Kathryn: What inspiration kept you going while you were writing it?

Todd: I have always been an anxiety researcher, especially social anxiety - people that have profound levels of shyness and fear about being evaluated.

Then I started seeing people who had energizing and profoundly meaningful social interactions. I started asking them about their motivations and feelings in the midst of social interaction.

What kept arising was “I felt interested” or “I was curious.” I realized that curiosity is the counter-motivation to anxiety.

When people are dealing with new people, and new challenges, they’re faced with a conflict, “Do I escape the situation so I can’t fail and look like a fool? Or do I approach and act on my curiosity, and potentially expand my skills, learn more about my strengths, and find out what rewards are available?”

I realized that this conflict between anxiety and curiosity is a fundamental part of everyday lives. Then I realized I would have to study curiosity if I really wanted to understand anxiety.

Curiosity and anxiety work in tandem. It’s not as if when you’re curious there’s no anxiety, or when you’re anxious there’s no curiosity. They work in all sorts of different combinations.

Kathryn: That reminds me of Jon Haidt moving from studying disgust to studying elevation.

Todd: I was just about to make exactly the same parallel.

Curiosity vs. Anxiety

Kathryn: What difference has it made it your own life to shift from studying anxiety alone to studying anxiety coupled with curiosity?

Todd: It has made me realize that the fundamental objective of my life is not to be happy or have a high frequency of positive emotions, but to have a rich, meaningful existence. That’s what I want to inspire in other people as well.

In such an existence, people are going to have an abundance of both positive and negative experiences. If you don’t make mistakes and have negative emotions and moments of intense anxiety, it means you’re not taking risks.

When you live trying to avoid threats, you can’t possibly be creative, and you can’t discover your strengths and figure out how to use them in your daily life.

So, for me it’s a shift from looking for the positive to looking to live a life that matters. It’s about experimenting, exploring, and discovering. And the cool thing about writing this book and doing ten years of research on curiosity is that I am very aware of deciding between the familiar and the new.

I can pick my favorite entre at a restaurant, or I can go with the chef’s specialty, which is exotic and interesting, but I may hate. High risk, high reward is a nice way to live life.

Kathryn: So you’re suggesting a shift away from ‘Let’s be positive’ to ‘Let’s accept anxiety as a necessary part of a life that involves taking the risks.’

Todd: Yes, and sometimes we feel anxious because something matters to us. This book argues that we should be doing things that are aligned with what we’re most passionate about. Following curiosity helps us explore and identify the things that are important to us.

Curiosity is important for other aspects of well-being. Think about gratitude. It is one of the most profound predictors of having happiness in life. But how can I be grateful without asking “Who in my social environment is helping me that I may not be acknowledging?” So curiosity is the engine that allows me to be grateful.

And what about finding strengths and using them in new ways? That implies questions like “What am I about? When am I at my best? When am I at my most energized?” Self-exploration is about being curious…curiosity directed inward.

Why Should We Care about Curiosity?

Kathryn: So curiosity is one of the driving engines of positive psychology?

Todd: In my book, I call curiosity the engine of growth. You can’t find your passions or purpose in life without trial and error experimentation. Curiosity is a mechanism that helps you create and discover meaning in your life.

And in the process of all this you catch glimpses of happiness as it ebbs and flows over the course of your lifetime.

I worry about the literal obsession with happiness being the fundamental objective of life. A fulfilling life is about a matrix of elements. What ingredients are related to the most elements?

What ingredients are related to the elements that I’m trying to change in my life, or in my client’s life, or in this organization? Can we give names to the ingredients so that people can talk with great precision about things that lead to positive outcomes?

When we focus just on happiness, it’s so broad and nebulous that we can’t get our hands around it. We need to be more specific about the elements that are already there and the ones we haven’t built into life yet.

Some people have an energizing, enthusiastic work climate, but they’re ignoring spirituality, or other people’s needs for love, or profound sources of meaning in life.

If we focus on these other elements, would we get even more than an energetic, highly enthusiastic workplace? I don’t know – these are questions that we haven’t explored yet.

Kathryn: Could you describe the matrix to me? I’m an ex-engineer, so when you say matrix I’ve got to picture it.

Todd: If we created a profile of where people fall on all these different dimensions of well-being… You have well-being and you can break that down into the Diener approach of frequency of positive emotions, frequency of negative emotions, and overall satisfaction.

But then you get maturity and wisdom. How well does someone deal with stressful emotions? How about achievement and creativity? These are all dimensions of well-being.

If every person has a profile, then we can explore his or her well-being in greater precision. Someone might say, “Now that you mention it, those are areas I haven’t thought about much that might be important for me to work on.”

But when we focus at a broad level on happiness or having a fulfilling life, we potentially miss the picture that each person has his or her own individualized profile for how life is going.

Kathryn: I can hear a lot of curiosity when you talk about individuals and how they differ.

Todd: Yes, and exploration and experimenting is part of everything that we are doing with positive psychology interventions. What I wanted to do with this book was just take this seemingly simple emotional experience and give it back to people so that they can use it intentionally instead of passively letting curiosity arise when novel, captivating things happen.

Curiosity is strength people can wield. I can decide to go and seek new things. I can decide to look at a person from new perspectives. I can ask somebody about what they were like before I met them.

