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The Absolute Best Plant for Beginners That Anyone Can Keep Alive (and 8 More Just Like It!)
Find meditation really boring? You’re not the only one
by Thomas Goetz, professor of psychology
Other practices like sermons, yoga and retreats can also trigger ‘spiritual boredom’. Here’s why it’s normal and even useful
So much is written and spoken about the benefits of meditation, prayer and other spiritual practices, but what you don’t usually hear mentioned is how boring they can be. This is not simply to say they can be difficult or challenging. Boredom is a distinct and unpleasant emotional state in which time seems to stand still, your body is lethargic, and you feel a strong desire to escape the situation.
I was chatting to a friend about it the other day and she shared various issues with meditation, such as a wandering mind and feeling tired while meditating. She also described how time seemed to drag on in an unpleasant way – a key sign of boredom. To try to overcome this, she began practising guided meditations – yet the uncomfortable feelings remained and, eventually, she stopped meditating altogether. Now, she feels frustrated because she genuinely believes meditation could be beneficial to find calmness and improve her focus.
My friend is far from alone. When prompted, I’ve heard people describe similar struggles with other spiritual practices such as yoga, silent retreats, pilgrimages and sermons. In fact, what my colleagues and I call ‘spiritual boredom’ has a long tradition. Christian history contains numerous depictions of boredom: paintings of yawning congregants, people sleeping during sermons, and so on. In the Middle Ages, this phenomenon was recognised as a spiritual malaise called acedia (from Latin), characterised by listlessness and melancholy. Christians referred to it as the ‘demon of noontide’ – a concept described by St Thomas Aquinas as the ‘sorrow of the world’ and the ‘enemy of spiritual joy’.
Beyond these examples from Christian history, reports of boredom can be found in almost every spiritual practice. For instance, in Buddhist contexts, there are accounts of boredom during Asanha Bucha Day sermons. Similarly, some reports relating to mindfulness meditation describe experiences of ‘void’ – an emotional state combining boredom and psychological entropy.
Yet despite its historical presence, spiritual boredom seems to be rarely discussed. Spiritual teachers and guides seldom acknowledge it, even though it might significantly affect engagement with spiritual practices. In general, talking about boredom is often a clear taboo for people. In terms of impression-management and image-engineering, people prefer to talk about their successes and fulfilling activities. They might think that mentioning boredom will imply they believe the activity is a waste of their time or that they somehow don’t ‘get it’. Meanwhile, spiritual teachers may avoid discussing boredom because it could suggest that their guidance is ineffective.
Spiritual boredom matters: it could reduce participation in practices – or even lead people to abandon them altogether. In today’s world, spiritual engagement is arguably more important than ever. In the face of global crises such as climate change and ongoing wars, many people turn to spiritual growth as a way to foster empathy and social connectedness, potentially counteracting trends of egocentrism and hyper-competition. Spiritual practices can help cultivate values that benefit the common good.
As an educational psychologist, I’ve long been interested in boredom in school settings where it can hinder learning and achievement. Spiritual growth can also be viewed as a learning process and, just as boredom can have detrimental effects in educational contexts, it may cause similar problems for spiritual practices and development.
The low average boredom during pilgrimages might stem from their inherent variability
This is what prompted my colleagues and me to search the psychological research literature for studies examining spiritual boredom – its levels, antecedents and consequences. To our surprise, we found no dedicated research. So, we decided to investigate it ourselves.
We explored five common spiritual contexts: yoga, meditation, silent retreats, Catholic sermons, and pilgrimages. We surveyed 1,267 adults using online questionnaires, asking them about their experiences of boredom during these practices (they rated their agreement with statements such as ‘During the yoga session I had just completed, I was bored’), as well as potential causes and effects of that boredom.
Although the average score for spiritual boredom across all practices was relatively low at 1.91 (based on a scale from 1 ‘completely disagree’ to 5 ‘completely agree’), we found that many of our participants had experienced significant levels of boredom. The average scores varied significantly by context, ranging from a low of 1.24 (for pilgrimages) to a high of 3.60 (for Catholic sermons), but there were individuals who reported high levels of boredom (scores of 4 or 5) in every context.
The relatively low average boredom reported during pilgrimages might stem from their inherent variability: changing landscapes, weather conditions, challenges, and encounters with diverse people – all of which can reduce monotony. Sermons, by contrast, tend to be much less dynamic, requiring passive listening and offering fewer opportunities for engagement.
Our theoretical framework for the study was the Control-Value Theory (CVT), developed about 20 years ago by the psychologist and educational scholar Reinhard Pekrun. The CVT was focused originally on academic settings related to learning and achievement but, over the past five years, its scope has broadened considerably to the workplace and other contexts.
The CVT posits that boredom is primarily driven by two factors: perceived control and the subjective value of the activity. Accordingly, boredom arises when we feel overchallenged or underchallenged (reflecting a mismatch in control) or when we consider the activity to have low personal relevance. Applying this to a spiritual context, imagine that during a guided yoga session a participant finds the breathing exercises too challenging and so mentally or physically disengages from the practice – potentially resulting in boredom. Or think of a dull, uneventful section of a pilgrimage or spiritual walk, leaving someone feeling underchallenged due to the lack of external stimulation, which could also lead to boredom. Similarly, during a silent retreat, a person might feel deeply bored if they fail to see the retreat’s relevance to their personal life, goals or values.
Note that the two boredom-precipitating factors identified by CVT are separate and do not always correspond, though they can combine. Take my friend who meditates, for example: she genuinely believed in the benefits of meditation, so it had high subjective value for her. Yet she felt significantly overchallenged – both when practising on her own, likely due to setting overly ambitious goals, and when attending a demanding guided meditation group. It’s reasonable to assume that her feelings of boredom would have been much more intense if she hadn’t perceived the practice as personally valuable.
Spiritual routines can lose their meaning over time, especially if they become habitual
Our findings align well with this theory. We asked our participants questions about the value they saw in their spiritual practices and how challenging they found them. Feelings of being over- or underchallenged and a lack of personal relevance were associated with a greater experience of spiritual boredom.
I can imagine that feelings of being over- or underchallenged are particularly common in group practices or pre-structured programmes, where a person’s individual needs may be overlooked. An example of this is sermons, during which it can be strongly assumed that some people may feel overchallenged while others feel underchallenged. Additionally, spiritual routines can lose their meaning over time, especially if they become habitual. For example, attending sermons out of tradition rather than personal conviction, or meditating routinely without reflecting on its relevance.
We also asked our participants about their levels of motivation and mindfulness during spiritual practice and, perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that spiritual boredom was associated with lower scores on both counts. Although these are correlational results, they’re consistent with the intuitive idea that boredom can significantly diminish the transformative potential of spiritual activities. For example, if someone aims to become calmer in life through meditation but feels bored during the practice, accompanied by a constant desire to escape the situation, the meditation might actually be more agitating than calming, and thus fail to have a positive effect on their overall sense of calm.
