3 Things to Fix Your Life & Finding Awe Everyday

This episode delves into practical strategies for managing worry, boosting confidence, and forging meaningful connections.

1. Understanding Worry: Worry stems from uncertainty; recognizing and gradually reducing safety behaviors can diminish anxiety.
2. Boosting Confidence: Confidence can be enhanced through music, "power poses," and reflective writing before important events.
3. Building Friendships: Creating meaningful relationships requires intentional time investment, with different tiers of friendship developing over varying hours of interaction.
4. Effects of Awe: Experiencing awe can significantly improve mental health and reduce stress through connection with nature and other awe-inspiring experiences.
5. Practical Advice for Everyday Challenges: The episode offers listeners practical, research-backed advice for managing daily psychological challenges effectively.

1. Introduction to Awe

Overview of the psychological benefits of awe, including health improvements and increased happiness. Mike Carruthers: "Research shows that experiencing awe can reduce stress and inflammation, leading to better overall health."

2. Strategies for Worry and Confidence

Discussion on managing worry through understanding and adjusting behavior, and enhancing confidence through psychological techniques. Helen Thompson: "To manage worry, it's crucial to address and modify our safety behaviors."

3. Building Meaningful Connections

Exploring the time investment necessary to form various levels of friendships and strategies for nurturing these relationships. Helen Thompson: "It takes about 50 hours with someone to form a casual acquaintance and much longer for deeper relationships."

• Practice mindfulness to manage worry: Focus on being present in the moment to reduce anxious thoughts.
• Use music to boost confidence: Listening to empowering songs can psychologically prepare you for challenges.
• Embrace small social interactions: Engage deeply in brief encounters to lay the groundwork for potential friendships.
• Seek awe-inspiring experiences: Regularly connect with nature or other sources of awe to enhance mental well-being.
• Implement 'power poses' before important tasks: This can subconsciously boost your self-confidence.

There is a good chance you have thought your cellphone was ringing or vibrating when it wasn’t. It seems weird and makes you wonder why it is such a common experience for people. This episode begins with an explanation. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130701-why-you-feel-phantom-phone-calls

Here are three things many of us wish were different in our lives are: We wish we had more friends; we wish we didn’t worry so much; we wish we were more confident. If any or all of those apply to you, you will want to hear my guest Helen Thomson. She is a writer and consultant who is author of This Book Could Fix Your Life. (https://amzn.to/3p2oERA). Helen researched these topics in depth and joins me to offer some very practical strategies to address these three common concerns.

You most certainly have experienced awe and wonder in your life. It’s that feeling when you first see the Grand Canyon or you see an incredible rainbow or when you see your own child minutes after being born. That is awe. What we often don’t pay attention to is that there is wonder and awe in a lot of things we see and experience every day – if we just take time to notice. And when you do, that feeling contributes to your overall health and happiness. Allen Klein, author of The Awe Factor (https://amzn.to/3wGSwWh) explains how to capture that sense of awe and wonder in your everyday life and explains the interesting research that shows the benefits.

Many of us are afraid of bees because we don’t want to get stung. That’s fair. And you probably should be afraid of killer bees or murder hornets. But what about those everyday honeybees? Are they dangerous? Listen as I reveal some truths and myths about bees and just how dangerous they really are. https://www.pestworldforkids.org/pest-guide/bees/

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"This Book Could Fix Your Life" by Helen Thompson

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Mike Carruthers
Hey, here's something you should know. Some experts estimate that up to 77% of the population has some level of speaking anxiety. I actually thought it was higher than that. Strong communication is a critical skill for success, which is why I'd like to recommend a podcast I know you're going to love called Think Fast Talk smart. Produced by the folks at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Think Fast Talk Smart is the number one career podcast in over 95 countries.

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All that and so much more is available on think fast talk smart. So what are you waiting for? Listen every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube, and you can tell them I sent you today on something you should know. Ever think your cell phone is vibrating or ringing when it really isn't? I'll tell you why that happens.

Then. How to stop worrying, be more confident, and make more friends. You can actually put hours on it. So 50 hours of time between you and another person is what it takes to make a casual acquaintance. And it takes about 90 hours for you to start thinking of someone as a friend.

Also, some important truths and myths about honeybees and what they think of us and the benefits of seeking out awe and wonder in the world and understanding what awe really is. When you get goosebumps, when something you know knocks your socks off, you ask, why is it important to find awe? Look for awe because it can make us happier, and other studies have shown it can make us healthier. All this today on something you should know.

