about visiting you, bringing you presents, bringing you things, and taking care of you. And now I let you come into my house and got you a job and a place to live because I don’t have anybody anymore. My son is gone and he was the only person that I was living with. I set about changing you, and you’re not that same person anymore.

But I don’t have anybody, and I want to know if you’d stay here. I’m in need of a son, and I want to know if I can adopt you.”

And he said yes and she did.

What is forgiveness?

What is this human capacity for forgiveness? What is the human capacity for dignity no matter what the circumstances of life?

As this story shows, forgiveness is not just about the other. It’s really for the beauty of your soul. It’s for your own capacity to fulfill your life.

Forgiveness is, in particular, the capacity to let go, to release the suffering, the sorrows, the burdens of the pains and betrayals of the past, and instead to choose the mystery of love. Forgiveness shifts us from the small separate sense of ourselves to a capacity to renew, to let go, to live in love. As the Bhagavad Gita says, “If you want to see the brave, look to those who can return love for hatred. If you want to see the heroic, look to those who can forgive.”

With forgiveness we are unwilling to attack or wish harm on anyone, including ourselves. And without forgiveness, life would be unbearable. It’s hard to imagine a world without forgiveness, because we would be chained to the suffering of the past and have only to repeat it over and over again. There would be no release.

It’s not easy. “Love and forgiveness is not for the faint-hearted,” wrote [the Indian mystic] Meher Baba. But someone has to stand up and say, “It stops with me. I will not pass on to my children this sorrow.” Whether it’s in Ireland or Israel, someone has to say, “I will accept the betrayal and the suffering, and I will bare it, but I will not retaliate. I will not pass this onto the next generation, and to endless generations of grandchildren.”

I remember a woman coming to see me amidst a terrible divorce. Unfortunately, her ex-husband was a lawyer and a very good one, so he wangled most of the money and a lot of the custody of their children. She was just desperate and struggled in all these ways to protect herself. Finally, she said to me, “You know, I simply am not going to bequeath to my children a legacy of hate. I will not do it. I will figure a way through this and I will not hate him—the bastard.” Humor helps, it really does.

When someone betrays you, you can hate them, or at some point, you can say it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it to live day after day with hatred. Because for one thing, that person who betrayed you could be in Hawaii right now having a nice vacation—and you’re here hating them! Who’s suffering then?

As Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate, writes: “Suffering confers neither privileges nor rights. It all depends on how you use it. If you use it to increase the anguish of yourself or others, you are degrading, even betraying it. Yet the day will come when we shall understand that suffering can also elevate human beings. God help us to bear our suffering well.”

Not quick or sentimental

So here is a little bit about the architecture of forgiveness. First, forgiveness does not mean that we condone what happened in the past. It’s not forgive and forget. In fact, forgiveness might also include quite understandably the resolve to protect yourself and never let this happen again.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that you have to speak or relate to a person who betrayed you, necessarily. It’s not about them. It doesn’t condone their behavior—it can stand up for justice and say “no more.”

And forgiveness is not sentimental, or quick. You can’t paper things over and smile and say, “I forgive.” It is a deep process of the heart. And in the process, you need to honor the betrayal of yourself or others—the grief, the anger, the hurt, the fear. It can take a long time. Sometimes when you do a forgiveness practice, you realize that you’re never going to forgive that person. And never takes a while.

Forgiveness is also not for anybody else. There’s a story of two ex-prisoners of war. One says to the other, “Have you forgiven your captors yet?” And the second says “No, never.” And the first one then says “Well, they still have you in prison, don’t they?”

Similarly, I remember sitting with the Dalai Lama and some Tibetan nuns who had survived years of imprisonment and torture. We were part of a meeting that I was running of ex-prisoners from all across the United States who’d been using meditation, contemplative practices, mindfulness, compassion, and so forth to change their lives.

With us were guys who had just been released after 25 years in Texas state prison or 18 years in Ohio in a maximum security prison. And they were sitting with the Dali Lama and these little nuns who were imprisoned during their teenagers years for saying their prayers out loud.

The nuns were asked, “Were you ever afraid?” And they answered, “Yes, we were terribly afraid. And what we were afraid of was that we would end up hating our guards—that we would lose our compassion. That is the thing we most feared.”

And they sat there, these sweet young nuns, and I remember this one guy who had been in prison for 18 years in Ohio saying, “I’ve seen some brave folks in my day, and I ain’t seen anything like you young ladies.”

The principles of forgiveness

One of the interesting things about forgiveness is that you find it in all different traditions. There are African indigenous practices of forgiveness. There is of course the Christian teachings of turning the other cheek and Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness. There is the mercy of Allah in Islam.

What’s unique about Buddhism—because Buddhism is more a science of mind than a religion, although it functions as a religion for some people—is that it offers practices in trainings. It doesn’t say just “turn the other cheek” or “remember the mercy of Allah,” but it offers a thousand different trainings: trainings in mindfulness, in compassion, in forgiveness, in lovingkindness, in compassion for those who are different than you, and so on.

In this way, Buddhist psychology shows an ancient understanding of “neuroplasticity,” the idea that our neurosystem is always changing, even to the very end of life. So many of the modern neuroscience studies that researchers like Richard Davidson are doing, using fMRI machines and the like, validate this idea of neuroplasticity. Indeed, in Buddhism, the teaching in three words is: “Not Always So.” Things are always changing.

The Buddha was a list maker: the Eightfold Path, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, the Four Nobel Truths. Similarly, here are 12 principles connected with the process of forgiveness.

One: Understand what forgiveness is and what it is not. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not condoning, it’s not a papering over, it’s not for the other person, it’s not sentimental.

Two: Sense the suffering in yourself, of still holding onto this lack of forgiveness for yourself or for another. Start to feel that it’s not compassionate; that you have this great suffering that’s not in your own best interest. So you actually sense the weight of not forgiving.

Three: Reflect on the benefits of a loving heart. [Buddhist texts say]: Your dreams become sweeter, you waken more easily, men and women will love you, angels and devils will love you. If you lose things they will be returned. People will welcome you everywhere when you are forgiving and loving. Your thoughts become pleasant. Animals will sense this and love you. Elephants will bow as you go by—try it at the zoo!

Four: Discover that it is not necessary to be loyal to your suffering. This is a big one. W are so loyal to our suffering, focusing on the trauma and the betrayal of “what happened to me.” OK, it happened. It was horrible. But is that what defines you? “Live in joy” says the Buddha. Look at the Dali Lama, who bears the weight of the oppression in Tibet and the loss of his culture, and yet he’s also a very happy and joyful person. He says, ‘They have taken so much. They have destroyed temples, burned our texts, disrobed our monks and nuns, limited our culture and destroyed it in so many ways. Why should I also let them take my joy and peace of mind?’

Five: Understand that forgiveness is a process. There’s a story of a man who wrote to the IRS, “I haven’t been able to sleep knowing that I cheated on my taxes. Since I failed to fully disclose my earnings last year on my return, I’ve enclosed a bank check for $2,000 dollars. If I still can’t sleep, I’ll send the rest.” It’s a training, it’s a process, layer by layer—that is how the body and the psyche work.

Six: Set your intention. There is a whole complex and profound teaching in Buddhist psychology about the power of both short-term and long-term intention. When you set your intention, it sets the compass of your heart and your psyche. By having that intention, you make obstacles become surmountable because you know where you are going. whether it is in business, a relationship, a love affair, a creative activity, or in the work of the heart. Setting your intention is really important and powerful.

Seven: Learn the inner and outer forms of forgiveness. There are meditation practices for the inner forms, but for the outer forms, there are also certain kinds of confessions and making amends.

Eight: Start the easiest way, with whatever opens your heart. Maybe it’s your dog and maybe it’s the Dali Lama and maybe it’s your child which is the thing or person that you most love and can forgive. Then you bring in someone who is a little more difficult to forgive. Only when the heart is all the way open do you take on something difficult.

Nine: Be willing to grieve. And grief, as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has spelled out, consists of bargaining, loss, fear, and anger. You have to be willing to go through this process in some honorable way, as I’m sure Nelson Mandela did. Indeed, he has described how [before he could forgive his captors] he was outraged and angry and hurt and all the things that anyone would feel. So be willing to grieve, and then to let go.

