How Curiosity Can Change Your Life

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.  – Eleanor Roosevelt

(Part 1 of a 10-part series on the character traits of happy people)

Last week I wrote about research that suggested that training in certain personality traits can improve life satisfaction. One of the traits I was surprised to see was curiosity. Specifically, I was surprised that curiosity came out ahead of appreciating beauty, which I always thought of as essential to happiness.

But then I started thinking about how curiosity works. Curiosity is active and dynamic.  Curiosity leads to learning, which keeps our brains limber and prevents dementia. Curiosity ensures we’ll keep adding and shifting our world view, which keeps us flexible and resilient when life sends us surprises.

We are naturally curious animals, and we can see this especially powerfully in children. I believe we lose our natural curiosity when we start becoming self-conscious. Perhaps our questions were judged as stupid, or nerdy, or not worth someone’s time. Maybe we started judging other people’s questions and made assumptions about their worthiness based on the questions they were asking. However it happens, we stopped being curious and started being judgmental. We worried more about how we fit in and how other people were judging us. We judged others before we found out anything about them.

Being curious is the antidote to judgment. In terms of ourselves, judgment stops us from finding out why that co-worker is getting under our skins so incessantly. It stops us from figuring out why we resent a friend’s success so much. It stops us from figuring out why we sometimes feel like a 5-year-old with our partner. It feeds the inner critical voice. Curiosity leads to compassion for ourselves.

But if we can put aside the judgment and be curious, we can begin to get underneath the surface to what’s really there.

Curiosity also leads to a better understanding of the world and other people. It helps us listen to each other when we have different viewpoints.  Why does your friend seem so blind (which is a judgment) about a particular issue? Let’s try to find out, and maybe we’ll find out that she’s got some good points, or even that we’re misunderstanding her stance. Curiosity leads to compassion for others, and compassion leads to forgiveness.

So how do we cultivate curiosity? There’s therapy, of course, where one-one-one support and gentle questioning can help us explore our inner lives, but there are also some practical ways to support curiosity in the external world that you can put in place now.

The first thing is to figure out what sparks your interest.

• When something sparks your interest, make a note of it. Next time you’re browsing the internet, keep a pen and paper nearby (or whatever you take notes with). Keep this notepad with you and write down any topic you think is interesting. It could be anything from animal behavior (Is it true that praying mantises eat each other during mating?) to religion (Why IS Christmas on December 25th?) to urban legends (Are there really alligators in sewers?). Most of the time these are fleeting thoughts that we forget.  Make a conscious effort to make time to answer your questions.
• Browse through a community college catalog and highlight the courses that sound interesting to you, just as an exercise to spark some ideas about what you’re naturally curious about.
• Take a look at podcasts. These are usually free and great for listening on an mp3 player or iPod while you do chores or on walks. They span a huge range of topics, don’t require a huge investment of time and can be very interesting. Try looking at TEDtalks podcasts or some of the NPR informational shows like RadioLab or How Stuff Works.  
• Notice when you’re surprised. What conclusions, assumptions or judgments were you making? This leads to….
• Ask more questions and talk about yourself less.  This works especially well in interpersonal conflicts, but can be practiced outside of conflicts, too. There are tons of interesting people out there in the world. Worry less about what they think of you, and concentrate more on mining the really fascinating things people are involved in. Then…
• Go talk to someone else about what you’ve learned. If they’re naturally curious, they might bring up some ideas you didn’t think of. You can practically feel those neurons developing in your brain as you process the new information.
• Spend time with a child. Notice their questions and how they incorporate new information. It’s fascinating and inspiring to see how excited they get by new experiences. Cultivate that enthusiasm, and you’ll find there is so much to be excited about.