Anyone who has taken a course or retreat of mine knows that I love the Beatles and have done since I was a young girl. I heard them for the first time when my older brother got their first record as a present, and something just lit up in me. I listened to the record over and over, dancing to it, exulting in the sheer positive energy of it, their constant message of joy and love. And now I know why.
Dr John Diamond, the late holistic psychiatrist, had various ways of testing whether music raised or lowered a person’s life energy – as measured by thymus activity. Of all the music he tested, the Beatles was the only pop group whose music raised life energy (in the same way that Beethoven’s music does, he said).
And now there’s new evidence that Paul McCarthy’s famous final line to the song The End – ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make,’ which I often play at the end of my workshops or retreats – has some basis in fact.
Zita Oravecz, an associate professor of human development and family studies at the Pennsylvania State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, studies how people feel and express love in their daily lives and whether this has any impact on our overall well-being. For 12 years Oravecz has been studying the day-to-day experiences of love and how it impacts us.Oravecz uses a more elastic definition of love, beyond just romantic love.
‘There are many small gestures and behaviors that generate the same feelings of warmth and kindness — the kind of love you experience through friendship, from your family or even love that you might receive from strangers,’ she said.
‘In my research, my collaborators and I define love as doing something nice for someone else and showing care for their well-being without expecting something in return.’
And when they studied what made people feel loved, they found that most people also have a broader definition of love: ‘receiving compassion in difficult times, cuddling a child, receiving a compliment from a stranger, and spending quality time with someone.’
To test this, she and a team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University recently published a fascinating study examining the reciprocal dynamics of feeling love and expressing it, and how that related to overall well-being. They enlisted 57 volunteers aged between 19 and 65 and over four weeks, asked them to report six times a day on their feelings of being loved and also expressing love.
The researchers then compared the two and discovered a fascinating effect. The more someone expressed love, the more they increased their own feelings of being loved, and this continued to grow over time. ‘We developed mathematical models to capture love dynamics and found that those who more freely express love experienced feelings of being loved for longer before returning back to a normal emotional baseline.’
But the reverse wasn’t true. Feeling loved didn’t necessarily lead to increases in expressing love.
Expressing love also had another amazing knock-on effect. Those who expressed love continuously and freely not only felt more loved, but also were more likely to consider themselves as flourishing in their lives.
There are some good biological reasons for this, all having to do with the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body which originates at the top of the spinal cord and works its way through the heart, the lungs, the muscles of the face, the liver, and the digestive organs.
As I’ve written and spoken about many times, the vagus nerve has two main functions: to control the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). But it also has another function; when balanced it increases our feelings of safety and connection, initiating the release of oxytocin, a neuropeptide that plays a role in love, trust, intimacy, and devotion, and connecting systems in your body involved with caretaking.
When it’s activated, as it is when we express love, care for someone, or show compassion or gratitude, it becomes a healing nerve.
Other evidence from Vrije University in Brussels in a study of cancer patients showing that the greater their vagus nerve activity (as when you express love), the slower the cancer progressed, no matter what type of cancer they had. This was particularly evident with patients suffering from advanced cancer that had spread.
The more you spread love, the more you feel loved, the more you experience a sense of flourishing and well-being, and the faster you heal.
Paul McCarthy said it all: ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’ In fact, it’s not at all equal. The love you make comes back to you a thousandfold.