Ten: Forgiveness includes all the dimensions of our life. Forgiveness is work of the body. It’s work of the emotions. It’s work of the mind. And it’s interpersonal work done through our relationships. 

Eleven: Forgiveness involves a shift of identity. There is in us an undying capacity for love and freedom that is untouched by what happens to you. To come back to this true nature is the work of forgiveness.

Twelve: Forgiveness involves perspective. We are in this drama in life that is so much bigger than our ‘little stories.’ When we can open this perspective, we see it is not just your hurt, but the hurt of humanity. Everyone who loves is hurt in some way. Everyone who enters the marketplace gets betrayed. The loss is not just your pain, it is the pain of being alive. Then you feel connected to everyone in this vastness.

I’ll end with this brief story about Maha Ghosananda who was the Gandhi of Cambodia—a very dear friend of mine and a good friend of the Dalai Lama’s. He led peace marches through Cambodia, through the minefields, for 15 years. He would walk people back to their villages who wanted to return, chanting lovingkindness and forgiveness the whole way. Through the jungles people would shoot at them. He would have hundreds of people behind him, and he would be beating a drum or ringing a bell and singing the song of lovingkindness. He said that if we can chant lovingkindness 100 miles back to your village, you will be safe. He did it over and over again.

I worked with him in the UN refugee camp on the border of Cambodia in the early years of that genocide. This camps had 50,000 people in a horrible, hot, dry rice plain, surrounded by barbed wire, and it was the camp that had the most Khmer Rouge in it underground.

Ghosananda asked if we could build a Buddhist temple in the central square, just a simple bamboo room and a platform. The UN said OK. So we got materials together, built this temple, and then invited everyone to come. The Khmer Rouge underground said, ‘If anyone goes to this temple, when we get back in Cambodia’—which was only 10 miles back across the border—‘when we get out of here, you will be shot.’

So we didn’t know if anybody would come. We went around the camp and rang a bell that morning, just as you would ring the temple bell, and 25,000 people gathered and filled the square. And Maha Ghosananda got up on this little platform—most of the monks were killed, 19 of the 20 people in his family were killed, 95 percent of the monks in the country were executed, all the intellectuals were killed. He got up and looked out at this sea of people. They hadn’t seen a monk in 10 years. The faces of trauma and shock and loss—what do you say?

He began to chant in Cambodian and in Sanskrit this simple chant that is one of the first verses of the Buddhist teachings. It goes, “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.” And he chanted it over and over again: Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. Slowly the voices began to pick up and chant with him, and pretty soon 25,000 people were singing this and weeping because it had been 10 years since they had heard the Dharma, the Truth, the Way.

And what I saw is that he spoke a truth that was even bigger than their sufferings; even bigger than their sorrows. This is the ancient and eternal law.

Altruistic behaviors can take on many forms, even among non-human animals. For example, they may warn neighbors of nearby predators or quell a dispute between two individuals fighting one another. But perhaps the most altruistic behavior of all is to care for an orphaned offspring as though it were one of your own.

I am by no means the first researcher to discover a case of adoption in the wild. It has been observed in over 60 different species of mammals, from mice to elephants to whales. Nevertheless, adoptions in the wild are quite rare. What can explain these seemingly altruistic acts?

Animal behaviorists have been trying to understand the motivation behind altruism for decades, with little success. Some suggest that acts of kindness do not square with our Darwinian view of natural selection. Others argue that animals are simply compassionate creatures, willing to help others even while incurring a cost to themselves.

Darwin’s law of natural selection, however, states that only the individuals who are most fit for their environment pass on their genes to the next generation. The “evolutionary game” is to increase copies of your genes at the expense of those of other individuals.

Adoption, then, does not seem to make sense under this law: By adopting another female’s offspring, you are passing on her genes instead of your own. In addition, you might be putting your own offspring at risk by having one more mouth to feed. Why, then, would a female choose to raise another female’s offspring?

My own research on North American red squirrels, a species known to be non-social, has shown that adoption can indeed be explained by Darwinian evolution. My findings challenge rather simplistic notions of animals as being either “selfish” or “altruistic.” Instead, our research suggests that selfish and selfless behaviors are often deeply, perhaps paradoxically, intertwined.

My colleagues and I have found that red squirrels do not treat all orphaned young equally. In fact, we found that red squirrels never adopt unrelated orphans but do adopt related orphans as long as they are related closely enough for the benefits of adoption to outweigh the costs. Relatives share a portion of their genes; the more closely related they are, the higher the proportion of genes shared. Adopting a relative means the surrogate female is helping to pass on the genes she has in common with her relative.

But there’s a catch: While females adopt relatives to increase the copies of their genes, adding additional young may reduce the rest of the litter’s odds for survival. Indeed, we discovered that surrogate females do in fact become more selective when they have more mouths to feed. That is, as her litter size increases, she requires that orphans be a closer relative to her before she’ll adopt them.

For example, if a female already has two pups, then she might adopt her niece or nephew. But when she has three pups, she would only adopt her grandchild or younger sibling, as they share more genes than her niece or nephew would.

Females, then, are forced to calculate the costs and benefits of adoption in a sophisticated way: They only adopt when the proportion of shared genes is high enough to make up for lowering the odds for survival of their young.

This suggests that what looks like altruistic behavior at first glance may not in fact be purely altruistic. If squirrels simply adopt to “be nice,” why do they not adopt unrelated orphans? By adopting only orphans related to themselves, red squirrels force us to consider that perhaps being nice may simply be a selfish means to increase one’s genetic fitness. Essentially, you can pass on your genes by having young of your own or by helping your relatives raise their young.

What about humans? Adopting children is popular in our culture and the majority of adoptions are between unrelated individuals.

Our human ancestors lived in small clans, where adoptions were most likely to have occurred between related individuals. Human nature is defined by our complex social interactions and strong emotional bonds.

Today, most couples who adopt children do so for a multitude of reasons. However, what motivates us to adopt an unfamiliar child remains unclear. Are we altruistically trying to offer another human being different opportunities in life, or are we selfishly filling an instinctual need to raise a child? Do we feel good about ourselves simply by knowing we helped someone in need or because we are seen as generous by others?

I would wager that adoptive parents maintain that they adopted in order to improve their child’s welfare. But how do we separate feelings of pride in our children from pride in ourselves for raising wonderful children? Perhaps we are simply programmed to pass on our genes by raising children and doing so gives us feelings of joy. Indeed, these feelings of joy might be essential to motivating us to become parents and sustain our species.

This does not suggest that compassion and altruism are an illusion. But it does suggest that they arise for complicated reasons. Ultimately, the underlining motivation of these behaviors, and the reasons for their persistence, may be due to a mixture of selfish and altruistic tendencies—tendencies that ensure the survival of our genes.

For years I worked with families who were very abusive to their children. Over time, I came to realize that all of the suffering that the children collected—whether it was domestic violence or child abuse or neglect—was a result of the absence of empathy in the parent.

There wasn’t one of those parents who woke up and decided, “Today is the day I’m going to hurt my child.” These were not monsters; these were people who I loved, actually.

I remember working with a group of teenage mothers who had all lived through sexual or physical abuse as children and were now struggling with addiction. They had great difficulty empathizing with their children. When the children would fall down, the mothers would say, “No pain, no gain.” And this could be a little toddler learning how to walk.

I saw that if you haven’t experienced love, it’s very difficult to know how to love.

So what can we do to break this cycle of abuse and neglect?

My idea was to focus on the attachment relationship between parent and child. I believe that we inherit the capacity for empathy—that we are all intuitively empathic—but this capacity can wither on the vine if a child never experiences empathy in the attachment relationship with his or her parents. So why not learn from the attachment relationship?

That idea motivated me to launch Roots of Empathy in 1996. Roots of Empathy is a classroom-based program for children in kindergarten through grade eight. Our mission is to build more caring, peaceful, and civil societies by raising levels of empathy in children.

Really the heart of the program is bringing the attachment relationship into the classroom: Every month for nine months, we bring an infant into the classroom with its parents, accompanied by a Roots of Empathy instructor. Children watch love grow over a whole school year; they watch confidence and security and emotional attunement between parent and child grow as well.

In addition to the family visits, the Roots of Empathy instructor visits the classroom days before the family visit, to help the children prepare for it, and days after the family visit, to help the children reflect on it, for a total of 27 Roots of Empathy visits over the year.

