Looking at beauty releases the same feel-good chemicals as being in love, eating chocolate, and exercising.

There’s no agreed-upon checklist of what constitutes beauty. It's whatever gives you an aesthetic charge.

Appreciating beauty gives your psyche and nervous system a break from exposure to the world’s ugliness.

Beauty keeps you interested in life, making you eager to sustain it and remember it’s worth living.

Isaac Asimov once came up with a unit of measurement for beauty that he called a milli-helen. If Helen of Troy’s legendary beauty was sufficient to launch a thousand ships, then a milli-helen is the amount of beauty sufficient to launch a single ship.

Asimov was not just a science-fiction writer, but a professor of biochemistry, and beauty, it turns out, is capable of launching not just an armada of ships, but a cascade of the same feel-good chemicals you get from being in love, eating chocolate, exercising, and having orgasms—dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin. It also lowers stress, blood pressure, and heart rate.

In other words, aesthetics isn’t superficial. It’s biochemical. And it isn’t a luxury, but a deep human drive.

And this is by design. In evolution’s logic, beauty brings pleasure, and pleasure reinforces useful behavior, whether in the selection of a mate (symmetry of face and luster of hair, for instance, signal good health and strong genes), or the selection of an environment to live in (lush greenery signals water and fertile land; scenic overlooks make it easier to spot predators). Furthermore, beauty keeps you aroused and interested in life, reinforcing behaviors that make you eager to sustain it, to remember that life is pleasurable and worth living.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of human needs places “aesthetic needs” near the top of the pyramid (below only “self-actualization” and “self-transcendence” needs), and they encompass our motivations to seek out and appreciate beauty, harmony, and order in our environments and experiences.

This applies whether the beauty you’re beholding is art, architecture, nature, music, a well-designed room, a virtuous action, a beautiful face, or a beautiful idea like “love thy neighbor.” It applies whether the beauty is an elegant mathematical formula, a perfect pitch in baseball, or a monster truck rally. There are, after all, beauty contests for hogs.

Clearly, there’s no universally agreed-upon checklist of what constitutes beauty, though researchers have identified some common attributes like simplicity, symmetry, certain juxtapositions of color or musical notes, certain ratios and geometries in the arrangement of physical elements. But beauty is whatever gives you an aesthetic charge.

If there’s anything universal about beauty, it might be that it represents some kind of ideal—of perfection, order, harmony, even joy. Or at least an ideal of perfectibility, something as enticing as it is elusive. In other words, beauty doesn’t just help create life, but inspires its higher flowering.

Given the imperfect nature of the world we live in, though, and the frequently unsightly behavior of those who live in it, the appreciation of beauty is a salve, a coping mechanism, a balancing act, reminding you that the world may be awful, but it’s also beautiful. You have the choice where to direct your gaze, of course, but the ability to hold the paradox that both exist, simultaneously, is a skill that can help you maintain balance when life goes off-kilter.

People who study neuro-aesthetics—a branch of science that examines how the brain responds to beauty—tell us that by engaging with beauty you’re essentially hacking your brain to boost your mood and immune system, stir your creative juices, and give your psyche and nervous system a break from continual exposure to the world’s ugliness and untidiness (which is also subjective). Looking at beauty is the emotional equivalent of the pleasure and relief you get from taking your contacts out at the end of a long day.

One researcher, Rene Proyer at Martin Luther University in Germany, demonstrated this neuro-aesthetic principle with a simple experiment. He created what he calls the “nine beautiful things” practice and tested it on a group of adults. For a week, he had them write about beautiful things they observed in their day-to-day lives—in human behavior, nature, art, whatever. The result: happiness increased, depression decreased.

Not that beauty doesn’t occasionally come with a payload of melancholy, especially the kind of beauty that’s fleeting, that fades before your eyes—sunsets, murmurations, the last notes of a favorite song. These may come freighted with a poignancy that can border on anguish: the sun sets, the light fades, the day ends, the days end.

At beauty’s farther extremes—where you’re stunned into wordlessness by a breathtaking landscape, a ravishing passage of literature, or someone’s physical beauty—it can even lead to envy or possessiveness, the hopeless hunger to merge with it, to capture it as you’ve been captivated by it.

Creative types certainly know the experience of wanting to breathe beauty in and then exhale it as writing or photography, music, or speech. They want to be the beauty, or at least the maker of beauty. But as Virginia Wolff once said of our attempts to capture the beauty around us, “The senses are easily overwhelmed. Nature has given us six little pocket knives with which to cut up the body of a whale.”

The English polymath John Ruskin tells us we should try anyway, because the best way to “possess” beauty—and its accompanying benefits—is to understand it. And the best way to understand it is to either 1) try your hand at capturing it in a drawing or poem, regardless of whether you have any talent for it (the point isn’t learning to draw, but learning to see), or 2) to give thought to what it is about beauty that moves you, thus coming to understand what you love.

For instance, my contemplations on the beauty of nature have helped me understand that what moves me about it isn’t just awe or aesthetic pleasure but a kind of nostalgia, even homesickness. Perhaps it’s the paleolithic remembrance—the genetic memory—of belonging there, immersed and indistinguishable from the natural world. In the Native American O’odham language, the term for wildness is linked with the words for wholeness, health, and aliveness, and gazing at wildness feels like it confers similar benefits.

Gazing on ancient cities and ruins, too, confers on me an analogous benefit—it acts as a corrective, if not a rebuke, to the relative ugliness of the modern cities I’ve lived within honking distance of for most of my life.

Some years ago, for example, I spent a month in Italy, and Italy is an object lesson in a kind of beauty and ornateness largely gone from the world, a piercing contrast between the ravishing craftsmanship in stone, wood, and mosaic that graces its ancient buildings—reminding me what can happen when people build with eternity in mind—and the comparatively dreary and uninspired architecture of my own time.

And gazing at such beauty soothes not just my sense of aesthetics, but my sense of perspective. Standing in the Pincio Gardens at sunset and looking over the entirety of Rome, across millennia, puts life in perspective, helping me take my nose off the grindstone of day-to-day life and take in a bigger picture and a deeper sense of time.

And the magnificent ruins of the Roman Empire (or, frankly, even a simple display of dried flowers) remind me that death and beauty aren’t strangers to one another—they share a wall—and that mortality itself is a thing of beauty, in that it teaches me to have a deeper gratitude for life, a keener appreciation of its pleasures, and a greater commitment to keeping my priorities in order.

As Achilles says in the movie Troy, “The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed.”

© Psychology Today