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Go to indeed.com something right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on something you should know. Indeed.com something terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need indeed something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers hi and welcome to something you should know.

Where it is springtime here, where I live in California and the spring of 2024 has been a particularly wet one, so everything is green and colorful and lovely. I am glad you're here. And we start today with something. I don't know if this has happened to you, but it's happened to me several times where I think my phone is vibrating in my pocket. I can feel it vibrating in my pocket, only to pull it out and look at it and realize that it wasn't vibrating at all.

Supposedly, it's happened to about 80% of people who have cell phones and 30% of people who have cell phones, at least in one survey, say they've actually heard their phone ring. When it wasn't ringing at all, it was totally a phantom ring. So why does this happen? Well, according to an article on the BBC website, it's a little complicated, but when you have your cell phone handy, you basically put yourself on kind of an unconscious alert that it could go off at any time. And since you know it could go off at any time and you are on alert that it could go off anytime, you're prone to false alarms.

Perhaps your sensitivity is just set a little too high. It's likely because you hate missing a call or a text, so you're hypersensitive so you don't miss one, and therefore you're prone to false alarms. And that is something you should know.

Human beings worry too much. We know that to be true because, well, when you look back at your own life, you can see that youve worried about a lot of things that really werent worth worrying about. And we also know from research, older people in their final years often state that they regret having spent so much of their life worrying over things they shouldnt have. Another common human problem is lack of confidence. How many of us wish we had more of it?

And of course, humans are social creatures. We need friends. Yet today, people have fewer friends than in previous generations. So what do we do about all of this? Well, there's some interesting and important research that offers some very practical and effective strategies to help us all stop worrying, be more confident, and make more and better friends.

And here to discuss this is Helen Thompson. She's a freelance writer and consultant who really dove into the research on this, and she has authored a book about it called this book could fix your life. Hi, Helen. Welcome. Hi.

Helen Thompson
Thank you for having me. So these are three pretty universal problems people have of worrying too much, not having enough confidence, and wanting more and better friends. And so let's start with worry. What is worry? The best way to think about worry is really basically it's uncertainty, right?

So our brain is this one big prediction machine and it doesn't like not knowing. So we don't, not knowing is not nice. So we all have this certain intolerance to uncertainty and we hate not knowing whether something's, how something's going to turn out, which is kind of why we've all probably experienced a lot of worry in the last year. And where we sit on that continuum actually affects how we react to stresses in our life. So someone who's really intolerant of uncertainty might stress really badly and might worry a lot when their partner is ten minutes late home, say, and they will start thinking the worst and they'll think they've been in a traffic accident or something.

Whereas someone who's quite tolerant to uncertainty would immediately assume that they were in traffic and they wouldn't stress them out at all and they wouldn't think twice. And so you can see how there can be a big difference between somebody's reaction to that same situation. So if you're someone who is less tolerant of uncertainty, you probably have quite a few safety behaviours they're called. So you might ring your children every half an hour if they're out at a friend's house to check they're okay, say, or if you're some like me, you might be telling them all the time, be careful, be careful, be careful. And these are safety behaviours.

And basically what you're trying to do is, is control the situation, is to try and prevent a negative situation from happening when you don't know what's going to happen. And, you know, to some extent, safety behaviours are good. You know, we want to protect our children, but too many safety behaviours, paradoxically actually make our general stress levels much, much worse because we never get the chance to see that bad things generally don't happen. And if they do happen, we can actually cope with them really well most of the time, and they're never really as bad as we think they're going to be. So in terms of uncertainty and worrying about the future, one way to help yourself is to identify these safety behaviors, which is actually quite a tricky thing to do.

And then what a therapist would tell you is to try and let them play the situation, play out in a safe way. So if you're worried about your children and where they might be, you, instead of phoning them every half an hour, maybe the next time you only phone them every hour, and then the next time you maybe only phone them once or twice or send them a text. And then you basically gradually lessen your safety behaviors until you get to a point where you see that you don't need to implement them anymore. And studies show that people who do this generally experience less worry more generally in their life. Yeah, I guess it makes sense that if you stop the behaviors revolving around worry, you might worry less.

Yeah, and it has a kind of generalization as well. So if you identify specific safety behaviors that are for specific events, you actually find a more general increase in wellbeing and less anxiety overall in other situations as well. It is interesting that we worry about the future, that we don't like uncertainty, but what we worry about are the negative things. Stop and think about, well, when I win the lottery or when I, you know, it's always negative. It's always what horrible thing could happen rather than what wonderful thing could happen.

