However, today we have something just for those who want to change up their daily browsing. Subreddit Hol’Up is full of surprising twists and turns that might leave you saying, “Wait a minute!” As an extra treat, the posts they share are sprinkled with dark humor, which folks online just can’t get enough of. Scroll down to find them, and don’t forget to upvote the ones that caught you off guard the most!
While you’re at it, make sure to check out a conversation with Tania Luna, a psychology researcher and co-author of Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, who kindly agreed to answer a few questions about unexpectedness.
To learn more about the importance of unexpectedness and surprise in our lives, Bored Panda reached out to a psychology researcher, educator, and co-author of Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, Tania Luna.
In the book, Luna, together with Dr. LeeAnn Renninger, shines a light on the most intriguing emotion that we humans feel and shows us how surprise can turn daily life into an adventure.
Luna tells us that, despite common belief, surprise (our reaction to something unexpected) isn’t a single emotion but a series of responses that are called the surprise sequence.
Interestingly, the first thing our body does when reacting to an unexpected event is freeze for about 1/25 of a second. This probably happened quite a lot while you were scrolling through this list, only that you might haven’t noticed.
Then Luna says, “Our brains rapidly analyze the situation to understand what’s happening.” After we grasped what was going on, she explained that “we adjust our perspective to make sense of the surprise.”
Lastly, we get the urge to share what we went through. “We relieve the cognitive burden created by the experience by passing on our story of the surprise to others. Throughout this experience, our emotions intensify. We like to say that “surprise makes us -er” (happier, sadder, angrier, funnier, etc.),” Luna explains.
As the authors mention in the book, “We feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not. Even though most of us try hard to feel prepared and in control, surprise is at the heart of our most joyful and meaningful memories.”
Additional benefits of inviting surprises into our lives include elevating the mood, boosting creativity, enhancing learning, deepening relationships, increasing our resilience, slowing our perception of time, and making life more memorable.
To embrace unexpectedness in our lives (besides visiting the Hol’Up subreddit), Luna suggests against searching for big, elaborate experiences or adventures but instead finding small, frequent surprises, which provide more fulfillment.
