Awe

As in walking, playing and watching sports, dance, ritual, and ceremony, over the course of the day raft mates’ emotions and physiologies synchronized. At the start, raft mates’ cortisol levels were all different; by the end of a day of moving in unison, their cortisol levels converged. The raft mates also synchronized in their emotional expressions: some rafters emoted together on their rafts in shrieks and howls; others vocalized together in symphonies of ooohs and whoas. The porous bodies of raft mates were merging.

A week after the trip, both teens and veterans felt less stress. They reported greater well-being. The teens reported better relations with friends and family. Veterans showed a 32 percent drop in the feelings and symptoms associated with PTSD.

The reasons why rafting might benefit us are many: the endorphin high of physical exertion, recreating with others, enjoying a breather from life’s hardships, the sights and scents of trees and sounds of the river. In more fine-grained analyses we found that it was awe that brought about the mind-body benefits of being outdoors. Here is a story of awe from a teenage participant:

There was a point today where I noticed . . . everything. There was smoke rolling over the hills, I felt in awe. There was water cresting and breaking over the boat, I felt wonder. I felt peaceful.

And one from a veteran speaks to how awe can heal trauma by putting things in perspective:

Looking up at the star-spattered sky, I thought about the universe and how infinite it is. It makes what I do feel less important; but the opportunity of what I could do more powerful and lightweight. I never see how many stars are in the sky like I did tonight.

Awe can make us feel that our life’s work is both less important than our default self makes it out to be and yet promising in purpose and possibility. Teens’ and veterans’ reports of feeling awe during the middle of the trip, rather than pride or joy, accounted for why they felt less stressed, more socially connected, more loving toward their families, and happier one week later.

Teenagers in our study of wild awe

Mean Egotism’s Demise

One clear, frigid day, while crossing a common in Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson was overcome by wild awe, which he described in a well-known essay from Nature from 1836:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

In many ways, “mean egotism” has become a defining social ill of our times. For various reasons, our world has become more narcissistic, defined by self-focus, arrogance, a sense of superiority, and entitlement (although since 2009, narcissism, encouragingly, has dropped slightly). Narcissism can trigger a myopia to others’ concerns, as well as aggression, racism, bullying, and everyday incivility. Not to mention hostility toward the self: narcissism fuels depression, anxiety, body image problems, self-harm, drug abuse, and eating disorders.

To test Emerson’s mean egotism hypothesis, UC Irvine professor Paul Piff and I took students to an awe-inspiring stand of blue gum eucalyptus trees on the UC Berkeley campus. The Eucalyptus Grove is very near the museum that houses the replica of the T. rex

skeleton where students did the I AM study of how awe reveals our collective selves. Out in the trees, in one condition, participants looked up into the bark, branches, leaves, and light on the eucalyptus for two minutes, and took in the wonders of what trees are and give. In the other, they stood in the same place, but looked up at a science building (see images below).

The awe condition

The control condition

After briefly looking up into the trees, our participants reported, in response to questions asked of them by the experimenter, that they were feeling less entitled and narcissistic. When told of the compensation for being in the study, they asked for less money, citing reasons such as “I no longer believe in capitalism, man.” And as all participants were answering these questions, a person—actually in cahoots with us—walked by and dropped a bunch of books and pens. Our participants feeling wild awe picked up more pens than those who looked up at the building.