It's about reframing. I think a lot of the time it's about thinking about how somebody else might view that event. That often helps. Actually, there's a couple of studies that show that actually talking to other people about how much worry they have about a specific event, say it's your partner being late home, for instance, can actually help you reframe your own worries and anxiety over that situation. So it all kind of adds up to talking about our worries, really helps us kind of dissolve them.

Mike Carruthers
But is there a personality trait? I mean, it just does seem that some people are more worriers than others and it just seems to be part of who they are. Yeah, there's certainly an aspect of personality involved, and there will be genetic predispositions to having anxiety and worries. But again, everybody is able to change their personality. Which sounds funny, because for many, many decades, it was thought that your personality was set in stone.

Helen Thompson
But in fact, it turns out that people's personality, when graded when they're, say, 30, and then when they're graded again when they're 70, can have completely different types of personality, which just kind of should give you the motivation to think about what aspects you might want to tweak here and there. Anything else about worry that you found in the research that you found really interesting, or that you think people need to understand better? Something that I wasn't aware of was that cognitive behavioral therapy is a well known treatment for anxiety. And obviously it's something that is only available to people who have a therapist accessible to them or who can afford a therapist. And what I discovered in the research was that there are a lot of apps now that offer cognitive behavioural therapy, and when they were tested side by side, so half a group of people went and had face to face therapy and the other half had cognitive behavioural therapy.

Through an app, they found that there was actually hardly any difference between the positive outcomes and their mental wellbeing and the decrease in anxiety. So I think that's really important to know that you don't need to see a therapist, you don't need drugs, necessarily from a doctor. You can't. There are solutions that you can use to help minimise your worries and your anxieties, just from. From your own home, from your mobile phone.

Mike Carruthers
I know another topic that you looked into was confidence. And so what did you find in the research about acquiring more self confidence? I think one of the fun parts is the fun findings is about music, because music's really well researched and its links to confidence are well supported by a lot of evidence. And when we listen to music, scientists call it arousal, which is the state in which the body and the brain are more alert and your emotions are intensified. And music can trigger this feeling of confidence in us because of what music is linked to in our brain.

Helen Thompson
So you might hear a certain type of music at an Olympic event, say, or a really great party, and those links are permanently forged in your brain so that the next time you hear that music, you'll feel the same sort of emotions. So I think this is a really nice way of being able to boost our confidence. And there's this really fun study that looked at it, asked undergraduates in Hong Kong to vote on what they thought was the ultimate music booster for confidence. And they found that it was we will rock you by queen and get ready for this by two, unlimited. And in the club by 50 cent.

They were the three songs that were the most empowering they found in this study. So I quite like listening to those, you know, just before an interview or, you know, before something where I, you know, a talk or a presentation. What is confidence? Confidence, I think, is a quite mysterious emotion behavior. It's not completely well understood about what actually happens in the brain when we're feeling confident, but we actually do have neurons, specific cells in the brain, that appear to fire when we feel confident.

So we can pinpoint it down to specific cells and their action in the brain. But I guess psychologists would call it something different. They would talk about a belief in yourself, a feeling. It's a real positive emotion, but it's very hard to define. Well, it's interesting that people talk about, well, he's a confident guy, but I feel confidence sometimes, but other times, other situations, I'm not confident at all, that it's very situational.

Yeah, of course. And obviously, the more we do things, the more we practice things, the more comfortable we feel in situations, the more confident we feel in situations. But there are ways of tweaking our confidence when we are feeling less confident. One of the ways I really love is because there's this confidence gap between genders, and pretty well, anecdotally and scientifically talked about women feel less confident than men or appear less confident than men. And there's some evidence to suggest that, yes, there is some aspects of women who do feel less confident than men in certain situations, but it's not all down to how confident they feel.

And there's a lot of biases that women encounter in the workplace that affect confidence. So, for instance, there's a lot of studies that show that confidence translates into rewards only when women combine it with empathy and altruism and other pro social traits. But if we blow our own horns without these extra characteristics, as a woman, you're seen negatively, but men seem to be able to toot their trumpet without those other characteristics and not be chastised for it. So there's this gender confidence gap that we. We have to overcome as women.

So there's this one study that I really love. It showed that a psychologist recruited about, I think it was about 150 male and female students to give a speech in front of a virtual audience. And they found that men spoke for longer, which is this standard indication of having more confidence, and they were rated more highly by an independent panel. And that in itself is not surprising. That's what we often find.