Through these visits we teach emotional literacy. Every time the baby demonstrates some emotion, the children talk about the baby’s intention and what the baby must be feeling. They are learning the language for their feelings.

I remember once when we had children in a fourth grade class talking about a time when they felt sad; we were helping them understand that we all feel sad and lonely at times, but we can help one another. And this little girl, out of the blue, said, “I felt sad when my mommy gave me away because we didn’t afford good food.”

Nobody said anything at the time. But the next day, most of the children in the class came with food. The majority of the children quietly in the cloakroom gave the food to the little girl. But what was so poignant was how some of the children said, “This is for your mommy, so your mommy can get you back.”

Clearly we’ve not begun to plumb the depths of the human heart, and I think it beats most deeply in our children. Very often little children are more emotionally literate than we are.

I think we in North America are emotionally illiterate. We worry about our traditional literacy rates, but we should be more worried, I think, about our emotional literacy, our ability to connect to ourselves and one another. In schools, we teach children to read, but if we don’t teach them to relate to others, they will be lost in life—lost in their relationships, they will not have success in their jobs, and we will not have peace in the world. It’s our mountains and our continents and our oceans that divide us. But it is our similarities through our emotions that connect us.

In Roots of Empathy, children can see their similarities to others through the baby. When children observe every dimension of “their” baby—every hiccup, every smile, every anxious glance—they learn about the baby’s temperament traits.

For example, is the baby high intensity or low intensity, and what does that mean? The baby cries frequently, loudly, and long—that’s an intense baby. This helps the children to understand themselves and gives them permission to love themselves if they are intense, because we all agree we love the baby, whether the baby is high intensity or low intensity.

“Oh I think you’re very intense, Billy,” one child said to another after a visit from their baby.

“Why do you think I’m very intense?” asked Billy.

“Because you have meltdowns all the time.”

“Yes,” said Billy, “so I’m like our baby! Pretty cool!”

Another thing we do in Roots of Empathy is keep an emotion barometer, where the children say whether they’re feeling great, not so great, or in the middle. Then we look at the whole list and ask the children what they observe. Nobody particularly notices who said what, but they’re astounded if they are one of the children who isn’t feeling too happy that day and they see there are other people who aren’t happy. There’s such isolation in our negative feelings: It’s easy to be happy together, but it’s hard for a child to talk about being lonely and scared.

And the lovely thing that happens when children have insights into how another person feels—empathy—is that it provides a break against aggression.

Sure enough, we know from independent research on Roots of Empathy that its greatest effect is in decreasing aggression among children—a hugely important result, because aggression is the gateway to all other kinds of bad outcomes for children. Many people have applauded the program for combating bullying. I had never intended for it to be an anti-bullying program; it was a happy accident that it did reduce all kinds of bullying.

The research also suggests we are improving children’s emotional literacy. When compared with other students, Roots of Empathy students demonstrate significantly better understanding of their own and others’ emotions.

What’s more, the research shows that Roots of Empathy creates more caring and supportive children—they’re kinder, more likely to share and help their classmates. They also feel more supported by their classmate and teacher, and they feel a greater sense of autonomy than other children do.

Amazingly, students at every grade level continue to show these improvements in their behavior three years after completing Roots of Empathy.

Children in Roots of Empathy also have much more knowledge than other children about parenting and the needs of babies. So many parents with whom I used to work shook their babies to paralysis, deafness, blindness, or death simply because they didn’t understand that babies cry because of their emotional needs, not just their physical needs—they could be crying just because they wanted to be held. If children really can understand the emotional life of a baby, they can parent beautifully as adults.

After starting as a pilot program with 150 children in Toronto 15 years ago, Roots of Empathy has now spread across Canada and across the world. This past school year, more than 47,000 children participated in Canada, in about 1,900 classrooms and 1,300 schools. In the fall of 2011, every Canadian province will be taking part in the program. It is delivered in English and French and reaches rural, urban, and remote communities, including Aboriginal communities in Canada. To date, Roots of Empathy has reached more than 363,000 children across the country. We have also launched a “sister” program, Seeds of Empathy, for younger children, three to five years of age, in childcare centers.

We also have programs in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, and Germany. The program is just now taking off in the United States, with a program in Seattle and new ones launching in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area this fall. We are planning to reach other countries soon.

When we pair some of these Roots of Empathy classrooms—when Aboriginal children in northern Ontario communicate with Maori children in New Zealand, for instance—they see how very alike they are. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their babies. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their families. They say exactly the same kinds of things about their friends.

And at the end of the year, when they make wishes for their babies, as all Roots of Empathy classes do at the end of the year, they wish for the same things. And what they wish should be on the policy tables of every country on the planet. They wish that the baby will be happy. They wish that the baby will be healthy. They wish that the baby will always have a good friend. They wish that the baby won’t have asthma—that’s clearly the little children with asthma. They wish that the baby will never be bullied—that’s some child who has suffered. They wish that the baby will have a daddy, and they wish that the mommy won’t have to go to work.

Every classroom has an armada of broken hearts, and poor teachers have such an incredible job. I had one teacher call me up last year. “I didn’t want to have Roots of Empathy,” he said. “I don’t know anything about babies—what did I want a baby in my classroom for? But my principal made me have it.”

“Really, I don’t know what to say to you,” he continued. “But I had intended to retire in June, and now because of Roots of Empathy I’m teaching for two more years to catch up on all those children I didn’t see.”

There’s no child that we should ever give up on. What Roots of Empathy offers is a pedagogy of hope, helping children find their voice—often through art—to share what’s in their heart.

Childhood is a very short season, and we know so much can be done to allow children to lead happy and productive lives. In the folds of a child’s brain, we have the potential for compassion, we have the makings of dreams, and we have without question the hope of tomorrow. Because it’s really on the breath of little children that the moral future of the universe rests.

I study positive emotions.

I realize this can sound frivolous, especially at a time when we’re facing widespread unemployment, when we’re sending soldiers into repeated tours of duty, when we’re confronted with a global environmental crisis.

But after two decades of research on positive emotions, I’ve come to realize that understanding positive emotions can help us address these problems and more.

I’m not just talking about jump-for-joy positive emotions. There are a whole range of positive emotions out there, including feelings of gratitude, feelings of serenity and tranquility, and feelings of love and closeness for the people we care for.

My colleagues and I have learned how positive emotions change the way our minds and our bodies work—change the very nature of who we are, down to our cells—transforming our outlook on life and our ability to confront challenges. Indeed, the science of positive emotions is key to helping people deal with adversity and live a meaningful life.

Far from being trivial, we’ve found that positive emotions broaden our awareness in ways that reshape who we are, and they build up our useful traits in ways that bring out the best in us, helping us become the best versions of ourselves.

Positive emotions open our mind

In my research, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two core truths about all of the different kinds of positive emotions.

The first is that they open us: They literally change the boundaries of our minds and our hearts and change our outlook on our environment.

Now let me get poetic here for a moment. Imagine you’re a water lily. It’s early dawn and your petals are closed in around your face. If you can see anything at all, it’s just a little spot of sunlight.

But as the sun rises in the sky, things begin to change. Your blinders around your face begin to open and your world quite literally expands. You can see more. Your world is larger.

Just as the warmth of sunlight opens flowers, the warmth of positivity opens our minds and hearts. It changes our visual perspective at a really basic level, along with our ability to see our common humanity with others.

We know this because we’ve done studies where we induce positive emotions in some people—by giving them a gift, making them have a positive experience, or showing them images of cute puppies or a beautiful sunset—but not others. In one of these studies in my own lab, we showed people a figure (see image on the left) and asked which of two comparison figures most resemble it. As you can see, one of the figures (the three triangles) resembles the top figure in its general configuration, while the other (the four squares) resembles it in its local details.

What we found was if we induced positive emotions in people, they were more likely to step back and say the figure of the three triangles was most similar to the top figure. They were seeing the big picture.

One of my favorite studies along these lines comes out of Adam Anderson’s lab at the University of Toronto. The researchers observed people’s brain activity while showing them photos of a face placed against a house in the background (see image on the left). They asked the people to judge whether the face was male or female but to ignore everything else in the picture.

There’s a part of the brain that lights up when we see a human face, and there’s also a brain region that lights up when we think about physical places, like a house. Which part would light up here?

