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Your brain tracks whether you matter
What the brain monitors
The brain measures heart rate, breathing, and blood sugar to keep a person alive. It also tracks the questions that make people want to be alive: Am I alone or connected? Does what I do matter? Is there beauty in the world? Are there things to look forward to? Are human beings good?
Signals in a crisis
In a crisis, a flood of information about how hard things are and how bad they could get arrives with overwhelm, loneliness, fear, or anger. The brain needs signals in the other direction: there are good things in the world, what you do matters, you are not alone, and there are people you care about who care about you. Those experiences matter as much as eating and breathing.
Small signals are enough
As a coping resource, the size of the signal does not matter. A person in huge suffering can be lifted by something objectively small, like noticing something beautiful out a window or being thanked for something they did.
Why does loneliness register like physical pain?
Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, and Kipling Williams at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported in 2003 in Science on a computer ball-tossing game in which participants were left out by the other players. Being excluded activated the anterior cingulate cortex, a region also involved in the distress of physical pain. The more distressed people said they were, the stronger the activity. The study helped launch research on the overlap between social and physical pain.
How did researchers define mattering?
Sociologist Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough introduced mattering in 1981 in a study of adolescents. They defined it as the sense that other people notice you, depend on you, and would miss you if you were gone. Their work suggested that mattering is distinct from self-esteem, which is about how a person judges themselves. Later researchers, including Gordon Flett, extended the concept to adults, workplaces, and older age.
Can looking at something beautiful change recovery?
Roger Ulrich reported in Science in 1984 on patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in a Pennsylvania hospital. Patients whose rooms had a window facing trees had shorter hospital stays and took fewer strong pain medications than patients whose windows faced a brick wall. The study compared patients matched on age, sex, and other factors. It became one of the most cited papers in the design of hospital environments.
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