Relationships
fromThe Gottman Institute
2 days agoLimerence: The Science of Falling Hard - and What Comes After
Limerence is an involuntary, obsessive preoccupation with a specific person, characterized by intense emotions and physical symptoms.
Elizabeth Roboz Einstein's journey began on May 15, 1940, when she boarded the Conte di Savoia, an Italian steamliner, leaving behind her family in Hungary as World War II escalated. This voyage was not a luxury cruise but a desperate evacuation for many, including 600 Central European refugees fleeing the advancing German troops.
There's a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet. What's happening in those moments goes far deeper than entertainment or education, and we seem to sense this instinctively.
Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi was investigating optimal human experience with this work. Everyone must want to know how to reach optimal human experience. That's rainbows-all-day-long territory. What is it, then? Flow is a state that arises from activities that use our core skillset but also challenge us, leading to increased motivation and immersion within what we're doing. The result is that we are more content, partially because performance is improved.
We were like: let's go dancing before we go to bed, she says. Woods, then 56, had gone clubbing in her 20s, but on Le Fez's dancefloor, as her body caught the beat, she had an epiphany moment, a shock of pure euphoria: The joy I felt the mind, body and soul connection was like a lightning bolt. She knew then that dancing and music were going to be a bigger part of my life than I'd ever thought.