The researchers found that when you induce a positive emotion, the “place” area lit up—people couldn’t help but pick up on the context of the photo, even when they were told to ignore it. When people were feeling neutral or negative emotions, they didn’t see the house at all.

This suggests that people are inescapably attuned to context when they’re experiencing positive emotions. They have a wider awareness, which may explain why people have a better memory for peripheral details when they’re remembering episodes that were positive.

If positive emotions open our awareness and increase the expanse of our peripheral vision, that means that they help us see more possibilities. And there are lots of benefits that flow from this.

• People are more creative when they’re experiencing positive emotions; when solving a problem, they come up with more ideas of what they might do next. This enhanced creativity has been directly linked to having a wider awareness.
• People are more likely to be resilient. I have conducted a whole line of research showing that people are able to bounce back more quickly from adversity when they’re experiencing positive emotions.
• Kids’ academic performance improves. Research has shown that kids do better on math tests or other tests if they’re just asked to sit and think of a positive memory before they take the test.
• There are medical benefits. Really neat research shows doctors make better medical decisions when they’re given a bag of candy—a really small way of inducing positive emotions. Keep that in mind the next time you go to your doctor’s office!
• Positive emotions make us more socially connected to others, even across groups. My former students Kareem Johnson and I found that positive emotions allow us to look past racial and cultural differences and see the unique individual behind those traits. They help us see the universal qualities we share with others, not our differences. And other experiments show that if you induce positive emotions, people are more trusting and come to better win-win situations in negotiations.

So positive emotions don’t just help us see the glass half full—that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. They also help us see larger forms of interconnection. They help us see the big picture.

Positive emotions transform us

The second core truth about positive emotions is that they transform us for the better—they bring out the best in us.

Now one interesting fact about all living things is that scientists estimate that, on average, we replace one percent of our cells each day. That’s another one percent tomorrow, about 30 percent by next month, and by next season, 100 percent of our cells from today—that’s one way of looking at it. So maybe it’s no coincidence that it takes three months or so to learn a new habit or to make a lifestyle change; maybe we need to be teaching our new cells because we can’t teach an old cell new tricks.

But one of the things I think is even more exciting is that the latest science suggests that the pace of cell renewal and the form of cell renewal doesn’t just follow some predetermined DNA script. Our emotions affect that level of cellular change.

What this suggests is that if we increase our daily diet of positive emotions, we broaden our awareness over time and change who we become in the future.

With this in mind, I was inspired by some of the newest research on meditation to look into how people might use meditation to elevate their basic levels of positive emotion—the amount of positive emotions they feel day-in, day-out.

In particular, I looked at a form of meditation called loving-kindness meditation, sometimes called metta, which asks people to take that warm, tender feeling they already have toward a loved one and learn to generate it toward other people, ranging from themselves to people with whom they have difficulties and eventually to all sentient beings on Earth.

People in my studies were novice meditators, but as they learned loving-kindness meditation over the course of eight weeks, their daily levels of positive emotions subtly shifted upwards. And this boost in positive emotions helped them build some important resources.

One of those resources was mindfulness, their ability to stay in the present moment and maintain awareness of their thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.

Also, their close and trusting relationships with others improved from the time they started learning meditation to a few weeks after the training ended.

We also saw improvements in people’s resilience—their ability to bounce back from difficulties and effectively manage the challenges they encountered—and reductions in aches and pains and other signs of physical illness.

These results suggest that if we increase our daily diet of positive emotions, we emerge three months later as more resilient, more socially connected versions of ourselves.

The positivity ratio

So positive emotions can clearly carry some profound benefits. But how much positivity do we need in our lives to reap these benefits—how much is enough?

My research with Marcel Losada has actually been closing in on an answer to this question. We’ve concluded that a ratio of at least three-to-one—three positive emotions for every negative emotion—serves as a tipping point, which will help determine whether you languish in life, barely holding on, or flourish, living a life ripe with possibility, remarkably resilient to hard times.

Without going into all the math behind this ratio, I want to stress that this isn’t an arbitrary number. It emerges from a wide ranging analysis we conducted, including analysis of flourishing business teams that we then tested in flourishing individuals and compared to family researcher John Gottman’s work on flourishing marriages. In each case, we found that positivity ratios above three-to-one are associated with doing extraordinary well.

Ratios of about two-to-one are what most of us experience on a daily basis; people who suffer from depression and other emotional disorders are down near one-to-one or lower.

It’s important to note that the ratio is not three-to-zero. This is not about eliminating all negative emotions. Part of this prescription is the idea that negative emotions are actually necessary.

I actually think a sailboat metaphor is appropriate here. Rising from the sailboat is the enormous mast, which allows the sail to catch the wind and give the boat momentum. But below the waterline is the keel, which can weigh tons.

You can see the mast as positivity and the keel down below as negativity. If you sail, you know that even though it’s the mast that holds the sail, you can’t sail without the keel; the boat would just drift around or tip over. The negativity, the keel, is what allows the boat to stay on course and manageable.

When I once shared this metaphor with an audience, a gentleman said, “You know, when the keel matters most is when you’re sailing upwind, when you’re facing difficulty.” Experiencing and expressing negative emotions is really part of the process for flourishing, even—or especially—during hard times, as they help us stay in touch with the reality of the difficulties we’re facing.

So this idea of the ratio points out where we should be. But how do we get there? What are the best ways to foster positive emotions and achieve this ratio?

Here’s my advice: If you make your motto, “Be positive,” that will actually backfire. It leads to a toxic insincerity that’s shown to be corrosive to our own bodies, to our own cardiovascular system. It’s toxic for our relationships with other people. I think we all know that person who’s trying to pump too much sunshine into our lives.

I think that’s the biggest danger of positive psychology: that people come out of it with this zeal to be positive in a way that’s not genuine and heartfelt.

But there’s a Sufi proverb: There wouldn’t be such a thing as counterfeit gold if there were no real gold somewhere. So how can we tap into those genuine, heartfelt positive emotions without grasping for the counterfeit gold?

One of the things that I think is very useful is to keep in mind that there’s reciprocal relationship between the mindset of positivity and positive emotions—a mindset of positivity begets positive emotions, and positive emotions beget positivity. So if we lightly create the mindset of positivity, from that positive emotions will follow.

How to foster that mindset? It helps to be open, be appreciative, be curious, be kind, and above all, be real and sincere. From these strategies spring positive emotions.

Now some of these are pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to explain what “be open” means as a way to increase your positive emotions. The reason that this works is that so often we can be preoccupied worrying about the future, ruminating about the past so we’re completely oblivious to the goodness that surrounds us in the present moment.

But when we’re really open to our current circumstances, those sources of goodness are so much easier to draw from, and they yield positive emotions.

Another thing, I think, that can be really useful is to step on the positivity scale frequently and track your positivity ratio. When I published my book, I created a free website that allows people to figure out their positivity ratio for a given day. It takes two minutes.

It’s kind of surprising and humbling to realize that, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us aren’t above this three-to-one ratio on a daily basis.

I think knowing one day’s positivity ratio may not be too informative. But if you take this short measure at the end of every day for two weeks, you could probably get a sense of what your life is like right now. Then continue to use it as you continue to make changes in your life, as you introduce more opportunities to be grateful, or start a meditation practice, or start volunteering and giving more frequently, and then track your positivity ratio and see if it changes—see how those steps make a difference in your life.

Just as a nutritionist will ask people to keep track of their physical activity and their caloric intake as a way to meet their health and fitness goals, this is a way to keep track of your daily emotional diet so you can meet your well-being goals.

I want to close with a famous Native American story. It goes like this: One evening, an old Cherokee tells his grandson that inside all people, a battle goes on between two wolves. One wolf is negativity: anger, sadness, stress, contempt, disgust, fear, embarrassment, guilt, shame, and hate. The other is positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and above all, love.

The grandson thinks about this for a minute, then asks his grandfather, “Well, which wolf wins?”

The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

As researchers who have worked with fathers and families for decades, we’re delighted to see fathers honored in this way, just as we saw mothers honored last month.

But what about the rest of the year? Too often, we find that messages about dads are decidedly negative in tone: Why don’t they hear the baby’s cries in the middle of the night? Why don’t they help more around the house? What can we do about “deadbeat dads”? The impression seems to be that men aren’t motivated to become involved with their kids or simply don’t understand what children need. We have to spend public money to persuade or compel men to be “responsible fathers.”

