Awe Is the Cheapest Medicine We’ve Got

Awe, it turns out, is one of the deepest anchorable states available to a human being.

Image by steven underhill from Pixabay

Years ago I lived on a floating home in Portland, and one of the rituals I still miss from those years is what I came to think of as my coffee-on-the-deck practice. Most mornings, before anyone else was awake and before the day’s noise began, I’d take a hot mug out to the deck and just stand there.

The Willamette River would be moving the way rivers always move, indifferent and unhurried. Mist would lift off the surface in slow rolls. A heron might pick its way along the bank. Sometimes the sky was the color of a peach, sometimes the color of slate. And every so often, if I held still long enough, something in me would let go all at once. The chatter would drop. My shoulders would drop. Time would do that strange thing it does when you stop trying to push it. And I’d come back into the day with a kind of inner steadiness that no amount of caffeine could account for.

I didn’t have a name for what was happening. I just knew the days I started that way went better than the days I didn’t, and I made a practice of getting out on the back deck whenever I could. Decades later, I recognize what I was doing. I was giving myself a daily, deliberate dose of awe.

A piece in National Geographic this fall caught me up on what science has finally figured out about the practice. The article, called “The Life-Changing Power of Awe,” summarizes about a decade of research that’s mostly come out of UC Berkeley, where the psychologist Dacher Keltner has been mapping what awe actually does to a human body. Keltner’s book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a beautiful account of what he and his colleagues have found, and the short version is this: awe is medicine.

The findings keep stacking up. A 2023 Harvard study found that just fifteen minutes in nature can measurably improve mental health, on something like the same order as moderate exercise or a basic dose of an antidepressant.

A 2022 brain-imaging study of sixty-three adults found that a single hour-long walk in a forest measurably lowered amygdala activity (the brain’s alarm system) when participants were later put under stress, compared to people who’d walked through a city.

A 2015 Berkeley study of undergraduates found that the ones who reported more frequent experiences of awe also had lower circulating levels of interleukin-6, a marker of chronic inflammation we now know underlies almost every modern disease, from heart attacks to depression to Alzheimer’s.

And a diary study tracking 269 adults over twenty-two days found that on the days people experienced more awe they reported about twenty percent less stress, fewer physical complaints, and greater well-being overall.

What the research is showing, in other words, is that awe doesn’t just feel good. It physically shifts your nervous system.

The neuroscientist Virginia Sturm at UCSF has found that awe pulls a body out of the sympathetic, fight-or-flight branch of the autonomic nervous system and into the parasympathetic, rest-and-digest branch. Your vagus nerve wakes up. Your heart rate drops. Your inflammation drops. The default mode network (the part of your brain that does most of the self-focused worrying) goes quiet.

You stop being the small, anxious self you usually are and become, for a few minutes, just an awareness that’s looking at something larger. Then you come back. And you bring the gentleness with you.

This is where my decades of teaching neurolinguistic programming come in. When Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed NLP at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, one of their core insights was that powerful internal states are anchorable. A state, in NLP language, is the whole package of how you’re feeling and thinking and breathing in a given moment, and the body keeps an unconscious record of it.

If you pair a deep enough state with a sensory cue (a touch, a word, a piece of music, a remembered image) the cue can later re-trigger the state. Athletes do this when they touch their wrist before a free throw. Singers do it when they take a particular kind of breath before a high note. Anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of something and been catapulted back to childhood has felt anchoring at work. The body does it on its own. NLP just makes it deliberate.

Awe, it turns out, is one of the deepest anchorable states available to a human being. When you stand on a mountain and the world unfolds underneath you, or you sit in a great cathedral as an organ floods the space, or you hold a newborn and your heart does that thing it does, you are in a powerfully integrated state across nearly every system in your body.

Anchor that state (notice your breath, notice where your feet are, notice the temperature of your skin, hold a particular small gesture in your hand) and you’ll be able to come back to a fragment of it later, in traffic, in a hospital waiting room, at a kitchen table where a difficult conversation is underway. You won’t get the whole peak. But you’ll get a taste, and the taste is enough to reset your physiology.

The good news is that you don’t need a mountain. Keltner and his colleagues have spent years showing that awe is built on attention more than on scale. A 2021 trial of older adults found that a fifteen-minute weekly awe walk, where people just slowed down and looked carefully at the textures and colors and small movements of the natural world, produced measurably greater drops in distress and bigger gains in positive emotion than ordinary walking did.

Sturm calls these micro-doses of awe. A leaf. A patch of moss. The way light moves on water. The face of a person you love. Music that gives you goosebumps. A stranger doing a small kindness on a city sidewalk. Even, Keltner notes, the simple practice of thinking about a person whose courage or generosity has shaped your life. He calls that last one moral beauty, and it produces awe responses just as strong as anything in nature.

What I’d add, from a working life spent inside NLP, is this: don’t just have the experience. Notice it while it’s happening. Slow down enough to feel where it lands in your body. Anchor it deliberately. Pair it with one small specific thing (a hand on your chest, a word you say to yourself, the feel of your breath at the back of your throat) so you can come back to it.

The contemplative traditions have always taught some version of this. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it recollection. Jewish tradition has the practice of saying a hundred blessings a day, each one a small returning to gratitude and astonishment. The Quakers sit in silence until something rises. None of those practices are decorative.

They are state-induction technologies, refined over thousands of years, that human beings developed precisely because we figured out, long before fMRI scanners existed, that the way we pay attention shapes everything else.

So here’s my homework, if you’ll take it. This week, find one fifteen-minute window where you can be outside without your phone. A backyard works. A park bench works. A walk to the corner and back works. Look slowly at one specific thing the way a child or a painter might. A bark texture. The geometry of a fern. The way the sky changes between two buildings.

Let yourself drop into it. When something inside you opens, even a little, notice it. Put a hand on your chest, take a breath, and say to yourself, quietly, this counts. That’s the anchor. Bring it back to your desk and use it during the next hard meeting.

Then come tell me in the comments what happened. We’re a wisdom school here, which means we do this practice together. The science is finally catching up to what the contemplatives have always known: paying attention, slowly, to the world that’s already in front of us, is the cheapest, most available, most reliable medicine we’ve got. Awe is a vitamin. And almost nobody is taking it.