But then when the psychologists tweaked some things for some participants by putting a photo of either Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel or Bill Clinton in the back of the auditorium where they were giving the speech, it made no difference to the men, but it made a massive difference to the women. The female students who were exposed to the images of the powerful women talked for significantly longer and were then rated more highly in the quality of their presentation by the independent panel. So, although it's not clear exactly why that phenomenon occurs and why it works, but it does argue for a very easy way of increasing female confidence by essentially having more role models, female more role models generally in society and in your workplace and in your personal life. And, you know, particularly important, perhaps, to have those role models visible to you when you need that confidence boost. We're talking about confidence and worry and friendship, and we're talking with Helen Thompson, author of the book.

Mike Carruthers
This book could fix your life. Now your ideas don't have to wait. Now they have everything they need to come to life. Dell technologies and intel are creating technology that loves ideas, loves expanding your business, evolving your passions. We push what technology can do.

So great ideas can happen right now. Find out how to bring your ideas to life@dell.com. Welcome to now. So, Helen, I've heard, I'm sure other people have heard that when it comes to self confidence, it's good to fake it till you make it. That if you act confident, even if you're not feeling confident, if you act that way, your confidence will catch up.

Is that true? Is there science to support that? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit mixed, actually. But there's this idea that body language can really help with confidence. And there's a big history of studies behind this, some of which haven't been able to be repeated.

Helen Thompson
But there was a lot of talk about the power pose about a decade or so, maybe two decades ago now, where there were a lot of studies that looked at how you place yourself in a confident pose. And actually that makes you feel more confident. So your confident pose is your legs a little bit further apart than they would normally comfortably stand. And you have open shoulders and your arms maybe at your sides. And that's a little bit like animals act when they are confident, when they want to show confidence to another animal.

And there is a lot of studies that show that if you do that, you actually come across as more confident, you are more successful, you're more likely to be invited to a second interview, say. But then a lot of those studies actually had a lot of problems with them. When our statistical techniques became a little bit better, we found that they weren't, in fact, significant anymore and the studies couldn't be repeated, as I said. But since then, we have had a few more studies that do seem to suggest that there is this way of actually positioning yourself, say, before an interview in this very broad shouldered, square legs far apart sort of stance, which can, if you compare people who do that with people who put themselves in a really weak position, so hunched over, your head down, arms crossed, just before you go into an interview, those that are more likely to be hired were those who had done the power poses, even though the interviewer didn't know which person had done which pose beforehand. So there is a little bit of evidence that faking it till you make.

Mike Carruthers
It works well, it also seems that other things affect your confidence. I mean, there are some days where everything seems to be going wrong and I don't feel very confident about anything, and other days when I'm on top of the world because things are going well and you know that it's not a vacuum, that everything affects your level of confidence. Yeah, sure. I mean, the environment you're in, I mean, it's a similar concept to the music. Why music puts you into this state of arousal.

Helen Thompson
And other things in your world can do that. You know, if you've just had a really great conversation with a friend or you've just had some really good news, you've all got this state of arousal in your brain and your hormones, positive hormones, feel good hormones that are going to help you feel confident in another situation. And likewise, if you've had the opposite kind of day, if you're feeling lonely or if you've had bad news or your general mental wellbeing is not great, then that's definitely going to affect your confidence. Sure. Yeah, right.

Mike Carruthers
Because you may feel on top of the world and you're about to give a speech, and just before then you find out that you've been fired. Well, that's how they go really well. And that's why it's really important to have these kind of little tips and these little tools that you can use that might not make a massive difference on their own. But if you put them all together, they could be the difference between getting a job or not getting the job. And have we talked about all the good ones?

Helen Thompson
So there is one more. You can put pen to paper. Essentially, if you write down various things that you've done that have made you feel confident or powerful in the past, just before a presentation or an interview or whatever situation is that you want to feel confident in, you're more likely to come across as confident. And so the way they tested this was to invite people in for interviews, and they got half the group to write down, just for five minutes before the interview, write down a whole list of things about times in which they felt confident and powerful. And then they got another section of people to write down times where they felt really unconfident and weak and unhappy.

