1: Is there anything specific we can do to experience more love in our lives?
The science tells us the answer is yes.
Yesterday, we looked at how people with high vagal tone experience more love and connection.
The vagus nerve runs from deep within our brain stem down into our heart and other internal organs.
People with higher vagal tone tend to be “more flexible across a whole host of domains—physical, mental, and social,” Barbara Fredrickson writes in her book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become.
“They simply adapt better to their ever-shifting circumstances, albeit completely at nonconscious levels. . .
“Socially,” she notes, “they’re especially skillful in navigating interpersonal interactions and in forging positive connections with others.”
Our vagal tone tends to remain constant over time.
“For most people,” Barbara writes, “it remains roughly the same year after year, rhythmically channeling them toward loneliness or social prosperity, sickness or health.”
2: Which is why the research Barbara and her team have conducted at the University of North Carolina is so impactful.
As it turns out, just like we can build muscle through regular physical exercises, we can also build vagal tone through regular emotional exercises.
How do we train our minds?
Through the ancient mind-training practice of loving-kindness meditation.
Barbara and her team began by measuring the vagal tone of all the participants in the study.
Then, several weeks later, the researchers randomly selected participants to learn loving-kindness meditation. Others would not.
After the loving-kindness meditation workshop concluded, the researchers once again measured the vagal tone of all the survey participants.
What did they find?
“That vagal tone—which is commonly taken to be stable an attribute as your adult height—actually improves significantly with mind-training,” Barbara writes.
Those participants who learned loving-kindness meditation changed the most.
“They devoted scarcely more than an hour of their time each week to the practice,” she notes.
“Yet within a matter of months, completely unbeknownst to them, their vagus nerves began to respond more readily to the rhythms of their breathing, emitting more of that healthy arrhythmia that is the fingerprint of high vagal tone.
“Breath by breath—loving moment by loving moment—their capacity for positivity resonance matured.”
3: The evidence-based reason for hope?
“No matter what our biological capacity for love is today, we can bolster that capacity by next season,” Barbara writes.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What do I know about loving-kindness meditation? What would I like to know?
Action: Commit to experimenting with loving-kindness meditation over the next month.
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