Having said all that, I don’t believe boredom is just an obstacle – it could also be informative. From an evolutionary perspective, boredom exists to signal misalignment. It’s your brain’s way of saying: ‘This doesn’t suit you – change something.’ If you ever find yourself bored while meditating, praying or listening to a sermon, it might be helpful to ask yourself: ‘Am I over- or underchallenged?’ and ‘Does this practice (still) hold personal meaning for me?’
If you feel over- or underchallenged, you could try to adapt your practice to meet your personal needs. To take an obvious example, maybe you are consistently overchallenging yourself with very long meditation sessions, in which case, try shortening the practice time to the point before it becomes boring. During group sessions, meditation teachers might suggest that participants avoid pushing themselves too hard when they feel overchallenged during practice. Similarly, if you find a practice lacks meaning for you, try to reflect on and remind yourself of its relevance and benefits – and why you started the practice in the first place. Again, teachers and spiritual leaders can help. For example, after a meditation session, a teacher could regularly initiate a brief exchange where participants share any positive effects they’ve experienced – such as the ability to let go of unfounded worries during daily life.
In short, don’t be embarrassed by your feelings of boredom or simply try to push them away. Those feelings are an important signal that the practice may not be optimal for you. It’s as if boredom is saying: ‘Change something, so I no longer need to be here’ – it’s a natural and potentially helpful signal that can guide your actions toward better alignment with your needs. That’s why talking openly about spiritual boredom should be encouraged: it could lead to meaningful and fulfilling conversations.
As for my friend, she resumed her meditation practice and consciously worked on not overchallenging herself – choosing to end the session whenever boredom signalled a sense of overwhelm. Gradually, she extended the duration of her sessions, allowing for natural fluctuations. Now that she feels the practice aligns well with her abilities, she appreciates it all the more. She is a vivid example of how boredom – when understood as a meaningful signal – can resolve itself by pointing to a misalignment. In her case, this ultimately led to a more fulfilling spiritual practice and a greater sense of calm in everyday life.
How the nature of friendship has changed through the centuries
by Bénedicte F Sère, historian
The metamorphosis of this special bond from feudal to modern times reveals much about the aspirations of different societies
Friendship is a force that runs deep through the human soul. It fosters trust, emotional balance and mutual support. It binds individuals and shapes communities, both in ordinary times and in moments of crisis. In the Middle Ages, friendship was more than a private bond – it was a social instrument, intertwined with moral ideals, religious duties and political hierarchies. Medieval thinkers devoted sustained attention to its meaning and value, often linking it to the Christian ideal of charity. As we shall see, friendship also emerges as a golden thread that weaves together antiquity and Christianity, reason and faith, the individual and the social body.
Medieval Christian Europe inherited from antiquity a deep reverence for the virtue of friendship. Thinkers in the Middle Ages read Cicero and Seneca, and adapted the ancients’ ethical models to their own literature, exegesis and philosophy. But the decisive turning point occurred in 1246 when Aristotle’s major treatise on friendship, found in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, was translated into Latin and began to circulate widely. With Aristotle, the medieval world inherited a powerful, systematic and comprehensive treatise on friendship.
Friendship, Aristotle says, is ‘one of the most indispensable requirements of life’: to flourish in this life, we must have excellent friends. He offered a set of precise definitions alongside a rich spectrum of nuances. There are three forms of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The first is a relationship between two people who are useful to each other – business partners or colleagues, say – and naturally these tend not to last. Friendships of pleasure are those based on a common pursuit or interest, which last as long as the friends share their passion. Finally, friendships of virtue involve both utility and pleasure, but are much deeper: these are friends who love and respect each other at their most fundamental level and who enrich each others’ lives by making it possible for the other to flourish. ‘Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves.’
Aristotle situated friendship within the broader framework of human relationships: between father and son, husband and wife, master and subject, and more. This encyclopaedic approach profoundly shaped Christian authors’ reflections. But a question soon emerged: how then could this Greek, philosophical and pagan virtue be reconciled with Christian virtue?
This question underpins the entire odyssey of the Ethics’ reception in the medieval West. From the mid-13th to the 15th century, Latin theologians wrestled with Aristotle’s concept of friendship, attempting to adapt it to Christian categories – chief among them, the theological virtue of caritas. Far more than mere affection or benevolence, caritas – often translated as ‘charity’ or ‘divine love’ – is, in scholastic theology, the highest of the three theological virtues, alongside fides (‘faith’) and spes (‘hope’, usually in the sense of our ultimate union with God). Infused by God rather than acquired through human effort, caritas binds the soul to God and orders all other loves accordingly. Rooted in Augustine and systematised by Aquinas, caritas is not only the love of God above all things but also the love of neighbour for God’s sake. Thus, while Aristotelian friendship is grounded in virtue and mutual recognition among equals, Christian caritas presupposes asymmetry, grace and a radically different anthropology. The encounter between these two frameworks – one ethical, the other theological – gave rise to a complex, and at times uneasy, synthesis in medieval thought.
That is why thinkers from the 13th to the 15th centuries, from Albert the Great to Johannes Versoris, engaged in a foundational enquiry: what is the true nature of the social bond? Is it a philosophical, rational, ethical – even humanistic – connection, or is it an infused, theological notion whose ultimate purpose is God as the principle presiding over all human relationships?
Even a slave could become the friend of his master – because both are men
Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century Dominican, elevated friendship to the status of a habitus, a quasi-virtue: only the virtuous are capable of genuine friendship. His term for this kind of friendship, amor amicitiae, is set in contrast to amor concupiscentiae – the love of desire. For Aquinas, friendship is rightly ordered toward its theological counterpart: charity, or dilectio (pure love, as opposed to the more carnal eros). The defining trait of friendship, like that of charity, is the proper ordering of emotion. To love another for their own sake, and not one’s own, is a form of self-transcendence: it is to recognise the other as an end in themselves. True friendship is marked by reciprocity, mutual goodwill, perfect equality, intimacy, likeness and shared purpose. Just as nature is oriented toward grace, Aquinas sees friendship as ordered toward charity.