And then they got another group of people to not write down anything. And they invited all these people into interviews, and they had an independent panel who didn't know what group they were interviewing, and the people who had written down their confident experiences were more likely to get the jobs. So it just shows that you're just giving yourself just little things you can do to give yourself that little boost, that can just make you come across as more confident. And obviously, there's clothing as well, which I think is a really, really obvious one, but that has also been tested scientifically, that if you are wearing clothes that make you feel confident, you will come across as more confident as well. And is that subjective, or are there clothes that make almost anybody feel confident?

That's a really good question, but I'm not sure that the studies seem to. For instance, one study looked at women who wore. They wore their favorite blouse or they wore a lab coat, and then they were told to make a neutral expression, and they had their photo taken. And the photos, you couldn't see their clothing. You could just see their faces.

And then another panel of independent onlookers rated all of the women to say which they thought looked the most confident. And it basically showed that when the women were wearing their favorite item of clothing, they were rated as looking more confident, even though you couldn't. The raters couldn't actually see the clothing, and the women were told to make a neutral expression in all the pictures. And now let's talk about making friends, because I think especially as we get older, making friends when you're a kid seems to be a lot easier because you're at school, you're doing things with other kids, and it's easier to make friends becomes more difficult as you get older, and there's no magic way to do it. It's all very happenstance and situational, and you bump into people or meet through someone else.

Mike Carruthers
So what about that? What's a good way, a more deliberate way to find friendship? Well, I think, firstly, you have to think about how long it takes to make a friend, because I think people underestimate this, and this has been studied. It takes time. You can actually put hours on it.

Helen Thompson
So 50 hours of time between you and another person is what it takes to make a casual, what you'd call a casual acquaintance. And it takes about 90 hours for you to start thinking of someone as a friend. And it takes about 200 hours spent together to think of someone as your closest friend. So if you think about how many hours we actually spend with people, sort of an hour here or there, you shouldn't try to rush that process or think that you can find a friend overnight. But there are also considerations of how many friends we need.

And we know that it's really important to have social ties. It's amazingly important for our physical and mental health. To the extent where studies show that people with weak social relationships with less friends are about 50% more likely to die in a given timeframe than those who have strong social ties and good quality friendships, we know it's really important. And so in terms of making new friends, I think it's important to think about, well, how many friends do we need? And generally, the research suggests that it's good to have around five intimate relationships.

So maybe not as many as you think. And most of us have about 15 closer friends and family and about 50 sort of next level friends that you might invite to a party. But it's really those five closest powers that's important. And apparently the best way to maintain those friendships is to see or speak to those people every other day. And that seems to be the kind of ideal amount of time and investment that you have to make to keep hold of those sort of those closest relationships to us.

Mike Carruthers
And where do those people tend to come from? Well, I think if you're looking at making friends, then if you're in a new city as an adult, like you say, it's really hard to make friends as an adult. But actually, a lot of the research looks at people who are trying to date, who are trying meet a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and it just shows some little tips. Like, when you first meet people, make sure you look them in the eye. You know, this increases trustworthiness between people.

Helen Thompson
Don't do it too much because it makes people freak out and it's a bit intense, but there's lots of eye contact you want to ask lots of questions. That's really important, particularly on first encounters, because studies show that the amount of questions you ask about the other person predicts how likely that person is going to be to want to see you again. So that's really important. I don't know if you looked at this, but what is the state of affairs with friendship in terms of how it relates to loneliness and how big a problem that is? And are people having more friendships or fewer friendships, or where are we with that?

Yeah, there does seem to be a few studies that suggest that loneliness has increased in recent years. And I think one of the surprising things I found out about loneliness was that one of the best ways to help stop somebody from feeling lonely is actually by getting them to go and help others. So rather than trying to go out and help yourself, actually going and working in, say, a soup kitchen, doing something that's actually helping somebody else is what seemed to be one of the best ways of actually getting somebody out of the cycle of loneliness and improving their mental health. Well, I wish we could talk longer about this because these are all things that I think people struggle with at different times in life. Worry, friendship, confidence.

Mike Carruthers
And it's good to get the research behind what works and how to make things better. Helen Thompson has been my guest. The name of her book is this book could fix your life. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Helen.

Appreciate you being here, Helen, thank you. It's been a real pleasure.

It's hard to go through the day without hearing someone use some form of the word awe, as in, that is so awesome, dude, that YouTube video. That YouTube video is so awesome. And maybe it's awesome, or maybe the word just gets overused a lot. True awe, like when you see the Grand Canyon for the first time or when you see your child for the first time after he or she is born, that's real awe. And that sensation or feeling or whatever awe is, is a real thing that offers interesting benefits to humans.

