What is awe, exactly?
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, where much of the modern science of awe has been built, define it as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that your current understanding cannot quite contain. A cathedral ceiling. A piece of music that seems to know something about you. A eucalypt older than the suburb around it. Vastness does not have to mean physical size; an idea, a kindness or a canvas can do it.
What makes awe unusual among positive emotions is what it does to the sense of self. Most good feelings enlarge us a little: pride, amusement, satisfaction. Awe does the opposite. In a series of five studies with 2,078 participants, Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner and colleagues (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015) found that awe reliably produced what they call the small self: attention shifting off the individual and outward. In their most striking experiment, a short pause in a grove of towering trees, simply looking up, left people measurably more helpful to a stranger moments later, and less entitled in their responses. The self quietens; the world gets larger. That shift, it turns out, is not only psychological.
Can a feeling really show up in your blood?
This is the study that moved awe from philosophy into biology. Jennifer Stellar and colleagues at Berkeley (Emotion, 2015) took two samples of university students, 94 in the first study, 105 in the second, and measured both their tendency to experience specific positive emotions and their levels of interleukin-6, or IL-6, a cytokine the immune system uses to raise inflammation.
Inflammation is useful in an emergency and corrosive as a constant: persistently elevated inflammatory markers travel with poorer health across many systems of the body. So the direction of the finding matters. Positive emotion overall predicted lower IL-6, but when the emotions were separated out, one stood clear of the rest. Awe, more than joy, contentment, love, pride or amusement, was the strongest predictor of lower IL-6, and the association held after controlling for body mass index.
The study cannot say which way the arrow points, people with less inflammation may simply have more capacity for wonder, and it measured students, not the general population. Even so, it put a number on something people have always sensed on the steps of a gallery: the state you are in when beauty stops you is a different physiological state, not just a different mood.
What happened when older adults went looking for awe?
If awe were only a lucky accident, something that happens to you at the Grand Canyon, it would be interesting but not very useful. A study from the University of California, San Francisco tested whether it can be cultivated on an ordinary footpath.
Virginia Sturm and colleagues (Emotion, 2020) asked older adults to take one fifteen-minute outdoor walk a week for eight weeks. Half were simply asked to walk. The other half were given a gentle instruction: walk somewhere new if you can, and deliberately notice what is vast, surprising or beautiful, the light on a building, the detail in a leaf, the scale of a tree. A small orientation, nothing more.
Both groups walked. Only one group changed. The awe walkers reported growing joy and warmth toward others during their walks, and, outside the walks entirely, rising day-to-day positive emotion and falling daily distress across the eight weeks. The most charming measure was photographic: participants took a selfie on each walk, and over two months the awe walkers literally made themselves smaller in the frame, giving more of the picture to the world around them, while their smiles grew measurably broader. Same legs, same footpaths, same fifteen minutes. The difference was where the attention went.
Does the view from the window count?
Long before awe had a literature, one of the most cited papers in environmental health made the blunt case that surroundings register in the body. Roger Ulrich (Science, 1984) examined the records of gallbladder-surgery patients in a Pennsylvania hospital across nine years. By accident of room assignment, some recovered facing a stand of trees; others, matched patient for patient, faced a brick wall.
The tree-view patients went home nearly a full day sooner on average, 7.96 days against 8.70, took fewer strong pain medications, and accumulated fewer negative comments in the nurses’ notes. Same surgery, same building, same care teams. The variable was what the eyes rested on.
It was a small study from another era, and it deserves the caution owed to any single result. Still, it opened a field, evidence-based design, on a simple premise the awe research has since deepened: the nervous system never stops reading the environment, and what it reads shapes the state the whole body runs in. A window is an input. So, by extension, is a wall with something worth looking at.
What does music do to a stressed body?
Music is the art form the stress research has measured hardest, because its effects are so quick to capture. Martina de Witte and colleagues pooled 104 randomised controlled trials, 9,617 participants in all, in a pair of meta-analyses (Health Psychology Review, 2020). The verdict: listening to music has a significant overall calming effect on both physiological arousal, with heart rate and blood pressure among the measures, and on psychological stress, how anxious and stressed people report feeling.
The wider picture agrees. A World Health Organization scoping review (Fancourt and Finn, 2019), drawing on over 3,000 studies, concluded that the arts play a major role in the prevention of ill health and the promotion of health across the whole lifespan: through mechanisms that are partly psychological, partly social, and partly, as the stress physiology shows, straightforwardly bodily.
None of this requires a concert hall. It requires taking seriously the idea that a nervous system bathed in beauty for twenty minutes is running differently from one bathed in noise.
Why would beauty be a physiological input at all?
Pull the threads together and a coherent picture emerges. Your nervous system’s continuous work is appraisal: scanning surroundings, body and memory, and setting your internal state to match, more defence or more openness, more vigilance or more repair. That setting is not decided by willpower. It is decided by information, and the environment is a large share of the information.