While there are certainly men who don’t take their role as fathers seriously, our experiences over the past three decades tell a different story. In our work with working-class, middle-class, and low-income families, what we hear from men is that they want to be good, devoted fathers—more involved and more approachable than their fathers were with them. What’s stopping them?

We’ve identified a number of barriers—obstacles that don’t prevent men from taking an active role, but surely make it difficult.

First, there are the messages they get from the parenting experts. Despite current interest in father involvement, an extremely large proportion of family research focuses on mothers and children. Scan the myriad of “parenting” books, and it is clear that the majority are addressed to and read by mothers, with an occasional nod to fathers.

Then there are the ways that health care agencies and other organizations exclude fathers, often unwittingly. Starting with pregnancy and labor and delivery, most appointments are set up for mothers and held at times when fathers work. The same is true for most pediatric visits. School records and files in family service organizations often have the child’s and mother’s name on the label, and not the father’s.

In the family agencies we have visited here and abroad, the walls are typically pastel colors, the pictures on the wall are of mothers, flowers, and babies, the magazines in the waiting room are for women, and the staff is predominantly female. In most welfare offices, fathers are not invited to case planning meetings, and when a home visitor is greeted at the door by a man, she often asks to speak with the mother. Given these scenarios, fathers are likely to get the message that they are invisible or irrelevant to their children’s welfare.

So how can we overcome these barriers and encourage more father involvement? Some organizations have simply tried to urge men to get more involved, as if the problem has been one of low motivation. Another approach has been to involve men in support groups led by men, focusing on fatherhood and family issues.

Instead, our approach is guided by a crucial finding from our research: The single strongest predictor of whether a father will be positively involved with his children is the quality of his relationship with the children’s mother. This is true regardless of whether parents are married or divorced, living together or separated, well-off or poor.

It’s not hard to imagine that when parents are fighting over custody or financial arrangements and the child lives with the mother, fathers may have a difficult time arranging to visit the child regularly. Yet similar dynamics occur when parents are married and living together. In high-conflict couples, the issues they fight about often have to do with child-rearing: “You’re too soft on Billy.” “Well, you’re too strict.” Even when parents generally get along, differences between their parenting styles often mean the mother is viewed as the “expert” who wants the father to be involved, but in particular ways.

Here’s the lesson we take from our research: If we want to promote fathers’ involvement with their children, we should work with moms and dads on strengthening the relationship between them—not just as romantic partners but as co-parents.

This approach is supported by two long-term studies we’ve run with working-class and middle-class families. Both studies enrolled the couples in groups, with trained co-leaders, that offered help on challenges in parenting and the couple’s relationship, even though they hadn’t been seeking help for either. One study involved expectant couples for six months, from the third trimester of pregnancy into the first few months of parenthood; the other study targeted couples with first children about to enter kindergarten, working with the couples for four months.

In both studies, we found that the group participants fared much better than people we observed who were not offered a group: Their parenting was more effective—they were warmer, more encouraging, more responsive to their child’s needs, and better at setting limits—and their kids did better in school. These benefits lasted for five years in the first study (pregnancy through the transition to kindergarten) and for 10 years in the second (from pre-kindergarten through the transition to high school).

What’s more, groups that focused more on the couple relationship than on parenting not only improved the couple’s effectiveness as parents but also maintained the quality of their relationship with one another. When the parents’ relationship as a couple was affected positively, their parenting was more effective and their children were less likely to act out aggressively or seem shy and withdrawn in school, and their achievement test scores were significantly higher than those of children whose parents had no special help.

Building on these findings, with funding from the California Office of Child Abuse Prevention, we designed and have been evaluating the Supporting Father Involvement Project, in collaboration with Marsha Kline Pruett at Smith College and Kyle Pruett at Yale University. Over the past eight years, trained staff in five California counties have worked in small groups with almost 900 low-income European-American, Mexican-American, and African-American families. Rather than just taking the traditional approach, in which men gather in fathers groups led by men to discuss the family issues faced by men, our project has created groups that both partners attend weekly for 16 weeks. We are comparing the results from these groups with the results from groups geared exclusively to fathers. Both groups have the same male-female co-leader teams.

In an already-published study of the first 300 families, we found that, compared with couples not offered either group, fathers groups and couples groups both produced significant increases in father involvement over an 18-month period and prevented a rise in behavior problems in the children.

But the couples groups had those benefits and more: The parents maintained satisfaction with their relationship, and their conflict and parenting stress declined.

While fathers often stay out of family conversations about childrearing, we find that when men are invited into such discussions in the safety of a group setting, they have as many ideas as women do about how they want to conduct their relationships with their children and their partners. One important intervention made by the group leaders is to help the mothers stand back a bit to make room for fathers to step in and become parents in their own way.

These positive results have been replicated with another 300 families, and a third trial is currently underway, this time with families who are at-risk not only because of low incomes but because they have come to the attention of welfare agencies for suspected child abuse, neglect, or domestic violence. Preliminary results suggest that the couples groups, with trained male-female co-leaders, are helping these parents use more productive problem-solving strategies, lower their parenting stress, and keep their children’s problem behaviors from escalating.

Of course, there’s good reason to want dads to be involved in their kids’ lives: Research shows that, in many different family arrangements, when dads are actively and positively involved, their kids develop fewer behavior problems, do better in school, avoid using drugs, delay sexual activity, and develop stronger close relationships with others as they become adults. What’s more, mothers of children with involved fathers do better financially and emotionally, and these involved dads themselves are healthier and more likely to hold a job and have a strong sense of purpose.

But if we want families to reap these benefits, simply encouraging fathers to be more involved isn’t enough. That’s why we’re working in partnership with the Office of Child Abuse Prevention and with others to make father involvement and family relationship services more available in California, and to disseminate the results across the country.

We realize that the majority of parents, though, may not seek or want services from outside agencies. For them, we can stress the key message from our research: In addition to focusing on what they should be doing to, for, or with their children, they shouldn’t forget to take care of their relationship as partners and as co-parents. This approach will be good for them and for their kids—on Father’s Day and any day.

I remember once, as a freshman in college, after spending hours getting ready for a big party, I complained to my boyfriend that my hair, makeup, and outfit were woefully inadequate. He tried to reassure me by saying, “Don’t worry, you look fine.”

“Fine? Oh great, I always wanted to look fine . . .”

The desire to feel special is understandable. The problem is that by definition it’s impossible for everyone to be above average at the same time. Although there are some ways in which we excel, there is always someone smarter, prettier, more successful. How do we cope with this?

Not very well. To see ourselves positively, we tend to inflate our own egos and put others down so that we can feel good in comparison. But this strategy comes at a price—it holds us back from reaching our full potential in life.

How can we grow if we can’t acknowledge our own weaknesses? We might temporarily feel better about ourselves by ignoring our flaws, or by believing our issues and difficulties are somebody else’s fault, but in the long run we only harm ourselves by getting stuck in endless cycles of stagnation and conflict.

Continually feeding our need for positive self-evaluation is a bit like stuffing ourselves with candy. We get a brief sugar high, then a crash. And right after the crash comes a pendulum swing to despair as we realize that—however much we’d like to—we can’t always blame our problems on someone else. We can’t always feel special and above average.

The result is often devastating. Most of us are incredibly hard on ourselves when we finally admit some flaw or shortcoming: “I’m not good enough. I’m worthless.”

And of course, the goalposts for what counts as “good enough” seem always to remain out of reach. No matter how well we do, someone else always seems to be doing it better. The result of this line of thinking is sobering: Millions of people need to take pharmaceuticals every day just to cope with daily life. Insecurity, anxiety, and depression are incredibly common in our society, and much of this is due to self-judgment, to beating ourselves up when we feel we aren’t winning in the game of life.

Another way

So what’s the answer? To stop judging and evaluating ourselves altogether. To stop trying to label ourselves as “good” or “bad” and simply accept ourselves with an open heart. To treat ourselves with the same kindness, caring, and compassion we would show to a good friend—or even a stranger, for that matter.

When I first came across the idea of “self-compassion,” it changed my life almost immediately. It was during my last year in the human development doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley, as I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation. I was going through a really difficult time following the breakup of my first marriage, and I was full of shame and self-loathing. I thought signing up for meditation classes at a local Buddhist center might help. As part of my exploration, I read Sharon Salzberg’s classic book Lovingkindness and was never the same again.