And Alan Klein is someone who has studied and written about it. Alan is a speaker and author of over 30 books, one of which is called the Awe Factor. Hey, Alan, welcome to something you should know. So what is awe? How do you, what's your definition when.

Alan Klein
You have a wow experience? When you get goosebumps? When something, you know knocks your socks off? To me, that's an awe experience. And I can't imagine going too far in life without having one of those experiences.

Mike Carruthers
But do we know what that experience is? I mean, what's going on that we feel, that sense, that thing? What is it? Interesting you asked that question, because what the researchers are finding, and this is only in the last eight to ten years, because it's very hard to define. It's an emotion.

Alan Klein
But other than saying it's an emotion, everyone experiences on a different way. What youth might think is something that, say, knocks your socks off. I may go, that's not so great. Like, my mom took her first flight when she was 83, and I met her at the plane and she got off and I said, ma, how did you like the flight? And she went, oh, that was incredible.

You could see the tops of the clouds. That was an awe moment for her. For me, who's traveled, you know, over 100,000 miles a year, it's not so much of an awe moment, seeing the tops of the cloud. So it's hard to describe. It's very individual.

And some things are more common, like seeing the number two generator of awe is looking at young babies or childbirth. Most of us are touched by that. So there are some commonalities, or being at the Grand Canyon, most of us go, ah. Oh, my God. When you see stuff like that.

So that's pretty common. But there are other things that maybe is not so common that each individual would find to be an awe moment. Well, it does seem that awe moments are singular in the sense that how many times are you going to look at the Grand Canyon and be awestruck? I mean, the first time, yes. The second time, maybe the third time.

Mike Carruthers
Yeah, I saw this yesterday. Yeah. But you know what? Research is finding that, and I think it's probably true with your example. So nature is the number one generator of awe.

Alan Klein
So if you see something that really awed you and you take a photo, if you look at that photo later on days, months, years later, researchers saying that you will get some of that same awe feeling that you got when you first saw that. Now, maybe there's not the same level, but still it brings back some of that same high moment that you had when you first experienced it. Even just looking at a photo or even just writing about that experience. One of my favorite experiences with awe was many years ago in Long Beach, California, where the Queen Mary, the original Queen Mary ship, sits. And for many years next to it in a big dome was Howard Hughes wooden airplane, the spruce goose.

Mike Carruthers
And it was a tourist attraction. People would come and see it. And the way you would enter to see it is you would step from behind a wall and there, taking up your entire field of vision, was this airplane. And if you had never seen it before, this thing was so big. I mean, the wingspan is 320ft.

It's a football field. The wingspan is the size of a football field. So I stood there next to this wall and watched as people came around the wall and saw this thing. And almost to a person, people would go, would stop and, oh, my God. There would be that moment of awe and you could just see it time after time, person after person.

It was incredible. And you just gave another definition of awe is when you see something and you go, oh, my God. And it's hard to explain sometimes why you have that feeling, but it's like maybe something you've never seen before, something you can't really explain. You know, that. How did that happen?

Alan Klein
For instance, I was hiking up in Yosemite, hiking up to vernal falls, and I'm going up a path, there's a path going down nearby, and somebody stops and yells across Allen. And I look at them and I don't recognize them, and they tell me, I was your apprentice. I used to be a scenic designer and they said I was an apprentice of yours 40 years ago in summer stock. Now, what are the chances, Mike, of us, meaning on this top of this mountain, had I turned a different way or had he delayed a bit and I was further up the path? I mean, it just that one moment.

People call it synchronicity, but I think it's more than that. When moments like that happen, those are all moments that things just connect in an instant. And you go, how did that possibly happen? That's an awe moment. And so everybody, as I said, everybody probably has had these moments in their life.

Mike Carruthers
And so the issue now is, for the purposes of this conversation, so what? I mean, so everybody has them, but what does the science say? What do we do with this? What is it doing for us? Well, the reason it's important to start noticing your awe moments is give you one.

Alan Klein
Scientific research came out last September in emotions journal, and they took 56 people. These are mostly older people, 60, 70, 80. They divided them into two groups. They told both groups, what we want you to do in this experiment is to go out once a week, 15 minutes, take a walk for 15 minutes and do this for eight weeks. So both groups were told the same thing, except one group was told something a little extra.