In the 14th century, the reception of Aristotle took a more rationalist turn, notably through the work of Jean Buridan, master of arts at the University of Paris. With Buridan, friendship was decoupled from its theological double and claimed a rational legitimacy of its own. A new ethical humanism emerged as a viable alternative to Christian morality. This ethical model re-inscribed friendship at the heart of human and social relations, such that even a slave could become the friend of his master – because both are men. In Buridan’s ethical humanism, friendship is no longer restricted to personal intimacy. The friend is any human being who is good and virtuous, valued for who they are. One’s support is owed to such a person by virtue of their moral worth alone, even in the absence of prior acquaintance. This reflects an idea of universal friendship extended to all good men. In Buridan’s system, the friendship-charity dyad disintegrates: friendship breaks free from its theological shell and asserts itself as a purely philosophical construct. As the historian Alain de Libera noted: ‘Aristotle offers the means to construct a philosophical alternative to Christian sociality – and to counter the very principle of its fulfilment: charity.’ (My translation.)
By the 15th century, in reaction to Buridan, a renewed theological interpretation of friendship became popular in the academic circles of Central Europe. Thinkers such as Paul of Worczyn, Versoris and Nicolas d’Orbellus reconnected with the 13th-century tradition – not by copying it, but by adapting it to new intellectual contexts. In their re-readings, Christian caritas reclaimed its centrality, while Aristotelian friendship was subordinated or spiritually redirected.
The Ethics became a site of doctrinal elaboration, where theological virtues – especially dilectio – superseded purely philosophical categories. This revival signalled a transformation of scholasticism, distinct from both 13th- and 14th-century models, and reflected broader shifts in late-medieval religious and cultural thought. The Aristotelian idea of friendship thus extended far beyond academia, shaping sermons, treatises, political discourses and practical documents – preparing the way for modern reflections by Erasmus, Montaigne, Diderot and Rousseau.
In this long process of assimilation and acculturation of pagan philosophy into the Christian Middle Ages, one observes the gradual penetration of ethical friendship into the political sphere. Governance by emotion became an emerging ideal: the prince was now expected to master and deploy emotion effectively. Political theorists began to envision a rationality that integrated ethical life and emotional engagement in both ruler and ruled. Through the efforts of the Aristotelian scholars, the contractual nature of friendship became a pillar of society – but not without paradox. Could a king have friends? No, replied Albert the Great: friendship entails equality and familiarity, and familiarity breeds contempt. At a time when the sacral majesty of kingship was being constructed, symbolic distance was essential. But, a century later, under Charles V, Nicole Oresme offered a different view: yes, the king could – and should – cultivate friendship, lest he resemble the tyrant, a man alone and incapable of love and friendship. The good ruler must be well-advised and morally anchored. While he may not strictly need friends, he requires them to practise virtue and to manifest the benevolence of his governance.
The embrace signified goodwill. Even sharing a bed was less about sexuality than diplomacy
At the Burgundian court in the 15th century – where Guillaume Fillastre’s Treatise on Friendship circulated – a sharper distinction emerged between the prince’s ‘good, true and loyal friends’ and his harmful enemies. In this society, neutrality had no place. A friend or an ‘ally’ was first and foremost someone who was not an enemy. The ideal of effective love was ever-present in theoretical discourse, chronicles and pas d’armes (highly ritualised martial tournaments) at court, but practice often fell short: the proliferation of alliances betrayed their instability. Yet ritual prevailed.
As the historian Klaus Oschema has shown more recently, gestures of physical proximity were essential expressions of friendship. The hand was read in all its symbolic forms: the handshake as a ceremonial gesture; the touching of hands as a sign of reconciliation and love; hand movements expressing grief; the raised hand for oath-taking on relics or the Gospels; folded hands as gestures of prayer or supplication. The embrace signified goodwill. The kiss marked peace, greeting, fraternal love and reconciliation – playing a role in both feudal homage and the Eucharistic ritual. Even sharing a bed was less about sexuality than diplomacy. Likewise, sharing a horse was a gesture of egalitarian peace-making. While medieval society distinguished between public and private spaces, it did not dissociate them: institutional and emotional spheres were deeply intertwined. In friendship, personal gestures became simultaneously public declarations and individual commitments. Friendship thus endured the transition from feudal to modern statehood: political stability was grounded in personal relations. Emotion and politics were inseparable.
According to its representation, application and idealisation, friendship reveals how a society conceives of itself and its social fabric. Fundamentally, friendship was a dramatised social bond, emotionally scripted, which medieval thinkers recognised as a powerful force for political cohesion. It has passed through the centuries, changing its outward forms without ever losing its essence: at times a pagan virtue, at others a Christian habitus, or a political instrument, it is that supple yet tenacious bond that ties hearts together and shapes communities. Far from being a mere sentiment, it is staged, ritualised, theorised, debated – in a word, historicised. And perhaps therein lies its greatest power: to reveal, through the fabric of its metamorphoses, what societies aspire to be. At a time when social bonds are in constant flux, revisiting medieval friendship means understanding that it was far more than a moral ideal: at every stage, it was a way of inhabiting the world.
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-the-sublime-in-the-natural-world
How to think about the sublime
An exquisite mix of fear and awe, pleasure and pain, the sublime stretches the imagination and reveals the limits of reason
by Nicole A Hall
There is no single way to elicit this peculiar feeling.
Perhaps you have felt it on a hot summer’s night, lying in the grass, scanning a leaden sky for shooting stars, satellites and planets. You are struck by the vastness of the Universe, its infinite measure. There is an anxious and humbling sense of awe and underlying fear.
Maybe, while on a hike, you are struck by unending skies, and the vast sweep of a spectacular and somehow terrifying mountain range, unable to absorb its full size. Perhaps it’s a mountain range like the Alps that you can’t take in all at once but only in parts. Its grandeur is staggering and somewhat frightening.
Maybe you have read a line of poetry that captures an exquisite coming-together of pleasure and pain, or that invites you to see your life in a new light, which throws into relief the delicious strangeness of existence. Or perhaps you have felt unexpectedly transported by the immersive grandeur of a painting.
It’s a sense of being overwhelmed, of impending terror, of encountering the unending incomprehensibility of infinity or a natural force: a phenomenon that shows the limits of the human mind while arousing contemplation. This is the sublime – a pleasurable but unsettling feeling.
A feeling that is at once pleasurable and unsettling is exceedingly paradoxical and difficult to account for, as we will see. But that doesn’t take away from its ability to influence and inform us about our place in the world, and our relationship with nature. While the concept is often linked to cultural, social or political dimensions, the focus of this Guide is primarily on the natural world. What role, then, might the sublime play in how you relate to your natural environment?
We’ll cover the role of sublimity and its connection to the natural world. We’ll learn to better appreciate and understand a feeling that is so often treated as ineffable or incomprehensible. And, hopefully, by the end you’ll have a little more insight into what you’re feeling when you gaze into that immeasurable and starry night sky.
Key points
The sublime is hard to define. Philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant have tried but, while the sublime can be identified, it follows no principle or rule and defeats our reasoning abilities.
The sublime is distinct from beauty. While beauty has form and bounded structure, the sublime is formless and unbounded. It is ineffable and resists rational understanding.
