Peak Experience
It's impossible to predict peak experiences, in fact, that's part of their charm. Peak experience can be so central, normal life can get pushed to the background.
Everyone's life has superlative moments, times when we feel extraordinary and our experiences are recorded in Technicolor.
"It's part of the human condition,"
says neuroscientist, Roland Griffiths,
"We're wired to have such experiences."
Psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term peak experience to denote sudden feelings of intense well-being that fill us with wonder and awe. Psychologically healthy people tend to have more of them. Such experiences can also bring feelings of interconnectedness and create a sharper sense of life purpose.
"It's that quality of the experience that makes it so memorable,"
says Griffiths.
"People feel that it informs life going forward."
As a result, peak experiences may cause a cascade of changes in our lives, as we accommodate a newly expanded sense of self.
While brain studies on peak experiences are impractical since such moments apparently arrive unbidden, researchers believe they involve extraordinarily diffuse activity in the brain. Griffiths says,
"It's going to involve an incredibly complex network of neural activity and interactions that we haven't been able to model yet."
About half of all Americans report having had a life-changing moment, according to Gallup polls. And while such moments can't be ordered into existence, we can gently prepare for the possibility.
Peak experiences often involve an epiphany, an aha! moment that occurs suddenly, typically during a period of emotional turmoil. In an instant, we have an insight that is entirely new and deeply meaningful.
We might realize that we can't stand one more day working as a corporate lawyer. Or that heavy drinking is ruining our life. An epiphany can reorder our priorities, revealing how we've veered away from our authentic self and inspiring us to move towards behavior that better matches it. The transformation is usually enduring.
A professor of psychology classifies such experiences as quantum change when a sudden realization leads to an immediate behavioral reorganization. They exist in sharp contrast to the slow, incremental modifications we make in response to education or wisdom gained over time.
Just as some epiphanies lead us out of miserable situations, others allow us to see beyond behavioral limits we have set for ourselves. They show us that we're capable of something we didn't think possible. We can learn to use technology, we can train for a triathlon, we can make new friends after age 40.
Based on our sudden insight, we start to act in totally new ways—although with some peak experiences, the change is strictly internal and subtle, but no less memorable.
For all the change that peak experiences can trigger, sometimes they shift nothing more than time itself. There are moments when the forces of man and nature align perfectly, and our job is simply to appreciate. Time can seem to stand still.
Psychology Today
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