Awe seems to act on this system in a particular way. It is an openness state with the volume turned up: attention wide, self quiet, the body’s alarm chemistry, on the early evidence, turned down rather than up. Trees out a hospital window, a slow movement of a symphony, a canvas that holds your eye for a full minute: these are not indulgences layered on top of health. They are signals, in through the senses, that it may be safe to spend less on defence.
This is also why environments deserve more respect than we give them. Nobody would argue that what you eat is irrelevant to how you function. The research above simply extends the courtesy to what you see, hear and stand inside.
There is a wider frame for the same idea. The cell biologist Dr Bruce Lipton, whose research and teaching have long resonated with Dr Ari’s own understanding of health, has spent decades showing through epigenetics that a cell’s behaviour follows the signals of its environment: which genes are switched on or off answers, in part, to the conditions a body lives in. Read that way, a room, its light, its grace, its beauty, is not a backdrop to your biology. It is one of its instructions.
Where can you find awe this week, for free?
- Take the UCSF instruction on your next walk: somewhere slightly new, fifteen minutes, and deliberately look for what is vast, old, intricate or beautiful. The instruction, not the walk, was the active ingredient. - Give one artwork one full minute. In a gallery or on your own wall, awe favours dwell time, and a minute is longer than most paintings ever get. - Listen to one piece of music with nothing else running. The trials that moved heart rate and blood pressure used music as the event, not the background. - Look up. Piff’s tree-grove experiment took about a minute of raised eyes. Night sky, canopy, ceiling, cloud, verticality is awe’s cheapest doorway. - Put something worth seeing where you already look: the view from the desk, the wall opposite the bed. Ulrich’s patients did not choose their window; you can.
How does Diskin Life approach awe and environment?
Walk into the Centre in Fitzroy and you will notice the walls answer back. The setting is an 1862 Victorian landmark on Victoria Parade, and its intent declares itself before you reach the door: mounted on the building is the world’s largest reproduction of human vertebrae, around 3,500 times life size, commissioned by Dr Ari in 1995 to celebrate the profession’s centenary, carrying simulated live nerves, bringing what we work with out onto the street.
Inside, the rooms run on light and lightness: high ceilings, sunlit spaces, art on nearly every wall, part hope-inspiring lighthouse, part sanctuary. The adjusting zone is home to fourteen original works of Resonance Art, The Keys to Awaken, the largest exhibition of its kind anywhere in the world: art made to be felt, not only seen. None of it is decoration around the work. We hold environment and beauty to be inputs to the nervous system, precisely the claim this article’s research keeps landing on, so the setting is deliberately part of the care, down to details you may never consciously notice.
The work itself begins the same way for everyone: a free, no-obligation Discovery Session, a conversation with Dr Ari, nothing more. From there, progress is read the way everything here is read, three ways, weighed together: what the testing shows (careful baseline testing plus seven extraordinary measures); what you notice in yourself, read against what you value; and what Dr Ari makes of the two, with more than forty years and 25,000+ clients behind the reading. Care is gentle Nervous System Adjustments, light, precise contacts that cue the nervous system rather than forcing it; the body does the work. Within the Premium Vitality approach, physical, cognitive and emotional performance are one connected system, and a state that can open, wonder and settle is part of what we are working toward.
What this cannot show
The awe literature is young, and much of it is correlational. Stellar’s IL-6 finding is an association in university students, it cannot say whether awe lowers inflammation or easier physiology makes wonder more available. Ulrich’s hospital study involved 46 patients four decades ago. The awe-walk study relied largely on self-report, where expectation effects are hard to exclude, and the music meta-analyses pool very different interventions in very different settings. No study shows that awe, art or music changes the course of any specific condition, and none of this substitutes for care of an existing health concern. Chiropractic care is not an art prescription, and standing in a gallery is not a health intervention. What holds honestly is more modest and still remarkable: your surroundings register in your physiology, states of openness look measurably different from states of defence, and beauty is one freely available way in.
What to hold on to
- Awe has a scientific definition, the feeling of standing before something vast that exceeds your understanding, and a measurable bodily signature.
- In Berkeley research, awe was the positive emotion most strongly associated with lower levels of the inflammatory cytokine IL-6.
- Awe can be practised: fifteen deliberate minutes a week shifted daily emotion in older adults over eight weeks, and shrank the self in their own photographs.
- Environments register in physiology, from hospital recovery beside a green window to heart rate and blood pressure settling with music.
- Beauty is an input, not an indulgence: what you see, hear and stand inside is information your nervous system uses to set your state.
- General information only, not a diagnosis or personal health advice. If waking at night is persistent or affecting your days, please also speak with your GP.
General information only, not a diagnosis or personal health advice. For questions about your health, please also speak with your GP.