The sublime doesn’t seem to be located anywhere. It overwhelms and moves us into a metaphysical or transcendental realm. The grandeur and vastness of awe-inspiring landscapes, majestic mountains, raging storms or formidable waterfalls can be experienced only in part.
The sublime involves a negative aesthetic force. The anxious discomfort it evinces invites humility and self-reflection. It’s another paradox of the sublime that this discomfort can have benevolent consequences.
The sublime makes us humble – and potentially moral. For Iris Murdoch, while the sublime can be a source of terror and conflict, it can also be the origin of our self-understanding as moral beings capable of exercising reason and freedom.
Environmental sublime versus cultural sublime. Artworks can’t offer the full existential experience of the unknowable natural sublime – those oceans, moonlight and mountains that trigger the terror and awe of sublime experience.
Think it through
The sublime is hard to define
In the writings of Longinus in the 1st century CE, the sublime captured the greatness or elevation of the soul to be found in literature, poetry and rhetoric, bringing out the importance of transcendent or transformative experience. John Dennis, in the early 18th century, contemplated how poetry can capture the sublime in the natural realm. He wrote at a time when scientific discoveries turned human attention to astronomy, the sea, the vast emptiness of space – all of which might be considered objects of sublime experience. In artistic practice, the sublime has also related to landscape, and more recently sculpture and installations, provoking questions about the extent to which artworks can represent or prompt experiences of the sublime.
However, it is Edmund Burke’s work on the sublime, along with Immanuel Kant’s, that continues to be influential to this day. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke wrote: ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible … is a source of the sublime…’ Kant in The Critique of Judgment (1790), meanwhile, distinguishes between two different versions of the sublime. The first is mathematical. This is the kind of sublime you experience when confronted with immeasurable distance, with infinity: the night sky, or what Kant calls ‘the starry heaven’, is a case of the mathematical sublime. The dynamic sublime, meanwhile, is evoked by extraordinary power rather than unimaginable vastness. Kant gives the example of an erupting volcano.
Because the sublime relates both to internal, subjective experience and to the external, objective world, it can often seem to resist definition: what are the principles that guide its use or application? Should we experience it as emerging from human experience, or from the world ‘out there’? In The Sublime Reader (2018), Robert Clewis writes that there is ‘an ambiguity in theories of the sublime, an ambiguity that may well be unavoidable’. He says that ‘the sublime can refer to a person’s or subject’s feelings and experiences, and it can be applied to the object that elicits those responses.’ This way of thinking places the subject in a position of distance from the object eliciting the experience of the sublime, making it difficult to pin down if it is psychological, or emotional, rather than an objective feature.
So, the concept is no doubt perplexing, and some have thought that no coherent theory of it is even possible. Although we can identify the sublime, it seems to follow no principle or rule. While it brings pleasure, that pleasure is associated with pain or fear. While linked with nature, it also applies to art, even if derivatively. And though it is associated with religious experience, it also maps onto scientific wonder and discovery. A pessimistic view would be to suggest that, since we are not fully able to explain the concept or categorise our emotional responses, we might as well give up on it.
A more positive approach would be that, even if the sublime in some sense defeats our reasoning abilities, yielding to the unknown is a creative act. It is generative of ideas that can orient us towards acknowledging our profound connection with the natural environment, which is not always harmonious or comfortable. It’s difficult to pin down exactly what the sublime is – but that doesn’t mean we should do away with it.
The sublime is distinct from beauty
With the natural sublime, which emerged in the 18th century, also came its distinction from the concept of beauty. Indeed, a better understanding of the sublime can be achieved by contrasting it with beauty, a thought that was central to Kant’s aesthetics. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant emphasised the roles of form and formlessness in distinguishing beauty from the sublime. An object’s form structures its beauty, so to speak: we can perceptually grasp the beauty of a flower because of its size and bounded structure. Beauty appeases and leads to tranquility. It ‘carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes an object of satisfaction in itself …’ In beauty, our understanding achieves harmony with the imagination as it is able to grasp the way an object presents itself to perception.
This is not so where the sublime is concerned: the concept of infinity, or the expanse of a stark mountain range, or the surging power of a monumental waterfall, are not bounded in their structure in such a way that we can perceive or conceptualise them as fully accessible to us. The sublime stretches and overwhelms the imagination, revealing the limits of our power of reason. That is why it is perceptually frustrating: your capacity for fully understanding the sublime is overridden or interrupted by the ineffable. In the sublime, we seem to come up against some kind of obstinate limit to our understanding.
According to Kant, our capacity for reason seeks harmony with our capacity for imagination in trying to understand the world, but the formlessness and unboundedness of the sublime are beyond our capacity for both perception and reason. We are therefore unable to fully grasp the object of sublime experience, yet we gain, Kant says, an awareness of our freedom and capacity for reason, both of which are foundational to moral action in his philosophy.
The sublime doesn’t seem to be located anywhere
Where does the sublime come from: our minds or the objective world? Is it human or does it somehow inhere in nature? Where is the sublime located? At first blush, it doesn’t seem to originate in the mind or in our emotions, since the grandeur and vastness of the sublime can be experienced only in part, as Kant observes. However, it doesn’t seem to be in the external world either, since it is unclear what it might mean for something to be sublime if no one is there to name it as such.
We might compare the sublime with another emotion: sadness. The weeping willow tree is often considered to be a symbol of sorrow and grief, and it’s common to feel a sense of sadness when looking at one. How come? Of course, we do not take the willow tree itself to be in the psychological state of being sad, but it nevertheless seems to possess the quality of expressing sadness. Consider the range of aesthetic qualities we attribute to places such as a ‘raging sea’ or a ‘peaceful meadow’ or, as the philosopher Emily Brady has argued, certain animals who may be thought to have psychological dispositions, such as a ‘mighty tiger’, a ‘joyous robin’, an ‘exciting falcon’. These questions are complex and call to mind contemporary discussions about how best to account for nature’s beauty, and how best to respect it given the richness of human response and moods.
A better way of thinking about the sublime, unlike many other aesthetic concepts, is to stress its relational dimension in terms of how human experience and appreciation relate to awe-inspiring landscapes, majestic mountains, raging storms, formidable waterfalls. As Brady writes in The Sublime in Modern Philosophy (2013), it is ‘the self’s relation to something greater’ and it is less identifiable than beauty because it overwhelms us and moves us into a metaphysical or transcendental realm. Its ineffability opens us to scientific curiosity and cultural expression. Through the humility we experience in its presence, the sublime conjures understanding of the moral and aesthetic obligations we have towards nonhuman and human entities.
