This time of year can be especially difficult for some people. The darker days and the celebration of holidays can lead to feelings of isolation and depression.
June Gruber, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, teaches a class on the science of happiness.
Her research includes a study about the benefits of “awe-walks," and other ways to cultivate happiness, particularly at this time of year.
Shelley Schlender: For this holiday season, for Hanukkah, for Christmas, for New Year, people get so busy and some philosophies say it's actually time to go quiet. What's your sense about happiness and the winter solstice and all the holidays around it?
June Gruber: I think feelings like happiness and a variety of other emotions, I don't think we need to limit them to one season of the year. All of these different changes in the weather and holidays can provide just different contexts to feel either happy, or compassion, or gratitude. And it does provide, as you said, a nice opportunity to slow down and reflect.
Schlender: Slowing down and reflect, do you recommend that people include a gratitude journal as part of slowing down and reflecting? A time to write down for at least five minutes a day what you felt were things that in some small way made you grateful.
Gruber: Absolutely. So we find that the science of gratitude is a really explosive field with a lot of really rich findings showing that the simple act of writing three things we're grateful for each day, this can take just a couple minutes, can really profoundly shape people's well being, reduce different mental health symptoms that we're all acquainted with: depression, anxiety, and the like.
And it can also provide an opportunity for us to be more appreciative of the people around us and connect with them.
Schlender: How about walking in nature? Is that a form of gratitude too?
Gruber: Absolutely. In fact, we're doing a research study right now, led by my graduate student Stevie Iboni, who's doing what are called "awe walks."
So out at Chautauqua, as well as indoors at the CU Art Museum, we're having young adults follow these prompts where they get into a state of awe or wonder, which is being in the presence of something big and vast and really seeing the wonder in it.
Schlender: Ah, so this is, not aha walks, this is awe walks, the awesomeness of the world, the things that are so big and amazing, are so sublime, we really don't understand them.
Gruber: That's absolutely right. And part of not understanding them and what's in awe, is that it kind of causes us to reorganize our thinking of the world and recognizing our smallness in it, which, which is a good thing. We're part of something bigger than ourselves.
Schlender: Sharing awe, is that something that works well if people ought to do it?
Gruber: I think if you force people to do it, I think it can backfire. But I think if you provide natural opportunities, Again, this can be walks in nature. This can be sometimes people report it in group contexts: it could be at a concert, it could be at church, it could be being around a really inspirational speaker.
I remember when Jane Goodall came to speak here at Boulder and just the crowd, that kind of sense of something bigger than the self, these things can happen naturally with or without other people.
Schlender: And keep our awe muscles, keep those strong.
Gruber: Absolutely, and sometimes it helps me to think about these awe perspectives. Even sometimes people will go to like a planetarium or somewhere where they're reminded about the vastness of their self or these eclipses. It also can kind of, for some people, put in perspective that even the distressing dark times are but a small blip in the kind of broad time scale of humanity and the universe. And give a sense of things will change, they will. Some of these things will not last forever.
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