Why Wonder Is Good Medicine
As we close out Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to share something that often gets forgotten in our busy lives but can offer enormous benefits for our mental health. It costs nothing, is available to you every single day, and requires no app, prescription, or appointment. Most of us walked past it this morning without noticing. It is the experience of awe, and the research on what it does for the human mind and body has become difficult to ignore.
I want to be careful here because ‘awe’ sounds like the kind of soft, feel-good idea that gets passed around wellness circles without much substance. That is not what this is. Over the past two decades, researchers in psychology and neuroscience have studied awe with the same rigor applied to anxiety, stress, and inflammation. What they have found is that brief moments of wonder produce measurable changes in how we think, how we feel, how our bodies regulate stress, and even how we treat the people around us. For those of us in the demanding middle stretch of life, somewhere between building careers, raising children, caring for aging parents, and carrying a near-constant mental load, this turns out to be unexpectedly practical information.
Let me walk you through what awe actually is, what it does, and how you can access more of it without booking a trip to the Grand Canyon.
What Awe Actually Is
The psychologist Dacher Keltner, who has done more than perhaps anyone to bring awe into serious scientific study, defines it as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Now, there is a lot in that definition, so let’s break it down into the two basic ideas inside it.
The first is vastness. We feel awe when we encounter something much larger than ourselves or than we are used to perceiving. Standing at the rim of a canyon does it. So does looking up at a cathedral ceiling or out at the ocean. But vastness is not only physical. We can feel it in the presence of a person of remarkable ability or moral courage, in a piece of music that seems too big for the room, or in a scientific idea that suddenly reorganizes how we see things. Vastness is about scale relative to the self, not about square footage.
The second idea is accommodation. When we meet something vast, our existing mental frameworks do not quite fit it, so the mind has to adjust to take it in. This is why awe can feel a little destabilizing at first. It is often accompanied by confusion, disorientation, and even a flicker of fear. That is not a malfunction. It is the mind stretching to accommodate something it did not have a category for. Sometimes we cannot make sense of the experience, and the unease lingers. But often the confusion resolves into something that feels like clarity or even enlightenment. That moment of the mind expanding to hold something new is a large part of why awe is so good for us.
The Small Self, and Why It Helps
The central mechanism researchers point to is what they call the small self effect. When you feel awe, your attention shifts from yourself to the larger world. Your problems, your inbox, your running internal monologue of worry and self-evaluation all recede for a moment. You feel smaller, but in a way that is freeing rather than diminishing.
This matters enormously for mental health, because so much of our daily suffering comes from being trapped inside our own heads. Anxiety is, in large part, an excess of self-focused prediction. We rehearse conversations, replay mistakes, and forecast threats. The years between thirty and fifty are often when this runs hottest, because they are the years of maximum responsibility. We are managing the most, deciding the most, and worrying about the most. The self has a lot to keep track of, and it rarely powers down.
Awe interrupts that loop. It does not solve your problems, but it briefly loosens their grip and reminds you that you are part of something far larger than your to-do list. As Keltner has put it, even brief experiences of awe make people more humble, less entitled, more aware of others’ strengths, and less stressed by the challenges of daily life. That last part is the one I keep coming back to in my practice. Being less stressed by the challenges of daily living is exactly what most of my patients are asking for.
What awe does for your mind
The cognitive and emotional benefits of awe are some of the best documented.
In 2020, Keltner and colleagues at UC Berkeley studied something they called the awe walk, a short walk taken with the deliberate intention of noticing the beauty and vastness around you. The instruction is almost embarrassingly simple, and yet the people who took these walks reported significant increases in well-being, including greater joy and reduced anxiety. They also felt more connected to others and less preoccupied with daily stress. The walk itself was nothing special. The intention to notice was the active ingredient.
Awe also appears to change how efficiently we think. Work by Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman found that people in a state of awe process cognitive information more effectively. There is also a fascinating thread of neuroscience research on what happens in the brain during awe. The prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for executive function and tight attentional control, downregulates, while the default mode network, the system involved in daydreaming, divergent thinking, and creative ideation, becomes more active. Researchers studying these brain states have even trained a computer model to detect when someone is experiencing awe based on their brain activity, with accuracy averaging around 75%. In other words, awe is a distinct and identifiable state, not a vague mood.
One of the most useful findings, especially for high-achieving and analytical people, is that awe increases our comfort with uncertainty. We become more:
- willing to sit with not knowing,
- less desperate for immediate closure, and
- more open to new information.
For anyone who tends to grip hard for control when life feels unpredictable, this is a meaningful shift. So, awe allows us to loosen that grip without feeling like we are losing ourselves.
What Awe Does for Your Body
Furthermore, the benefits of awe extend beyond mood and mindset. They show up in the body.
A study published in the journal Emotion found that people who regularly experienced awe had significantly lower levels of interleukin-6, which is a key marker of systemic inflammation.
A quick word on inflammation, since it gets thrown around a lot. Inflammation is your body’s response to illness, injury, or something that does not belong in it, such as germs or toxins. In the short term, it is protective. The problem is chronically elevated inflammation in the absence of any actual illness or injury, which researchers have linked to the onset and progression of a long list of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression.
The implication is striking. Brief, repeated moments of wonder may help quiet the kind of low-grade, persistent inflammation that slowly wears the body down over time. I am not suggesting that an awe walk replaces medical care. I am saying that there is a connection between our emotional life and our physical health, and that awe can be a factor in improving both.