The sublime involves a negative aesthetic force
Brady goes on to link the sublime’s aesthetic dimension with perception and imagination. The actual experience of the natural sublime ‘is not a delightful or contemplative experience, [it] does not define a relationship of loving nature, or even a friendly relationship with nature. Rather, it is uncomfortable, even difficult – an imposition on environmental events.’ The sublime as experienced through its distinctive aesthetic qualities overwhelms by its unknowable nature in the expression of vastness and infinity: those aspects to which we don’t have sensual or perceptual access. This is a distinctly negative aesthetic aspect of sublime appreciation that is importantly ‘unsentimental’ and ‘complex’, as Brady writes in ‘The Environmental Sublime’ (2015). Here is Brady’s fuller list of the aesthetic qualities of the sublime: ‘mysterious, dark, obscure, great, huge, powerful, towering, dizzying, blasting, raging, disordered, dynamic, tumultuous, shapeless, formless, boundless, frameless, and so on’.
This emphasis on the sublime as a negative, potentially alienating aesthetic quality renders it both profound and anxiety-inducing to the extent that it invites humility and self-reflection. In other words, we need to consider the fundamental and unknowable force of sublime experience to arrive at human (cultural or scientific) intellect, reason, and our capacity for freedom, and moral and artistic judgment. Indeed, the anxious discomfort evinced by the sublime reminds us of how we relate to nature. It does so in such a way that not only excites us, but that can also create a sense of outward-seeking empathy, understanding and respect for nonhuman entities of the natural environment. It’s another paradox of the sublime that this discomfort can bring about benevolent consequences.
The sublime makes us humble – and potentially moral
According to Kant and, later, Iris Murdoch, our own feelings of humility and insecurity emerge when faced with sublime experience. As Murdoch wrote in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959):
Confronted with some vast prospect, the starry sky, or the Alps, the imagination and the senses cannot properly take in what lies before them, that is they cannot satisfy the reason, which demands a total complete ordered picture. Yet in being so defeated the reason gains a fresh sense of its own independence and dignity. Since reason is the moral will, the experience of the sublime is a sort of moral experience, that is, an experience of freedom.
Murdoch holds that, while the sublime can be a source of terror and conflict, it can also be the origin of our self-understanding as moral beings capable of exercising reason and freedom. The formlessness and disorder of the sublime compel us to seek moral order or purpose. For Kant, pleasure in the sublime is linked with the recognition of our internal and abstract capacity for moral reason, the moral law. For Murdoch, this feeling is less about timeless and abstract reason, and more about seeing others as moral individuals in themselves with whom we connect and seek understanding.
At the heart of the matter lies the idea of humility. The philosopher Tom Cochrane connects the idea of humility to feelings of self-negation. By this, he means a feeling that ‘may be less physiologically intense than everyday instances of fear’ and that has ‘psychological profundity that coheres well with our intuitions of the sublime’. We look away from ourselves, our desires, our inclinations and, through the moral will, act in awareness of the existence of others. In the context of today’s climate crisis, the freedom we have in being able to reason should lead to the conclusion that we ought to care not only about how we engage with each other, but how we engage with the natural world. This way of thinking recalls Aldo Leopold’s ‘The Land Ethic’ in A Sand County Almanac (1949), in which he calls for us to not seek to dominate nature, but to respect it. We should care about our place within, or our interconnectedness with, nature’s system and thereby contribute to its flourishing.
Environmental sublime versus cultural sublime
So far, we have mostly been considering the sublime as it is encountered in the natural world and how this experience does not reduce to pleasure, but reveals complex, deeply felt emotions that contribute to growth in emotional intelligence, character and a life worth living. What does the natural sublime have to say about the sublime encountered in the arts?
To a certain extent, I agree with Brady, who argues that it is difficult to see how the arts can fully capture the natural sublime, or the humility that accompanies it. This is because a combination of externally imposed power, formlessness, unboundedness, unpredictability and disorder feed into our vulnerability, heighten our emotions and expand our imaginations. The arts, while they of course heighten our emotions and expand our imaginations, cannot do so in quite the same way, or to the same extent. As the poet and playwright Hildebrand Jacob wrote in 1735, the objects of human creativity can offer only ‘a very faint notion of what is not so easily described, or taught, as conceived by a mind truly disposed for the perception of that, which is great and marvellous’. Oceans, moonlight and mountains are the ‘real’ of sublime experience, whereas cultural representations use different cues to guide the mind in that direction. By their very limitation, artworks can’t offer the existential experience with the unknowable aspects of the natural sublime.
But even if the cultural sublime does not occasion the sublime in the same way as experiencing it in nature does, we of course shouldn’t dismiss its artistic, social or cultural worth. Consider examples of soaring architecture meant to instil a sense of the beyond, like the nave of a great church, or the dynamic sublimity of massive structures like dams, high-speed trains, rockets blasting off.
The arts are replete with the sublime. Anish Kapoor’s Descent into Limbo (1992) – a pitch-black eight-foot hole – ‘triggers the experience of an unfathomable black hole in the ground’ that causes a feeling of indefinite smallness, according to one critic. Or take Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ (1773), in which she captures the breadth of human imagination through poetic description of transcendental experience of the skies, cosmos, planets and stars. The poem ends:
And ripen for the skies: the hour will come
When all these splendours bursting on my sight
Shall stand unveil’d, and to my ravish’d sense
Unlock the glories of the world unknown.
The mid-20th-century artist Agnes Martin aimed to express – through her universal 8 foot x 8 foot paintings depicting horizontal lines – the sense of the universal, the atemporal, the endless. These works – of course there are many more – address the boundlessness of form, while at the same time relating to the bounded body. But, while they incorporate a sense of the sublime, it often lacks the existential vigour of the natural sublime, which is more likely to trigger in us a sense of awe and humility.
Why it matters
The environmental sublime provides us with an understanding of the complexity of humanity’s connection to nature. It opens up fresh possibilities for our imagination to explore, new outlets for our creativity, and a means by which to generate scientific, literary and artistic ideas. It allows us to cultivate a deep respect for nature. And the experience of the sublime illuminates other concepts such as the beautiful, the ugly, the grotesque, the fearful, the disgusting, all of which are more accessible.
The aesthetic force of the sublime locates human thought and emotion primarily in the natural environment and intertwines it with moral concerns about that natural environment. It connects us to the environment, not as coldly distant, rational beings, but sensitively – which is why it is able to stretch our empathy and care to include others, including nonhuman others. That experience is other-regarding and self-regarding, pronouncing a deep form of respect through humility. That respect is achieved not only through scientific understanding, although, as we have seen, scientific understanding and imagination both contribute to the flourishing of natural environments and of the humans who reside in those environments.