They were told, when they go out on their walk to look for something that awed them, that they found wander in and just notice how they were feeling. Maybe even take a photo of themselves, actually, of what are them. And then after eight weeks, they interviewed both groups and the negative group, or the group, not the negative group, but the group that was just told to go take a walk. They said things like, you know, I'm going on a trip soon and I haven't packed and I don't have my ticket, and I'm really worried about that. They consistently found that those people said they were, they were thinking about other things, things they were concerned or worried about.

The other group that was told to find some awe, they said that they had less negative emotions. They found that they had more positive emotions. They found that they were less upset and that they were happier. Mike, this was just a once a week, 15 minutes walk, and they did it just eight times. You ask, why is it important to find awe, look for awe, have that intention of finding awe, because it can make us happier.

And other studies have showed it can make us healthier. So how would that happen? I mean, how can finding awe make you healthier? Well, one study had showed that it reduces inflammation. I don't have the exact details of how they studied that.

It seems amazing. And so what do you conclude from that? I mean, one assumption I would think you could make is that when you're focused on finding wonder and awe in something, well, then you're not worried about other things. You're not worried about packing for your trip or worried about what's going to happen tomorrow. You're focused on the moment, you're being very mindful.

Mike Carruthers
And by doing that, that reduces your stress and makes you healthier. Right. Finding awe is being more mindful. And one of the things I realized we need to set our, once we set our intention in anything, we're moving towards that direction. So another example, I took a class a couple of years ago where we were given an intention every day to do something.

Alan Klein
And one day it was to go out and find things in the shape of hearts. And I took my dog for a walk and I came back and I looked at the morning glories that I was growing around my gate in the front of the house, and every single leaf was heart shaped. Now, I had been walking in and out, walking my dog three times a day. I had not noticed that until I had that intention. So finding, you know, putting your intention as if, like those people on the experiment, once they had that intention, they found it and they said they were.

Mike Carruthers
Happier and they were happier. How and for how long and how much happier? They said they focused less on negative emotions. And the other thing they found, and other studies have found this, too, about awe and wonder, is that it helps us connect with other people. Interesting study done with Cirque du Soleil by a researcher named Beau Lato Lotto.

Alan Klein
And they took an audience watching Cirque du Soleil, and they examined them before, during, and after the show. And what they found was that people experience awe and wonder, and anyone who's seen Cirque du Soleil knows that. But they found that people. One of the things they found is that people said they connected closer with other. It helped them connect to other people.

Mike Carruthers
So is it just that we're sharing this experience together? I mean, how does watching Cirque du Soleil help you become closer to other people? You mean the people they're with watching it together and we're sharing this awe inspiring experience of Cirque du Soleil. So that brings us together. It really, it's like when we all.

Alan Klein
When we saw something happen that was so amazing to us, we're all going, ah, you know, we're all going, oh, my God, you know, how. How could they do that? Because we're sharing the experience together. Exactly. Okay.

Exactly. It does seem that children are more awestruck than adults. And then there are those adults, those kind of curmudgeony. Curmudgeony old adults where nothing seems to awe, doesn't seem to be in their repertoire. Everything is like, I was thinking of the spruce goose thing.

Mike Carruthers
If they walked in, they'd go, oh, yeah, it's a plane. You know? Yeah, right. You know, yeah, it's a plane. It's a plane that the wingspan is the size of a football field.

But, yeah, it's a plane. Well, people are like that.

But that's a choice, right? You can choose to live your life looking for all the wonder in the world, or you can choose to just not care and just not look. And who cares how big the plane is? And the Grand Canyon is nice, but it's just a hole in the ground. And so that's a choice to look at it one way or look at it the other way, right?

Alan Klein
Well, Einstein once said that, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said something like, you could live your life as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live your life as everything is a miracle. And, I mean, just think of your own body, what a miracle that is. And how, you know, one breath keeps us alive. You stop just one breath and you're gone. Is that not a miracle?

Mike Carruthers
Yeah. Well, I would think so, yeah. How is it not a miracle? So you're right. Some people, no matter what it is, they're not going to see the awe, the wonder, the miracle that we all are that surrounds us all the time.

And yet that look on a child's face when they see a magic trick or they see something that they've never seen before, that truly is awe inspiring. That look, watching their face, I mean, that's awe inspiring, right? Yeah. And as I said, the second generative awe is childbirth. And watching young children, you know, they're just amazing.

Alan Klein
Sometimes just their face. Look at pictures of babies faces, the big eyes and the big smile, and it truly is amazing. So boil this all down into a message. Is the prescription to be more open to finding wonder in the world and that that is good for you? Well, yeah, I think it's to be more open that realize that it's all around us.

