Feeling down? You need to experience more awe, psychologists say. So I set off every day to explore my local area, leaving my phone behind
I am in the middle of a cloud, halfway up a steep pike, and on a mission to get some awe. I am here thanks to a new study, which found that by paying close attention to our surroundings as we walk, we can get our happy chemicals pumping and enhance overall wellbeing. That sounded pretty good, so I find myself in the middle of nowhere on an oddly misty, humid day.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks I am in the right place. “It’s hard to think of a single thing that you can do for your mind and body that’s better than a little dose of awe,” he says. It was Keltner and a team of researchers who published a paper that found that awe can reduce stress, help inflammation, increase creativity and sociability and make you happy. “To me, that all says we urgently need to find awe.”