However, so do many cultural and literary approaches. Consider the deep connections with the natural environment that are manifest in some First Nations communities: Alexis Wright’s impressive novel Carpentaria (2006) is one such literary example that should be valued for its insight into Australian Aboriginal sensibility and wisdom. Many more examples abound, and they should be integrated into how we conceive of the natural environment, points of view that ought to be taken into consideration in formulating legislation that intends to protect it.
The aesthetic force of the sublime merits careful attention and integration in our engagement with sublime and non-sublime environments. This means that we recognise ourselves as moral beings who contribute to the flourishing of people, ecologies and environments the world over, even those we may not know or properly understand. What that means is coming up with an aesthetic moral framework that respects descriptions and evaluations that are true to those local communities, ecologies and environments. These considerations can focus our attention on how to act. The sublime, then, while transcendent, complex and disturbing, just might contribute to ecological, environmental and human flourishing.
So on that hot summer’s night looking into the night sky or on that hike across the vast mountain range, you might contemplate your connection to the natural environment. You might consider how you might feel, reflect or act in such a way that contributes not only to your capacity for reason, but to your imaginative and creative potential too. You might consider that, indeed, the friend you’re beside on the grass and gazing up at the stars with similarly has imaginative and creative potential. You might even consider non-sublime, non-classically beautiful nature and your responsibilities to it, since they, too, merit our moral and aesthetic understanding.
Five Surprising Ways Exercise Changes Your Brain
Moving your body is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your mind.
We’ve all heard that exercise is good for us—how it strengthens our hearts and lungs, and helps us prevent diseases like diabetes. That’s why so many of us like to make New Year’s resolutions to move more, knowing it will make us healthier and live longer.
But many people don’t know about the other important benefits of exercise—how it can help us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage.
Around the world, people who are physically active are happier and more satisfied with their lives. They have a stronger sense of purpose and experience more gratitude, love, and hope. They feel more connected to their communities, and are less likely to suffer from loneliness or become depressed.
These benefits are seen throughout the lifespan, including among those living with serious mental and physical health challenges. That’s true whether their preferred activity is walking, running, swimming, dancing, biking, playing sports, lifting weights, or practicing yoga.
Why is movement linked to such a wide range of psychological benefits? One reason is its powerful and profound effects on the brain. Here are five surprising ways that being active is good for your brain—and how you can harness these benefits yourself.
1. The exercise “high” primes you to connect with others
Although typically described as a runner’s high, an exercise-induced mood boost is not exclusive to running. A similar bliss can be found in any sustained physical activity.
Scientists have long speculated that endorphins are behind the high, but research shows the high is linked to another class of brain chemicals: endocannabinoids (the same chemicals mimicked by cannabis)—what neuroscientists describe as “don’t worry, be happy” chemicals.
Areas of the brain that regulate the stress response, including the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, are rich in receptors for endocannabinoids. When endocannabinoid molecules lock into these receptors, they reduce anxiety and induce a state of contentment. Endocannabinoids also increase dopamine in the brain’s reward system, which further fuels feelings of optimism.
This exercise high also primes us to connect with others, by increasing the pleasure we derive from being around other people, which can strengthen relationships. Many people use exercise as an opportunity to connect with friends or loved ones. Among married couples, when spouses exercise together, both partners report more closeness later that day, including feeling loved and supported.
Another study found that on days when people exercise, they report more positive interactions with friends and family. As one runner said to me, “My family will sometimes send me out running, as they know that I will come back a much better person.”
2. Exercise can make your brain more sensitive to joy
When you exercise, you provide a low-dose jolt to the brain’s reward centers—the system of the brain that helps you anticipate pleasure, feel motivated, and maintain hope. Over time, regular exercise remodels the reward system, leading to higher circulating levels of dopamine and more available dopamine receptors. In this way, exercise can both relieve depression and expand your capacity for joy.
These changes can also repair the neurological havoc wreaked by substance abuse. Substance abuse lowers the level of dopamine in your brain and reduces the availability of dopamine receptors in the reward system. As result, people struggling with addiction can feel unmotivated, depressed, antisocial, and unable to enjoy ordinary pleasures. Exercise can reverse this.
In one randomized trial, adults in treatment for methamphetamine abuse participated in an hour of walking, jogging, and strength training three times a week. After eight weeks, their brains showed an increase in dopamine receptor availability in the reward system.
Jump-starting the brain’s reward system benefits not just those who struggle with depression or addiction. Our brains change as we age, and adults lose up to 13 percent of the dopamine receptors in the reward system with each passing decade. This loss leads to less enjoyment of everyday pleasures, but physical activity can prevent the decline. Compared to their inactive peers, active older adults have reward systems that more closely resemble those of individuals who are decades younger.
3. Exercise makes you brave
Courage is another side effect of physical activity on the brain. At the very same time that a new exercise habit is enhancing the reward system, it also increases neural connections among areas of the brain that calm anxiety. Regular physical activity can also modify the default state of the nervous system so that it becomes more balanced and less prone to fight, flight, or fright.
The latest research even suggests that lactate—the metabolic by-product of exercise that is commonly, but erroneously, blamed for muscle soreness—has positive effects on mental health. After lactate is released by muscles, it travels through the bloodstream to the brain, where it alters your neurochemistry in a way that can reduce anxiety and protect against depression.
Sometimes, the movement itself allows us to experience ourselves as brave, as the language we use to describe courage relies on metaphors of the body. We overcome obstacles, break through barriers, and walk through fire. We carry burdens, reach out for help, and lift one another up. This is how we as humans talk about bravery and resilience.
When we are faced with adversity or doubting our own strength, it can help to feel these actions in our bodies. The mind instinctively makes sense out of physical actions. Sometimes we need to climb an actual hill, pull ourselves up, or work together to shoulder a heavy load to know that these traits are a part of us.
4. Moving with others builds trust and belonging
In 1912, French sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term collective effervescence to describe the euphoric self-transcendence individuals feel when they move together in ritual, prayer, or work. Moving with others—for example, in group exercise, yoga, or dance classes—is one of the most powerful ways to experience joy.
Psychologists believe the key to producing collective joy is synchrony—moving in the same way, and at the same time, as others—because it triggers a release of endorphins. This is why dancers and rowers who move in synch show an increase in pain tolerance.
But endorphins don’t just make us feel good; they help us bond, too. People sharing an endorphin rush through a collective activity like, trust, and feel closer to one another afterward. It’s a powerful neurobiological mechanism for forming friendships, even with people we don’t know.
Group exercise has managed to capitalize on the social benefits of synchronized movement. For example, the more you get your heart rate up, the closer you feel to the people you move in unison with, and adding music enhances the effect. Breathing in unison can also amplify the feeling of collective joy, as may happen in a yoga class.
