Curiosity: A Surprising Key to Belonging

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Last month, I led a three-week course designed to help participants better hone their focus and flow. Each week, we met to review the week’s training, discuss practices, and share personal insights.

While members were eager to engage with the lessons, there was something they looked forward to even more: connecting with each other on our live weekly calls. Just as much as, if not more than the mini-trainings, worksheets, and mindfulness recordings, they yearned for more time to connect with each other.

As someone who has spent decades researching human connection and led numerous masterminds and retreats, this fact should not have surprised me. But it did reinforce something I’ve long known to be true: We human beings thrive most when we feel we belong.

Unfortunately, thanks in part to cultural divisiveness, a decline in social institutions, increasing remote work, and longer working hours, we’re struggling to foster belongingness, and it’s taking a serious toll on our well-being.

In 2017, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health crisis—one that only worsened amid the pandemic. Data from the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that 36 percent of Americans feel lonely “frequently” or “all the time.” And the Survey Center on American Life reported that Americans have fewer close friends than ever, with 12 percent responding that they have no close friendships at all. Similarly, social anxiety (both a cause and effect of social isolation) has risen considerably among young adults, according to a study published by PLOS One, negatively affecting their work, education, and general well-being.

In other words, you’re not alone in feeling alone. Fortunately, you can decrease loneliness and takes steps toward fulfilling your need to belong. And one surprising key may reside in another fundamental human trait: curiosity.

Curiosity is the proactive facet of wonder that spurs us to question the way things are and our desire to learn or know. Curiosity propels us to become more engaged in new experiences, seek novel perspectives, and—especially important—connect with other human beings in more enriching and meaningful ways.

Best of all, curiosity’s something you already have. It just might require more nurturing to activate. So let’s get curious about curiosity.

How Wonder and Curiosity Fuel Connection

Humans are evolutionarily hard-wired to crave belonging because, for millennia, our survival depended on it. After all, if you traveled too far from your group, you might starve, become a saber-tooth tiger’s dinner or, at the very least, fail to procreate. And while technological advancements have since made life safer and more physically comfortable, we still have a deep desire to belong.

In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running in-depth study of adult physical and mental well-being, has routinely shown that relationships not only make us happier but keep us healthier too.

The bottom line: We need to reconnect with our supportive packs. And wonder and curiosity can help us cultivate those connections. Here’s how:

• First, wonder expands our perspective by resetting our outlook outward, inciting curiosity about others and, in turn, setting off a dopamine rush through the brain.
• Next, our curiosity-fueled dopamine high activates our internal reward system and pushes us to further explore the subject of our wonder.
• Wonder-induced curiosity then leads us down a path of exploration, pushing us to identify and bust our own biases, increasing our capacity for empathy, and helping us open ourselves to authentic connections.

Seeking Common Ground Through Our Differences

As much as we’re wired to crave belonging, we’re also wired for bias. Our adaptive unconscious takes in thousands of sensory data points to identify potential threats or changes in our environments so we can survive, adapt, and grow.

Unfortunately, our adaptive unconscious also creates biases—which is why we naturally gravitate toward people who look like us, share similar views, or come from similar backgrounds. It’s also why we pursue things that are comfortable, familiar, and reinforce our existing beliefs.

In short, our brain unconsciously sizes people up as friends or foes to keep us safe, inadvertently closing us off from the connections we so desperately need. But when we allow wonder and curiosity to take the wheel, we can break out of our bias boxes, and often, we’re much happier for it.

For example, in a 2014 study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers instructed commuters on trains and buses to connect with a stranger near them, remain disconnected, or commute as normal. While commuters predicted they’d have a more positive commute if they remained in solitude, the opposite happened: those who connected with strangers reported a more positive commute experience. And the people they’d spoken with also enjoyed their commutes more.

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This study’s results show us that opportunities for connecting are all around, and even distant social connections can improve our well-being. Furthermore, it’s likely the people around you are looking for belonging just as much as you, and genuine curiosity helps us connect human to human and find value in interactions even with those who are different.

How to Cultivate Your Natural Curiosity

In our tween years, our brains pare down neurons, reducing our synaptical connections to help us be more discerning in our perceptions. But this also makes us more aware of and concerned about how others perceive us. Social consciousness and comparisons kick in, and we begin to have more me-centered thoughts. This, combined with our productivity-centric society, often lead us to suppress curiosity by the time we reach adulthood.

Fortunately, this isn’t permanent, and our innate capacity for curiosity is always there, occasionally rising to the surface when we experience moments of astonishment and wonder. And creating and harnessing those moments can help us find belonging.

Here are a few ways you can ignite your curiosity to help foster connections:

• Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Like the commuters in the study, you can use daily moments of downtime to chat with people nearby. This could be someone seated next to you in a waiting room, another shopper in a grocery check-out line, or a fellow parent at the local playground.
• Lead with questions out of genuine curiosity. Whether connecting with a stranger in public, a new acquaintance at a social function, or a long-time friend, train yourself to let wonder lead the way. You might ask questions like, “Where’s the most awe-inspiring place you’ve ever been?” or “What would you do if you weren’t in your current career?”
• Share experiences of wonder. Ask yourself what you truly care about. For example, what gets you excited? What do you daydream about? What do you want to investigate? These questions can guide you to opportunities for connecting with others through shared experiences of wonder. For example, you might enroll in a language immersion class, join a volunteer program, or sign up for a travel tour group.

By leveraging wonder and igniting your curiosity, you can build more authentic connections, deepen your relationships, and improve your mental and physical well-being.