I had known that Buddhists talk a lot about the importance of compassion, but I had never considered that having compassion for yourself might be as important as having compassion for others. From the Buddhist point of view, you have to care about yourself before you can really care about other people.

I remember talking to my new fiancé, Rupert, who joined me for the weekly Buddhist group meetings, and shaking my head in amazement. “You mean you’re actually allowed to be nice to yourself, to have compassion for yourself when you mess up or are going through a really hard time? I don’t know . . . if I’m too self-compassionate, won’t I just be lazy and selfish?” It took me a while to get my head around it.

But I slowly came to realize that self-criticism—despite being socially sanctioned—was not at all helpful, and in fact only made things worse. I wasn’t making myself a better person by beating myself up all the time. Instead, I was causing myself to feel inadequate and insecure, then taking out my frustration on the people closest to me. More than that, I wasn’t owning up to many things because I was so afraid of the self-hate that would follow if I admitted the truth.

After getting my Ph.D., I did two years of postdoctoral training with a leading self-esteem researcher. I quickly learned that although thousands of articles had been written on the importance of self-esteem, researchers were now starting to point out all the traps that people can fall into when they try to get and keep a sense of high self-esteem: narcissism, self-absorption, self-righteous anger, prejudice, discrimination, and so on.

I realized that self-compassion was the perfect alternative to the relentless pursuit of self-esteem. Why? Because it offers the same protection against harsh self-criticism as self-esteem, but without the need to see ourselves as perfect or as better than others. In other words, self-compassion provides the same benefits as high self-esteem without its drawbacks.

Although no one had yet defined self-compassion from an academic perspective—let alone done any research on it—I knew that this would be my life’s work.

Over the past decade, research that my colleagues and I have conducted shows that self-compassion is a powerful way to achieve emotional well-being and contentment in our lives, helping us avoid destructive patterns of fear, negativity, and isolation. More so than self-esteem, the nurturing quality of self-compassion allows us to flourish, to appreciate the beauty and richness of life, even in hard times. When we soothe our agitated minds with self-compassion, we’re better able to notice what’s right as well as what’s wrong, so that we can orient ourselves toward that which gives us joy.

The science of self-compassion

So what is self-compassion? What does it mean exactly?

As I’ve defined it, self-compassion entails three core components. First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental. Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering. Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it. We must achieve and combine these three essential elements in order to be truly self-compassionate.

This means that unlike self-esteem, the good feelings of self-compassion do not depend on being special and above average, or on meeting ideal goals. Instead, they come from caring about ourselves—fragile and imperfect yet magnificent as we are. Rather than pitting ourselves against other people in an endless comparison game, we embrace what we share with others and feel more connected and whole in the process. And the good feelings of self-compassion don’t go away when we mess up or things go wrong. In fact, self-compassion steps in precisely where self-esteem lets us down—whenever we fail or feel inadequate.

Sure, you skeptics may be saying to yourself, but what does the research show?

The bottom line is that according to the science, self-compassion does in fact appear to offer the same advantages as high self-esteem, with no discernable downsides.

The first thing to know is that self-compassion and self-esteem do tend to go together. If you’re self-compassionate, you’ll tend to have higher self-esteem than if you’re endlessly self-critical. And like high self-esteem, self-compassion is associated with significantly less anxiety and depression, as well as more happiness, optimism, and positive emotions. However, self-compassion offers clear advantages over self-esteem when things go wrong, or when our egos are threatened.

In one study my colleagues and I conducted, for instance, undergraduate students were asked to fill out measures of self-compassion and self-esteem. Next came the hard part. They were asked to participate in a mock job interview to “test their interviewing skills.”

A lot of undergrads are nervous about the interviewing process, especially given that they will soon be applying for jobs in real life. As part of the experiment, students were asked to write an answer to that dreaded but inevitable interview question, “Please describe your greatest weakness.” Afterward they were asked to report how anxious they were feeling.

Participants’ self-compassion levels, but not their self-esteem levels, predicted how much anxiety they felt. In other words, self-compassionate students reported feeling less self-conscious and nervous than those who lacked self-compassion, presumably because they felt okay admitting and talking about their weak points.

Students with high self-esteem, by contrast, were no less anxious than those with low self-esteem, having been thrown off balance by the challenge of discussing their failings. And interestingly, self-compassionate people used fewer first-person singular pronouns such as “I” when writing about their weaknesses, instead using more third-person plural pronouns such as “we.” They also made references to friends, family, and other humans more often. This suggests that the sense of interconnectedness inherent to self-compassion plays an important role in its ability to buffer against anxiety.

Another study required people to imagine being in potentially embarrassing situations: being on a sports team and blowing a big game, for instance, or performing in a play and forgetting one’s lines. How would participants feel if something like this happened to them?

Self-compassionate participants were less likely to feel humiliated or incompetent, or to take it too personally. Instead, they said they would take things in stride, thinking thoughts like “Everybody goofs up now and then” and “In the long run, this doesn’t really matter.” Having high self-esteem, however, made little difference. Those with both high and low self-esteem were equally likely to have thoughts like, “I’m such a loser” or “I wish I could die.” Once again, high self-esteem tends to come up empty-handed when the chips are down.

In a different study, participants were asked to make a videotape that would introduce and describe themselves. They were then told that someone would watch their tape and give them feedback in terms of how warm, friendly, intelligent, likable, and mature they appeared (the feedback was bogus, of course).

Half the participants received positive feedback, the other half neutral feedback. Self-compassionate people were relatively unflustered regardless of whether the feedback was positive or neutral, and they were willing to say the feedback was based on their own personality either way. People with high levels of self-esteem, however, tended to get upset when they received neutral feedback (what, I’m just average?). They were also more likely to deny that the neutral feedback was due to their own personality (surely it’s because the person who watched the tape was an idiot!).

This suggests that self-compassionate people are better able to accept who they are regardless of the degree of praise they receive from others. Self-esteem, on the other hand, only thrives when the reviews are good and may lead to evasive and counterproductive tactics when there’s a possibility of facing unpleasant truths about oneself.

Recently, my colleague Roos Vonk and I investigated the benefits of self-compassion versus self-esteem with more than three thousand people from various walks of life, the largest study to examine this issue so far.

First, we examined the stability of positive feelings these people experienced toward themselves self over time. Did these feelings tend to go up and down like a yo-yo or were they relatively constant? We hypothesized that self-esteem would be associated with relatively unstable feelings of self-worth, since self-esteem tends to be diminished whenever things don’t turn out as well as desired. On the other hand, because compassion can be extended to oneself in both good times and bad, we expected the feelings of self-worth to remain steadier over time among self-compassionate people.

To test this idea, we had participants report on how they were feeling toward themselves at the time—for instance, “I feel inferior to others at this moment” or “I feel good about myself”—doing so 12 different times over a period of eight months.

Next, we calculated the degree to which overall levels of self-compassion or self-esteem predicted stability in self-worth over this period. As expected, self-compassion was clearly associated with steadier and more constant feelings of self-worth than self-esteem. We also found that self-compassion was less likely than self-esteem to be contingent on outside factors like social approval, success in competitions, or feeling attractive. When our sense of self-worth stems from being a human being intrinsically worthy of respect—rather than being contingent on reaching certain goals—our sense of self-worth is much less easily shaken.

We also found that in comparison to self-esteem, self-compassion was associated with less social comparison and less need to retaliate for perceived personal slights. It was also linked to less “need for cognitive closure,” which is psych-speak for the need to be right without question. People who invest their self-worth in feeling superior and infallible tend to get angry and defensive when their status is threatened. People who compassionately accept their imperfection, however, no longer need to engage in such unhealthy behaviors to protect their egos.

In fact, a striking finding of the study was that people with high self-esteem were much more narcissistic than those with low self-esteem. In contrast, self-compassion was completely unassociated with narcissism, meaning that people who are high in self-compassion are no more likely to be narcissistic than people low in self-compassion.

An island of calm

Taken together, this research suggests that self-compassion provides an island of calm, a refuge from the stormy seas of endless positive and negative self-judgment, so that we can finally stop asking, “Am I as good as they are? Am I good enough?” By tapping into our inner wellsprings of kindness, acknowledging the shared nature of our imperfect human condition, we can start to feel more secure, accepted, and alive.