We were born with brains able to craft a sense of connection to others that is as visceral as the feedback coming from our own heart, lungs, and muscles. That is an astonishing thing! We humans can go about most of our lives, sensing and feeling ourselves as separate, but through one small action—coming together in movement—we dissolve the boundaries that divide us.
5. Trying a new activity can transform your self-image
Every time you move your body, sensory receptors in your muscles, tendons, and joints send information to your brain about what is happening. This is why if you close your eyes and raise one arm, you can feel the shift in position and know where your arm is in space. You don’t have to watch what’s happening; you can sense yourself.
The ability to perceive your body’s movements is called proprioception, and is sometimes referred to as the “sixth sense.” It helps us move through space with ease and skill and plays a surprisingly important role in self-concept—how you think about who you are and how you imagine others see you.
When you participate in any physical activity, your moment-to-moment sense of self is shaped by the qualities of your movement. If you move with grace, your brain perceives the elongation of your limbs and the fluidity of your steps, and realizes, “I am graceful.” When you move with power, your brain encodes the explosive contraction of muscles, senses the speed of the action, and understands, “I am powerful.” If there is a voice in your head saying, “You’re too old, too awkward, too big, too broken, too weak,” sensations from movement can provide a compelling counterargument.
Physical accomplishments change how you think about yourself and what you are capable of, and the effect should not be underestimated. One woman I spoke with shared a story about when she was in her early 20s and found herself severely depressed, with a plan to take her own life. The day she intended to go through with it, she went to the gym for one last workout. She deadlifted 185 pounds, a personal best. When she put the bar down, she realized that she didn’t want to die. Instead, she remembers, “I wanted to see how strong I could become.” Five years later, she can now deadlift 300 pounds.
Clearly, we were born to move, and the effects of exercise on our psychological and social well-being are many. So, why not add more movement to your life? No doubt you’ll feel better, be happier, and have better social relationships because of it.
Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., is a health psychologist who specializes in understanding the mind-body connection. She is the best-selling author of The Willpower Instinct and The Upside of Stress. Her latest book, The Joy of Movement, explores why physical exercise is a powerful antidote to the modern epidemics of depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
Originally published by Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
The only land disputed between the US and Canada
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb1BsdpjvX8
Baakiyalakshmi | Episode Promo | 14th July 2025
Detach Yourselves
The parenting internet’s fixation on “attachment styles” is unhelpful and unscientific.
By Nancy Reddy
Marie and her husband started seeing a couples therapist when the early years of parenthood put a strain on their marriage. Their two kids were 3 years and 4 months old, respectively, when COVID lockdowns began, and the couple were both stressed out and overwhelmed. (Marie—not her real name—said she was the one doing the lion’s share of the child care while her husband worked from home.)
In therapy, when she’d bring up a challenge with her husband or her kids, the therapist frequently brought the conversation back to a topic that surprised Marie: her relationship with her parents. The therapist had determined that because that early relationship was marked by “insecure attachment,” Marie was struggling to form a secure attachment with her husband. “I have issues with my parents,” Marie admitted, but she didn’t see why the therapist was so fixated on her childhood. The therapist assigned Marie and her husband a book on attachment to read together, and Marie started, at the therapist’s encouragement, attending solo sessions with an individual therapist to work through her childhood issues. Marie described that period as “really going down a wormhole.” She was doing her best to “heal her attachment style,” as her therapist insisted, but none of that work seemed to help things at home.
Whether you’re hearing it from a therapist, as Marie did, or picking it up on one of the countless attachment-focused accounts on Instagram and TikTok, chances are if you’re a new parent, you’ve taken in messaging around the need to give your child a “secure attachment,” or the urgency of fixing your own attachment issues lest you pass them on to your kid. “Securely attached” kids, the theory goes, will be socially confident and have a strong sense of self. As adults, they’ll make friends easily and have healthy romantic relationships. In contrast, “anxiously attached” adults are driven by fear of rejection and abandonment and have tendencies toward codependency, while the “avoidantly attached” among us have difficulty sharing feelings and trusting others. Your co-worker who’s clingy at happy hour? Probably anxiously attached. The boyfriend who takes forever to return your texts? Classic avoidant, or so pop psychology would have it. There’s a powerful lure in the idea that it might be possible to parent your kid so effectively that you’ll encase them in psychological Bubble Wrap and safeguard them against whatever relationship challenges have plagued you.
But there’s a flip side to all this: the sense that if our own pasts are a liability, any wrong move might damage our kids for life. Nicole McNelis, a therapist who frequently works with new moms, told me that many of her clients bring these messages from social media into sessions, worrying, for example, that because they bottle-fed their baby, he’ll be insecurely attached. McNelis followed up on this example by clarifying that that’s not how parenting works; there’s no single practice that will determine the quality of your relationship with your kid.
If reading about attachment has helped you feel as if you better understand yourself or your partner, or if it’s guided you toward approaching your parenting or your friendships in a more thoughtful way, I’m so happy for you. But if the idea of attempting to “heal” your insecure attachment before finding true love fills you with despair, or if you’re frantically trying to give your own child the “right” attachment style, I’ve got good news for you: “Attachment styles” have the sheen of science, but underneath, it’s basically all vibes.
Attachment styles were first defined by Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian-American psychologist who developed the Strange Situation, a procedure she used in experiments carried out in Baltimore in the 1970s. In the Strange Situation, a child between 9 months and 3 years comes to the lab with their primary caregiver, and they’re admitted to a room set up as a living room with various toys. After a few moments, a stranger enters, and a few moments after that, the caregiver leaves briefly, then returns. The child’s response to their caregiver’s departure and return, Ainsworth posited, reveals their attachment style. Once a child’s attachment style has been “set,” by about age 3, the theory goes, it’s more or less fixed. The message to moms is clear: If you mess up your kids early, you’ve doomed them for life.
As a laboratory experiment, the Strange Situation draws its authority from a yearlong observational study of mothers and their babies that preceded it. During that investigation, which is known as the “Baltimore study,” Ainsworth and three assistants observed 26 mother–infant pairs in three-week intervals, from the time the babies were 3 weeks old to just past their first birthdays, with a total of about 72 hours of observation for each pair. When that observational phase of the study ended, 23 of those mother–baby pairs came into the lab for the first Strange Situation. Ainsworth correlated behavior during the Strange Situation to what they’d observed in the babies at home with their mothers, sorting types of behavior into the three groups—securely attached, anxious, and avoidant—at the heart of today’s attachment styles research.
Ainsworth and the investigators who’ve followed her argue that this longitudinal study of mothers and babies gives credibility to all the Strange Situation laboratory research that has ensued. As one attachment-theory proponent put it, the Baltimore study is the “small base” on which the “skyscraper of research and theoretical conclusions in attachment theory” is built.
