Awe

My collaborators Jennifer Stellar and Neha John-Henderson and I had a hunch about how awe may be an antidote to our overheated and overstressed times. We suspected that awe may reduce the inflammation produced by our immune system, in particular that which arises in response to chronic threat, rejection, and loneliness. How? Why might the wonders of life shift this problematic inflammation? Because in many ways, awe is the antithesis to the social threats that cause the release of proinflammatory cytokines.

Proinflammatory cytokines are released in immune cells throughout your body to kill invading bacteria and viruses. In the short run, cytokines heat up your body to kill the pathogen, leaving you feeling sluggish, vague, achy, and disoriented as the body marshals resources to fend off the attack and recuperate. The trouble, though, is that the human mind treats social threats like an invading pathogen: studies find that social rejection, shame, being the target of prejudice, chronic stress, loneliness, and threats to loved ones elevate cytokine levels in your body.

Awe, by contrast, heightens our awareness of being part of a community, of feeling embraced and supported by others. Feeling awe, we place the stresses of life within larger contexts. Perhaps everyday awe, we wondered, would be associated with lower inflammation.

To test this hypothesis, we gathered measures of inflammation (as assessed in the biomarker Interleukin 6, or IL 6). Participants also reported on their everyday awe by offering responses on a seven-point scale (1 = not true, 7 = very true) to questions like:

I often feel wonder about what is around me.

I feel awe outside regularly.

We also measured the tendency to feel other positive emotions, such as pride and amusement. In this study, it was only awe that predicted lower levels of inflammation. Everyday awe, then, can be a pathway for avoiding chronic inflammation and the diseases of the twenty-first century such inflammation is associated with, including depression, chronic anxiety, heart disease, autoimmune problems, and despair. This finding caught the attention of a very large human being who knew the inflammation of trauma well.

Stacy Bare stands six feet, eight inches tall. He has a giant beard and a massive head that stretches the biggest beanies. His voice has the tree-shaking pitch of a moose call. When thoughts of his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan move through his mind, his gaze shifts to the side and his lips retract—traces of a cry of distress, perhaps, for brothers in combat or innocent Iraqis lying dead by the side of the road. When he talks about the need to do more for veterans than numb their minds with pharmaceutical cocktails, or when he recalls a veteran friend who just took his own life, his prose and prosody slow, moved by a conviction found in getting very close to human suffering.

During his childhood in South Dakota, Stacy was inspired by his grandparents’ stories of awe from serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II. At age nineteen he tried to enlist but was rejected; he was too tall. Instead, he joined the army, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. During these engagements, he suffered from chronic inflammation. This didn’t prevent him from finding awe:

During my year in Iraq I was in a near-constant state of low-grade to high-grade funk. I was being forced into a horrific policy decision and a poorly run war every day. I’d lost friends, watched Iraqis being killed, endured blasts and rifle shots and mortar fire and food that made me crap my pants once a month. I worked mostly for a string of ever-changing leadership, each one intent on “making a difference” in their own way.

The light shifted dramatically.

I turned around and saw a huge, pulsing orange wall charging down the road and obliterating everything in its path. Less than a second and the buildings and cars that stretched on either side of the road were gone. I ran, laughing and smiling, to duck into a concrete structure, a little bunker, on the side of the road. I kept my back against the wind but all around me the bunker filled up with fine misted sand. It caught in my mouth and in my throat, but I couldn’t stop smiling or laughing.

The world was a huge place and I was just a tiny speck in it. My challenges and concerns and worries of life all were erased in an instant as I just tried to breathe. It was a remarkably freeing feeling amidst an otherwise incredibly imprisoning year. In its total obliteration, I also found the dust storm magnificently beautiful.

Even after the dust storm raged past, the orange sky stuck around for a while. There would be other orange skies that I’d stare up into that year in Iraq but never had I been stuck inside the storm as it scoured past me. We can do whatever we want on this planet, I remember thinking, but the world will always win—so we might as well build as much joy, real joy for all people while we’re here.