There is also evidence that awe directly calms the nervous system. Research by Michelle Shiota found that during awe, the fight-or-flight activation of the sympathetic nervous system dials back. People in awe feel an impulse to stop moving and simply take in what is in front of them before acting. In a culture that rewards constant motion and reactivity, that built-in pause is its own kind of medicine.
Awe Changes Your Relationship With Time
If there is one finding that resonates most with my patients in their thirties, forties, and fifties, it is this one. The single most common complaint I hear is not sadness or even anxiety. It is that there is never enough time.
A set of experiments by Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker, published in Psychological Science, found that people who felt awe, compared with those who felt other emotions such as ordinary happiness, reported feeling they had more time available. They were less impatient. They were more willing to volunteer their time to help others. They preferred experiences over material possessions and reported greater overall life satisfaction. The researchers traced all of these effects back to a single source: awe changes our subjective experience of time by bringing us fully into the present moment.
That is worth pondering. Awe does not actually add hours to your day. What it does is pull you out of the anxious forward lean toward the next thing and root you in what is happening right now. And when you are genuinely present, time feels more abundant. The clock did not slow down. You finally caught up to it.
Awe Makes Us Kinder and More Connected
Awe is not only a private experience. It reliably makes people more generous and more oriented toward others. Research by Piff and colleagues found that awe situates individuals within broader social contexts and enhances collective concern. In their words, awe may encourage people to set aside strict self-interest to improve others’ welfare.
The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo describes awe as the feeling we have when we encounter something unexpected, vast, and hard to explain, whether it is a sweeping view or a single improbable pink stripe on a flower. That encounter makes you realize there is something bigger than yourself, your own problems fade into the background, and you become more concerned with the collective. You get out of your own head and become more cooperative and generous.
This is why I think of awe as something close to an antidote to isolation. Diminishing the self in a healthy way and turning attention outward is precisely the opposite of the lonely, ruminative inward spiral that so many people fall into, especially after periods of stress or withdrawal. Awe reconnects us to the sense that we belong to a larger whole.
Nature Is the Easiest Doorway
You can find awe in art, in music, in cathedrals, in mathematics, or in watching someone act with real moral courage. But nature is the most reliable and accessible doorway for most of us.
A series of studies by Anderson and colleagues looked at this directly. In one, at-risk youth and military veterans went whitewater rafting. A week after the trip, their reported well-being was higher than before, and among all the positive emotions measured, awe was the single best predictor of that improvement. In a second study, college students kept daily diaries for two weeks. On the days they wrote about experiences in nature, they reported greater satisfaction, and those experiences were more closely tied to awe than to any other positive emotion, such as joy, pride, or gratitude.
These were longitudinal studies rather than tightly controlled experiments, so the researchers themselves were careful not to claim that awe in nature directly causes improved well-being. What we can say is that these findings add to a substantial and growing body of evidence that time in nature is good for us, and that awe appears to be a large part of why.
So spend a little time outdoors. Let the mountains, the ocean, or even the trees swaying in your own backyard do their quiet work.
The Best Part: You Can Train This
Here is the finding that turns awe from a nice occasional accident into an actual practice. The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has noted that taking a moment each day to practice awe produces a long-term effect. Over time, the emotion becomes easier to feel. The practice essentially helps rewire your brain to access these mood-boosting states more readily. Awe is a capacity you can strengthen, like a muscle.
That reframes the whole thing. You are not waiting passively for a grand vista to move you. You are building a skill.
How to Practice Awe
Try a two-minute awe pause. When a full walk is not possible, you can find wonder in two minutes wherever you are. First, pause. Find a quiet moment, maybe by a window or right before sleep. Second, notice imperfection. Look for what is not polished but still full of life, like the weathered texture of a leaf, the chipped edge of a favorite mug, or even your own tired eyes in the mirror. Third, zoom out. Ask yourself what part of this connects you to a larger story, and let your awareness move from your body to your surroundings, from your breath to the sounds around you. Fourth, let it land. Breathe, and simply be with it without rushing to capture or define it.
Widen your sources. Awe does not require a mountaintop. Great music, a moving piece of art, a moment of genuine kindness or courage in another person, the night sky, or the strange beauty of something very small can all open the door. Find what leaves you a little speechless, and return to it.
Do this daily if you can. Small, repeated doses of wonder have outsized effects on your mood, your biology, and your sense of meaning over time.
We spend so much of adult life zoomed all the way in, focused on the next task, the next worry, the next thing that needs handling. Awe asks us to zoom out, even briefly, and to remember that we are folded into something far larger than the narrow concerns of any given day. That shift, the small self turning outward toward the vast, is good for the mind, good for the body, and good for the people around us.
I would gently add one thing. Awe is a wonderful practice and a real support in everyday stress, but it is not a substitute for care when something deeper is at play. If you are living with persistent anxiety, a low mood that does not lift, or stress that an afternoon walk cannot touch, that is worth taking seriously, and you do not have to sort it out alone. Reach out to my office and let me help. There are solutions to these conditions that can help. You are cordially invited to call 844-802-6512 for more information.
Until next time, go find something that leaves you a little undone by its beauty. Your brain, and the rest of you, will thank you.