But, though the Strange Situation has become an incredibly popular research tool, with countless academic careers built on those studies, the naturalistic observations that formed a key part of the Baltimore study have never been repeated, something even Ainsworth lamented. Late in her life, she said in an interview, “I have been quite disappointed that so many attachment researchers have gone on to do research with the Strange Situation rather than looking at what happens in the home or in other natural settings.” Ainsworth saw that year spent observing mothers and babies in their homes as a valuable source of information about how attachment forms, and although she’s most famous as the originator of the Strange Situation, even she believed that more time spent with mothers and babies in the real world would improve the field of attachment research.
This reliance on the Baltimore study as the real-world basis for the Strange Situation laboratory protocol is even more troubling given the flaws in research design that have since been uncovered. To start, 26 mother–baby pairs is a small sample size on which to base an entire field of research. Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist who spent most of his career at Harvard until his death in 2021, noted that this “very small sample” was “certainly not enough to build a theory on.” Though those mothers have become the basis of big claims about what all babies need from their mothers, they’re not a representative sample of the population. In fact, because participants were selected not in order to reflect the characteristics of the population of the area or the country, but rather, as Ainsworth shared with an interviewer late in her life, on recommendations from pediatricians who made remarks like “This one is a charmer,” “That one puzzles me, and “I wonder how motherhood will work out for this one,” they’re not even representative of middle-class white women in Baltimore in the ’60s.
Moreover, the study was designed with assumptions about mothers and babies at its center. The researchers came to watch the mothers doing different activities at all times of day—except, notably, in the evening, when the fathers might be home. Ainsworth described this failure to observe fathers as a limitation of the research, but still concluded that it was the mother who mattered most.
Beyond this issue with the design of the study, there are also serious questions about the quality of the findings of Ainsworth and her assistants. Each observer visited individually and made notes, but Ainsworth asked the observers to use ordinary language to summarize what they’d seen. That meant that the same language might be used to describe different behavior in different settings. Ainsworth rarely attempted to assess the reliability of these observations, only occasionally making the visits alongside her assistants. She seems to have supervised her assistants quite loosely, if at all, and one of the three did not even write up her notes until six months after her visit.
The original records from the Baltimore study reveal even more troubling issues with the research, according to historian of science Marga Vicedo, who viewed those records in the archives. Although proponents of Strange Situation research have long presented it as a model of careful observational study, Vicedo’s analysis of the original records shows that in many cases, the accounts reflect the researcher’s critical personal judgments of the mothers and tension between the researcher and the mother. The reports also vary significantly in the quality of detail, as well as their adherence to the directive to take notes every five minutes. In total, Vicedo argues, they “cannot be considered trustworthy scientific reports.”
As Kagan points out in his 2013 book The Human Spark, there’s so much about the relationship between parent and child that simply can’t be captured in a brief laboratory protocol. His own guess, he explains, based on decades of research, is that social class and experiences with peers and in school play a vital role in shaping a child’s temperament, perhaps even more so than attachment to a primary caregiver in early childhood. Though it’s a take less immediately friendly to an Instagram carousel, he cautions readers, “It is wise to refrain from strong statements about the power of an infant’s attachment to affect his or her future moods, sociability, or mental health.” The next time you’re inclined to worry if sending your baby to day care will doom him to a life of insecure attachment or wonder if your mother’s occasional inattention during your childhood turned you into an avoidant mess, remember that those labels aren’t nearly the bulletproof science they sometimes seem.
Once we free ourselves from the tyranny of needing to single-handedly create a secure attachment in a child, while healing our own attachment wounds, what do we do instead? To start, it’s a good idea to just give ourselves some more grace, especially in the earliest years of parenting. Sarah Wheeler, a licensed educational psychologist and parenting coach, notes that the years from birth to age 3, the time when attachment is ostensibly forming, are often incredibly hard ones for new parents. Of course those years are important to child development, she acknowledges, “but for parents, it’s almost cruel to say, ‘That time where you basically couldn’t put hard pants on, that was it!’ ” Wheeler warns that worrying too much about attachment can “actually get in the way of having this genuine connection” with your child.
Wheeler says that “almost every decision a parent makes or reaction they have is informed by something that happened earlier on in their life,” and she suggests Internal Family Systems as an approach to learning more about how your childhood is coming into play in your parenting or your other relationships. One IFS-trained therapist, Leslie Petruk, describes it to me as a framework that understands that people as made up of multiple inner parts, with the goal being to help clients “learn how to heal the parts that are wounded and carry wounds” as a process of making peace with difficult past experiences. Though Petruk uses attachment theory in her work, she’s cautious about labeling clients with a particular attachment style, a practice she says is “putting people in a box.” That label often isn’t necessary, she finds; moreover, such a label is “not really accurate, because our whole system might not have had that experience. There might be parts of us that had different experiences.” Petruk describes this work as “an inside job for us as the parents,” meaning that parents are charged with understanding where our reactions to our kids come from and learning to respond differently.
Similarly, cognitive behavioral therapy is an approach that starts with the present, then works backward. McNelis, the therapist who works with new moms, uses an approach that’s grounded in CBT. “Our past experiences and our lived experiences are critically important to who we are right now,” she says, “but I look at it more from a breaking-generational-patterns perspective.” She said she’s found that attachment styles don’t “feel particularly empowering” as a tool in her practice; instead, she focuses on helping clients develop coping mechanisms. For her, a more empowering way to think about how our past comes into our parenting is: “What are the choices you want to make as a parent so that you don’t carry this pattern forward, so that you don’t carry this generational trauma forward?”
The more I think about what’s improved my own marriage and my parenting in the past several years, the more convinced I am that McNelis is onto something in focusing less on unearthing past trauma and more on practical interventions. Our stories and our childhoods matter, of course, but it’s not helpful to think of ourselves as essentially broken because of wounds long in the past. It’s certainly true that there are moments for self-reflection and probing of our histories. But sometimes conflicts appear in a relationship for more pedestrian reasons: You need help with the laundry, or you need someone else to tag in and get your kid their billionth snack of the day.
It turns out that Marie, of the “insecure attachment,” would agree. She eventually left that individual therapist, and she and her husband faded out of couples counseling as well. The change that really turned a corner in her marriage? It wasn’t a matter of “doing the work” to heal her attachment style, and the couple never finished the book on attachment the therapist had assigned them. Marie told me, “The issues with my husband more had to do with us both being exhausted and stressed, having just emerged from COVID with two young kids.” They began communicating better, and Marie felt more able to ask for what she needed. And this seems like the real kicker: Her husband started doing bedtime five nights a week. Sometimes, what you need, more than therapy or self-reflection, is for someone else to take a turn tucking in the kids.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-reveals-long-walk-prevent-003634650.html
Study Reveals How Long We Need to Walk to Prevent Chronic Back Pain
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