I can ask my romantic partner what she does when I’m not there. Looking at the work on capitalization and how people respond when things go right, it’s all about being interested and intrigued by good things that happen, even when you have no involvement.

    Continued in part 2

Kashdan, T. (2009). Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. New York: William Morrow.

Images:
Bees on flower from Survivephotography’s photostream
Joy of Exploration from docentjoyce’s photostream

Kathryn: Do you think that there’s a great deal of variability in curiosity from person to person?

Todd: Absolutely. We all have different genetic predispositions to how sensitive we are to novelty and whether we get upset in unfamiliar and uncertain situations. There is also a major age effect.

Children have boundless curiosity to explore everything. Then there’s something that occurs when we enter adulthood.

We learn the rules, we want to develop some closure, we want to feel intelligent, we want to feel some level of certainty and structure in our lives.

When we learn what the rules are at the workplace, which are different from those in a funeral parlor, which are different from those in an elevator, which are different from those at a cocktail party, what falls to the wayside is that desire to just seek out the newness – the lust for new things.

We get caught up in the struggle to control uncertainty, which we can’t actually do.

Kathryn: What was the most surprising thing that you came across when you were working on the book?

Todd: I think the brain science research on Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. One of the first markers of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s at the neurological level is inability to manage and deal with novelty, an early sign of degeneration.

It includes not only an unwillingness to go seek out the unfamiliar and a clinging to the familiar, but an actual aversion when they’re faced with something that they’ve never seen before.

Dopamine is linked up with anticipating rewards, and so it’s closely linked to curiosity. Dopamine kicks in when we see that there’s something novel. Dopamine circuits are short-circuited in the early stages of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Doing actively novel activities buffers the age-related cognitive decline and reduces the risk for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Thus curiosity and exploring new things appears to be a potential antidote to degenerative brain diseases.

Kathryn: You’ve explained how curiosity relates to strengths and gratitude. How does it relate to mindfulness?

Todd: I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of discussion about mindfulness in PPND. I think curiosity is one of the two major dimensions of mindfulness.

You can’t have mindfulness without being curious. Most people focus on the gentle guiding of attention towards the present moment - to focusing on a chosen target of your attention, and gently guiding attention from things that distract you.

The second part of mindfulness is about the quality of attention. I find “non-judgmental” a negative, off-putting term.

The quality of attention is about having an open and receptive and curious attitude towards whatever is the target of your attention. And I think this gets lost in measures and definitions.

Kathryn: Are there different kinds of curiosity?

Todd: I had a study that I haven’t published yet. We asked over 500 people what are the things that make them most curious. The two most frequent categories were being curious about other people’s lives and trying to figure themselves out – introspection.

We don’t talk enough about the value of introspection, being curious about the self. You can’t do goal-setting or strength-spotting without introspection. And you can’t get there without curiosity.

Kathryn: So do you have a research question that you’d really like to see somebody address?

Todd: That’s a really good question. There are people that are addressing this question, but I think it hasn’t fully been answered yet: How do you maintain passion, commitment and intimacy in long-term relationships? My first mentor - Arthur Aron had a cool finding. First you have romantic couples do novel and exciting things together - not just something pleasant, it has to be new territory. And then you have them bring up unresolved conflicts. They were much more agreeable, open-minded and warm toward each other after sharing a novel and intriguing activity.

That hits the value of being curious, being intrigued with your partner. Lives are getting longer. If you get married or committed in a relationship at age 30, how do you keep a relationship for 70 years? Seven decades.

That’s the research that I want to see done — really difficult, longitudinal research to get at how people behave in their everyday lives that can maintain that excitement and that intrigue, and thus keep that relationship alive and vital.

What do extremely happy, passionate couples look like? What can we learn from them? Who are the couples that can be our Martin Luther Kings and Mother Teresas of marriage?

I want exemplars. I want to be able to whip out examples that show how these couples behave differently. How do they synchronize with each other? How open are they to letting each other evolve separately and together? What space do they provide for each other?

These are difficult things to measure and operationalize, but too important not to study.

Kathryn: Before we finish, one more question: What comes next for you?

Todd: I want to write a book about the full spectrum of relationships. There’s a lot of territory that people haven’t covered before in the popular press. This includes our relationships with non-humans - whether its animals or objects or technology.

There is 20 to 30 years of research in social psychology on relationships that has never been shown to the public.

For example, Susan Anderson at NYU does great research that really resonates with me.

We meet a person that somehow reminds us of someone with whom we have a strong intimate relationship, and we end up superimposing the old intimacy on this new stranger who has entered our lives. This is a fascinating process, and there’s a lot of research on it.

References:

Andersen, S.M., Reznik, I., & Glassman, N.S. (2005). The unconscious relational self. In R. Hassin, & J.S. Uleman, & J.A. Bargh (Eds.), The New Unconscious (Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience), (pp. 421-481). New York: Oxford University Press.

Aron, A., Paris, M., & Aron, E. N. (1995). Falling in love: Prospective studies of self-concept change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1102-1112. (Todd: I love this study of his.)

Kashdan, T. (2009). Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. New York: William Morrow.

Images
Cat and large bug from johnnyalive’s photostream,
Curious seagull from Sir Mervs’ photostream
2 couples hiking from Ancient Brit.’s photostream