It does take work to break the self-criticizing habits of a lifetime, but at the end of the day, you are only being asked to relax, allow life to be as it is, and open your heart to yourself. It’s easier than you might think, and it could change your life.

What makes us good? What makes us evil?

Research has uncovered many answers to the second question: Evil can be fostered by dehumanization, diffusion of responsibility, obedience to authority, unjust systems, group pressure, moral disengagement, and anonymity, to name a few.

But when we ask why people become heroic, research doesn’t yet have an answer. It could be that heroes have more compassion or empathy; maybe there’s a hero gene; maybe it’s because of their levels of oxytocin—research by neuroeconomist Paul Zak has shown that this “love hormone” in the brain increases the likelihood you’ll demonstrate altruism. We don’t know for sure.

I believe that heroism is different than altruism and compassion. For the last five years, my colleagues and I have been exploring the nature and roots of heroism, studying exemplary cases of heroism and surveying thousands of people about their choices to act (or not act) heroically. In that time, we’ve come to define heroism as an activity with several parts.

First, it’s performed in service to others in need—whether that’s a person, group, or community—or in defense of certain ideals. Second, it’s engaged in voluntarily, even in military contexts, as heroism remains an act that goes beyond something required by military duty. Third, a heroic act is one performed with recognition of possible risks and costs, be they to one’s physical health or personal reputation, in which the actor is willing to accept anticipated sacrifice. Finally, it is performed without external gain anticipated at the time of the act.

Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward.

By that definition, then, altruism is heroism light—it doesn’t always involve a serious risk. Compassion is a virtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know that it does. We’re just now starting to scientifically distinguish heroism from these other concepts and zero in on what makes a hero.

My work on heroism follows 35 years of research in which I studied the psychology of evil, including my work on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The two lines of research aren’t as different as they might seem; they’re actually two sides of the same coin.

A key insight from research on heroism so far is that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.

Take the Holocaust. Christians who helped Jews were in the same situation as other civilians who helped imprison or kill Jews, or ignored their suffering. The situation provided the impetus to act heroically or malevolently. Why did some people choose one path or the other?

Another key insight from my research has been that there’s no clear line between good and evil. Instead, the line is permeable; people can cross back and forth between it.

This is an idea wonderfully represented in an illusion by M. C. Escher, at left. When you squint and focus on the white as the figures and the black as the background, you see a world full of angels and tutus dancing around happily. But now focus on the black as the figures and the white as the background: Now it’s a world full of demons.

What Escher’s telling us is that the world is filled with angels and devils, goodness and badness, and these dark and light aspects of human nature are our basic yin and yang. That is, we all are born with the capacity to be anything. Because of our incredible brains, anything that is imaginable becomes possible, anything that becomes possible can get transformed into action, for better or for worse. 

Some people argue humans are born good or born bad; I think that’s nonsense. We are all born with this tremendous capacity to be anything, and we get shaped by our circumstances—by the family or the culture or the time period in which we happen to grow up, which are accidents of birth; whether we grow up in a war zone versus peace; if we grow up in poverty rather than prosperity.

George Bernard Shaw captured this point in the preface to his great play “Major Barbara”: “Every reasonable man and woman is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character what’s inside. What he does and what we think of what he does depends on upon his circumstances.”

So each of us may possess the capacity to do terrible things. But we also posses an inner hero; if stirred to action, that inner hero is capable of performing tremendous goodness for others.

Another conclusion from my research is that few people do evil and fewer act heroically. Between these extremes in the bell curve of humanity are the masses—the general population who do nothing, who I call the “reluctant heroes”—those who refuse the call to action and, by doing nothing, often implicitly support the perpetrators of evil.

So on this bell curve of humanity, villains and heroes are the outliers. The reluctant heroes are the rest. What we need to discover is how to give a call to service to this general population. How do we make them aware of the evil that exists? How do we prevent them from getting seduced to the dark side?

We don’t yet have a recipe for creating heroes, but we have some clues, based on the stories of some inspiring heroes.

I love the story of a wonderful nine-year-old Chinese boy, who I call a dutiful hero. In 2008, there was a massive earthquake in China’s Szechuan province. The ceiling fell down on a school, killing almost all the kids in it. This kid escaped, and as he was running away he noticed two other kids struggling to get out. He ran back and saved them. He was later asked, “Why did you do that?” He replied, “I was the hall monitor! It was my duty, it was my job to look after my classmates!”

This perfectly illustrates what I call the “heroic imagination,” a focus on one’s duty to help and protect others. For him, it was cultivated by being assigned this role of hall monitor.

Another story: Irena Sendler was a Polish hero, a Catholic woman who saved at least 2,500 Jewish kids who were holed up in the Warsaw ghetto that the Nazis had erected. She was able to convince the parents of these kids to allow her to smuggle them out of the ghetto to safety. To do this, she organized a network.

That is a key principle of heroism: Heroes are most effective not alone but in a network. It’s through forming a network that people have the resources to bring their heroic impulses to life.

What these stories suggest is that every one of us can be a hero. Through my work on heroism, I’ve become even more convinced that acts of heroism don’t just arrive from truly exceptional people but from people placed in the right circumstance, given the necessary tools to transform compassion into heroic action.

Building on these insights, I have helped to start a program designed to learn more of heroism and to create the heroes of tomorrow.

The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) is amplifying the voice of the world’s quiet heroes, using research and education networks to promote a heroic imagination in everyone, and then empower ordinary people of all ages and nations to engage in extraordinary acts of heroism. We want to democratize the notion of heroism, to emphasize that most heroes are ordinary people; it’s the act that’s extraordinary.

There are already a lot of great heroes projects out there, such as the Giraffe Heroes Project. The HIP is unique in that it’s the only one encouraging research into heroism, because there’s very little.

Here are a few key insights from research we’ve done surveying 4,000 Americans from across the country. Each of these statements is valid after controlling for all demographic variables, such as education and socioeconomic status.

Heroes surround us. One in five—20 percent—qualify as heroes, based on the definition of heroism I provide above. Seventy-two percent report helping another person in a dangerous emergency. Sixteen percent report whistle blowing on an injustice. Six percent report sacrificing for a non-relative or stranger. Fifteen percent report defying an unjust authority. And not one of these people has been formally recognized as a hero.

Opportunity matters. Most acts of heroism occur in urban areas, where there are more people and more people in need. You’re not going to be a hero if you live in the suburbs. No shit happens in the suburbs!

Education matters. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be a hero, I think because you are more aware of situations.

Volunteering matters. One third of all the sample who were heroes also had volunteered significantly, up to 59 hours a week.

Gender matters. Males reported performing acts of heroism more than females. I think this is because women tend not to regard a lot of their heroic actions as heroic. It’s just what they think they’re supposed to do for their family or a friend.

Race matters. Blacks were eight times more likely than whites to qualify as heroes. We think that’s in part due to the rate of opportunity. (In our next survey, we’re going to track responses by area code to see if in fact these heroes are coming from inner cities.

Personal history matters. Having survived a disaster or personal trauma makes you three times more likely to be a hero and a volunteer.

Based on these insights into heroism, we’ve put together a toolkit for potential heroes, especially young heroes in training, who already have opportunities to act heroically when they’re kids, such as by opposing bullying.

A first step is to take the “hero pledge,” a public declaration on our website that says you’re willing to be a hero in waiting. It’s a pledge “to act when confronted with a situation where I feel something is wrong,” “to develop my heroic abilities,” and “to believe in the heroic capacities within myself and others, so I can build and refine them.”

You can also take our four-week “Hero Challenge” mini-course online to help you develop your heroic muscles. The challenge may not require you to do anything heroic, but it’s training you to be heroic. And we offer more rigorous, research-based education and training programs for middle and high schools, corporations, and the millitary that make people aware of the social factors that produce passivity, inspire them to take positive civic action, and encourage the skills needed to consistently translate heroic impulses into action.

We’re also in the process of creating an Encyclopedia of Heroes, a collection of hero stories from all over the world. Not just all the classic ones and fictional ones, but ones that people from around the world are going to send in, so they can nominate ordinary heroes with a picture and a story. It will be searchable, so you can find heroes by age, gender, city and country. These are the unsung, quiet heroes—they do their own thing, put themselves in danger, defend a moral cause, help someone in need. And we want to highlight them. We want them to be inspirational to other people just like them.

