Hammer Out the Love

With legendary folk singer and activist Pete Seeger’s passing this week, time to pick up the refrain: h ammer out the love between our brothers and our sisters, all over this land.

In writing the book “ Love 2.0:  How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become ,” Dr. Barbara Fredickson shares a lot about how hammering out the love can occur in micro-moments. And, how compassion is the same as love, something we need much more of to make this land for you and me.

Here are three lessons [1] Dr. Barbara Fredrickson and her team learned:

Love and compassion can be one and the same.

Love doesn’t require that you ignore or suppress negativity. It simply requires that some element of kindness, empathy or appreciation be added to the mix. Compassion is the form love takes when suffering occurs.

Simply upgrading your view of love changes your capacity for it.

The latest science offers new lenses through which to see your every interaction. The people Dr. Fredrickson interviewed for the book shared incredibly moving stories about how they used micro-moments of connection to make dramatic turnarounds in their personal and work lives.

When people take just a minute or so each day to think about whether they felt connected and attuned to others, they initiate a cascade of benefits . This is something you could start doing today, having learned even just this much more about how love works.

Small emotional moments can have disproportionately large biological effects.

It can seem surprising that an experience that lasts just a micro-moment can have any lasting effect on your health and longevity. Micro-moments of love not only make you healthier, but being healthier builds your capacity for love. Little by little, love begets love by improving your health. And health begets health by improving your capacity for love.

Isn’t it time to hammer out more love?