Here’s a mixed and fascinating bag of psychology for you: If you contemplate your own death, some weird things happen. Next time you’re in court, you better hope your judge doesn’t use this kind of meditation.
Yet in Bhutan, people are expected to do this five times a day, and it’s one of the things credited for making it known as one of the happiest countries in the world. The idea is that it puts your life into perspective and lets you see a fuller picture of the things that get to you. That’s more Buddhist contemplations than science, but that doesn’t mean it’s not correct or valuable.
There’s an app I have called WeCroak that sends me reminders that I’m going to die, five times a day. After several years of using the app, my response to the notifications over time has been pretty interesting, but more interesting is the unexpected psychology behind contemplating your own death.
“Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” – WeCroak notifications
Gravitate Towards Happy Thoughts Automatically
One study found some interesting results around this, and they’re not what you might think. Contemplating our death doesn’t make us feel happy or sad. Very little emotion came into the results. Instead, the death contemplation resulted in an unconscious coping mechanism, in which more weight was put on positive thoughts, giving priority to positive things when making judgements. Participants didn’t feel more happiness but tuned in more to happy thoughts. This happened almost immediately.
“Death is a psychologically threatening fact, but when people contemplate it, apparently the automatic system begins to search for happy thoughts.”
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