Awe is Good for You…

© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive, LLC. Baby deer on the edge of the woods at Heartwood Farm.

…and you don’t have to travel to some far-off place to get some. I experienced it this morning when making prolonged eye contact with a baby deer in the woods. I entered a state of timeless beauty – it could have been five seconds or five minutes – where the ordinary processing equipment of my mind simply stopped for a bit. Solid science has now shown that awe is a distinct emotion, and that the positive side of awe has significant benefits for physical and mental health, including reduced inflammation and threat arousal, as well as increased prosocial relationality and social integration. Sure, that first view of a mountain range is a reliable producer of awe, but so are many other, more accessible things: shared music, dancing, spiritual experience, and almost any form of nature, large or small, engaged with fully. While the effects are well known, the mechanisms remain elusive, but since we know it works, why not regularly help ourselves? If you need ideas on how, see Dacher Keltner’s new book-length treatment of his decades of research on this topic called Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. If you’d like to talk about how building awe into your day can change your perspective and greatly enhance your leadership, reach out.

Reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35994778/ “Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health”

Notes:

From research piece: 

“Awe arises in encounters with stimuli that are vast, or beyond one’s current perceptual frame of reference (Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Vastness can be physical, perceptual, or semantic and requires that extant knowledge structures be accommodated to make sense of what is being perceived.” 

Recent evidence suggests that awe is a distinct state in a complex space of eight to 10 positive emotions (e.g., Cowen & Keltner, 2021). 

Awe, then, is associated with a profile of elevated vagal tone, reduced sympa- thetic arousal, increased oxytocin release, and reduced inflammation—all processes known to benefit mental and physical health. 

can often repair and enhance physical health and well-being. 

Experiences of awe have been proposed to be one of the pathways through which immersion in nature benefits mental and physical health (Kuo, 2015) 

awe in nature reduces rumination (Lopes et al., 2020), reduces stress, and elevates well-being (Anderson et al., 2018; Bai et al., 2021)