Essentially, we’re trying to build the social habits of heroes, to build a focus on the other, shifting away from the “me” and toward the “we.” As the poet John Donne wrote: “No man [or woman] is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

So every person is part of humanity. Each person’s pulse is part of humanity’s heartbeat. Heroes circulate the life force of goodness in our veins. And what the world needs now is more heroes—you. It’s time to take action against evil.

Of course, you don’t have to shop to reap the benefits of giving. Research suggests the same benefits come from donating to charities or volunteering your time, like at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter. Here are some of the ways that giving is good for you and your community.

1. Giving makes us feel happy. A 2008 study by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and colleagues found that giving money to someone else lifted participants’ happiness more that spending it on themselves (despite participants’ prediction that spending on themselves would make them happier). Happiness expert Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, saw similar results when she asked people to perform five acts of kindness each week for six weeks.

These good feelings are reflected in our biology. In a 2006 study, Jorge Moll and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health found that when people give to charities, it activates regions of the brain associated with pleasure, social connection, and trust, creating a “warm glow” effect. Scientists also believe that altruistic behavior releases endorphins in the brain, producing the positive feeling known as the “helper’s high.”

2. Giving is good for our health. A wide range of research has linked different forms of generosity to better health, even among the sick and elderly. In his book Why Good Things Happen to Good People, Stephen Post, a professor of preventative medicine at Stony Brook University, reports that giving to others has been shown to increase health benefits in people with chronic illness, including HIV and multiple sclerosis.

A 1999 study led by Doug Oman of the University of California, Berkeley, found that elderly people who volunteered for two or more organizations were 44 percent less likely to die over a five-year period than were non-volunteers, even after controlling for their age, exercise habits, general health, and negative health habits like smoking. Stephanie Brown of the University of Michigan saw similar results in a 2003 study on elderly couples. She and her colleagues found that those individuals who provided practical help to friends, relatives, or neighbors, or gave emotional support to their spouses, had a lower risk of dying over a five-year period than those who didn’t. Interestingly, receiving help wasn’t linked to a reduced death risk.

Researchers suggest that one reason giving may improve physical health and longevity is that it helps decrease stress, which is associated with a variety of health problems. In a 2006 study by Rachel Piferi of Johns Hopkins University and Kathleen Lawler of the University of Tennessee, people who provided social support to others had lower blood pressure than participants who didn’t, suggesting a direct physiological benefit to those who give of themselves.

3. Giving promotes cooperation and social connection. When you give, you’re more likely to get back: Several studies, including work by sociologists Brent Simpson and Robb Willer, have suggested that when you give to others, your generosity is likely to be rewarded by others down the line—sometimes by the person you gave to, sometimes by someone else.

These exchanges promote a sense of trust and cooperation that strengthens our ties to others—and research has shown that having positive social interactions is central to good mental and physical health. As researcher John Cacioppo writes in his book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, “The more extensive the reciprocal altruism born of social connection . . . the greater the advance toward health, wealth, and happiness.”

What’s more, when we give to others, we don’t only make them feel closer to us; we also feel closer to them. “Being kind and generous leads you to perceive others more positively and more charitably,” writes Lyubomirsky in her book The How of Happiness, and this “fosters a heightened sense of interdependence and cooperation in your social community.”

4. Giving evokes gratitude. Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of a gift, that gift can elicit feelings of gratitude—it can be a way of expressing gratitude or instilling gratitude in the recipient. And research has found that gratitude is integral to happiness, health, and social bonds.

Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, co-directors of the Research Project on Gratitude and Thankfulness, found that teaching college students to “count their blessings” and cultivate gratitude caused them to exercise more, be more optimistic, and feel better about their lives overall. A recent study led by Nathaniel Lambert at Florida State University found that expressing gratitude to a close friend or romantic partner strengthens our sense of connection to that person.

Barbara Fredrickson, a pioneering happiness researcher, suggests that cultivating gratitude in everyday life is one of the keys to increasing personal happiness. “When you express your gratitude in words or actions, you not only boost your own positivity but [other people’s] as well,” she writes in her book Positivity. “And in the process you reinforce their kindness and strengthen your bond to one another.”

5. Giving is contagious. When we give, we don’t only help the immediate recipient of our gift. We also spur a ripple effect of generosity through our community.

A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees—from person to person to person to person. “As a result,” they write, “each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.”

Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone (also released during sex and breast feeding) that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others, with “symptoms” lasting up to two hours. And those people on an “oxytocin high” can potentially jumpstart a “virtuous circle, where one person’s generous behavior triggers another’s,” says Zak.

So whether you buy gifts, volunteer your time, or donate money to charity this holiday season, your giving is much more than just a year-end chore. It may help you build stronger social connections and even jumpstart a cascade of generosity through your community. And don’t be surprised if you find yourself benefiting from a big dose of happiness in the process.

Though the next gadget or experience may bring fleeting pleasure, research shows that genuine happiness is about how we feel inside. To really enjoy the holidays, try these simple, research-based practices that will help keep you in a healthy state of mind.

1. Set your intention to enjoy the holidays as much as you can. By making the conscious decision to open yourself to true well-being and happiness, you’ll be more likely not to miss those uplifting moments and even begin to have your radar out for them. Psychiatrist Dan Siegel argues that by setting your intention, you “prime” your brain to be ready for positive experiences. And this can spur a positive cycle of happiness: Research by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson shows that when we allow ourselves to feel positive emotions, we become more open and sensitive to future positive experiences, bringing us even more of those good feelings down the line.

2. Savor any moments of well-being when they’re here. Don’t just know that you’re feeling good. Let your awareness savor how the experience registers in your body and mind for 15 or 30 seconds. (Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson calls this “taking in the good.”) Research by Fred Bryant, a professor of psychology at Loyola University, has found that savoring positive experiences strengthens our positive response to them. And neuroscience studies have shown that the longer we hold an emotionally stimulating experience in our awareness, the more neural connections form in our brains to strengthen the trace of that experience in our memory.

3. Take a break, regain your focus. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by everything on your To Do list, remember to take a few breaths. Take a break and enjoy a cup of tea or a hot bath. Try some yoga or exercise. Or get out of the doing mode for a little while and let yourself just relax. It can be challenging to disengage from the clutch of activity and connect with the moment in a restful way. But research suggests that it’s worth the effort to slow down and regain your focus: A recent study out of Harvard found that a wandering mind—typical in our multitasking culture—is a strong cause of unhappiness. 

4. Practice gratitude. Don’t take your good fortune for granted. Consciously reflect on all the blessings in your life each day. Express your appreciation directly to loved ones and friends when you’re with them. You and they will both feel the joy of loving connection. In a study by Martin Seligman, a leader in the field of positive psychology, people who considered themselves severely depressed were asked to write down three good things that happened each day for 15 days. At the end of the experiment, 94 percent of these subjects had a decrease in depression and 92 percent said their happiness increased. A study published earlier this year in the journal Psychological Science found that people who expressed gratitude to others felt significantly closer to those people afterward.

5. Practice generosity. Neuroscience research shows that performing an altruistic act lights up the same pleasure centers in the brain as food and sex! Whenever you feel the impulse to be generous, act on it. As you do, notice the expansive feelings in your body and mind. Without expecting anything in return, notice how good it feels inside when you see someone happy because of your sincere generosity. It can be as simple and profound as being fully present for a friend, sharing the gift of your caring and attention. Or when you open the door for someone, consider the positive impulse behind that act. Anytime you do something that contributes to the well-being of another, let yourself feel the joy of generosity. And be sure to include yourself in your generosity practice.

6. Play and have fun. Remember what it was like when you were a kid during the holidays? Let yourself experience that again. Be around kids if you can. Tune into and take delight in their enthusiasm. Singing or dancing are excellent ways to get out of your head and open to joy. As David Elkind, author of The Power of Play, writes, “Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social emotional development at all ages.”

Finally, remember that happiness is contagious: Research shows that happiness can spread like a virus across three degrees of separation; if you’re happy, you increase the odds that your close friends and family will be happy, too. So the more you can stay connected to your own happiness, the more you help others get in touch with their own well-being. We all benefit when you can awaken the joy within you. Happy Holidays!