I mean, if you think you don't have a lot of awe in your life, look at a flower and then look closer. I think one of the prescriptive things is to, you know, we don't stop. We don't look closer. Look inside a tulip. The shapes, the colors, sometimes the fragrance.

So just prescriptive is stop. Stop for a moment and look around. Take a raisin, for instance, and just look at the shape and the texture and realize that there's no other raisin in the world probably exactly like that raisin. So everything. Or just stop and realize what it took for the broccoli to get to your plate.

That whole process of somebody planting the seed, or just the fact that this little seed can produce this edible broccoli, that somebody had a plant and water and nurture, and the son had a, you know, nourish, and it had to go on a truck to your store where somebody wrapped it and checked you out, and you brought it home, you had to cook it, and there it is. We just take so much for granted when, if we really stop and look and think, and as you said, be more mindful of everything around us, I think that's a prescription to find the awe that is there. You know, we were talking at the beginning about how, you know, people are in awe often when they see something they've never seen before. And the more you see it, maybe the less awe you're in. But the one thing that always inspires awe in me is when I look up at the night sky on a dark night and I see all those stars and see this little corner of the universe that we're part of every single time.

Mike Carruthers
I'm in awe of that. I can't even get my head around it right. And how many times have you seen it? All the time. All the time.

Alan Klein
So. And it didn't stop you from going about your business, but you took a moment or five minutes to be in awe? Well, I made a very conscious decision many years ago to try not to lose that childlike wonder of the world. And I've tried to live my life that way, to always try to be on the lookout for stuff like that. But I'm not always successful because life gets in the way sometimes.

Mike Carruthers
But I'm glad I made that decision because I see things that perhaps other people don't. I totally agree with you. I don't know if this was in my resume, but I used to be a scenic designer for the captain Kangaroo show. But it taught me to look at the world in childlike eyes. Because if Bunny Rabbit was going to trick Mister Green jeans into giving him a carrot by designing this machine that he tricked Mister Green jeans to press a button to carrot would come out.

Alan Klein
I was the designer of that. And so I had to think, how would a child do this? I think it wore off on me when I went about my life to kind of look through the eyes of a child. And so that's another you ask, what is a prescriptive way to find Moa is to start looking through the eyes of a child. In Zen, they call a beginner's mind.

Mike Carruthers
Just let's recap the benefits of doing this, because it's one thing to do it, and just doing it is a reward in and of itself because those moments are pretty magical. Deeper than that, what are the benefits of this? Either some we haven't talked about or recap the ones we have. So recapping is on that all walk, people said they were happier and they were focused more on positive emotions. Another study shows that it could help reduce inflammation in our body.

Alan Klein
Other studies have showed that it connects us with other people. So there are just three positive scientific research studies proving that awe is very beneficial. Well, it's a little bit like it reminds me of the song and the saying stop and smell the roses. But it's more than that. It's seeking out all the things that inspire awe in you and allow yourself to be awed and reap the rewards of that.

Mike Carruthers
Alan Klein has been my guest. He is a speaker and author. His latest book and he's written over 30 books and his latest book is called the Awe Factor. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you Alan.

Appreciate you being here.

We have a lot of flowers around our house and so consequently we have a lot of bees around our house. Theyre fascinating creatures to watch. I dont know if you knew this but there are over 20,000 species of bees in the world and typically when we talk about bees, were talking about honey bees or bumblebees. These bees are social bees, meaning they live in colonies or hives and theyre not aggressive by nature. These bees only sting if theyre harmed or threatened.

However, they do release a pheromone that alerts other bees to come and assist when theyre harmed or threatened. A solitary bee usually doesnt mind being looked at closely and is unlikely to sting you unless he perceives you as a threat. About 1% of the human population is allergic to bee venom and even a few bee stings at once can be life threatening. But for most of us, the rest of us, it would take about ten bee stings for every one pound of body weight to get a lethal dose of venom from bees. So for a person whos 140 pounds, thats 1400 bee stings.

In general, it is true that if you dont bother them, they wont bother you. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast, and I hope you do, id really appreciate it if you would write a quick review, just a sentence or two of how much you enjoy it, and post it wherever you listen. Apple Podcast, Spotify, Castbox, tunein. Wherever you listen to, there's usually a way to leave a review.

It's pretty simple, it's pretty easy, and it helps us a lot. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.