The Health Benefits of Looking at Beauty |
Looking at beauty releases the same feel-good chemicals as being in love, eating chocolate, and exercising.
There’s no agreed-upon checklist of what constitutes beauty. It's whatever gives you an aesthetic charge.
Appreciating beauty gives your psyche and nervous system a break from exposure to the world’s ugliness.
Beauty keeps you interested in life, making you eager to sustain it and remember it’s worth living.
Isaac Asimov once came up with a unit of measurement for beauty that he called a milli-helen. If Helen of Troy’s legendary beauty was sufficient to launch a thousand ships, then a milli-helen is the amount of beauty sufficient to launch a single ship.
Asimov was not just a science-fiction writer, but a professor of biochemistry, and beauty, it turns out, is capable of launching not just an armada of ships, but a cascade of the same feel-good chemicals you get from being in love, eating chocolate, exercising, and having orgasms—dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin. It also lowers stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.
In other words, aesthetics isn’t superficial. It’s biochemical. And it isn’t a luxury, but a deep human drive.
And this is by design. In evolution’s logic, beauty brings pleasure, and pleasure reinforces useful behavior, whether in the selection of a mate (symmetry of face and luster of hair, for instance, signal good health and strong genes), or the selection of an environment to live in (lush greenery signals water and fertile land; scenic overlooks make it easier to spot predators). Furthermore, beauty keeps you aroused and interested in life, reinforcing behaviors that make you eager to sustain it, to remember that life is pleasurable and worth living.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs places “aesthetic needs” near the top of the pyramid (below only “self-actualization” and “self-transcendence” needs), and they encompass our motivations to seek out and appreciate beauty, harmony, and........