In his book, Dr. Keltner writes that awe is critical to our well-being — similar to joy, contentment and love. His research suggests it has tremendous health advantages that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the discharge of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.
“Awe is on the leading edge” of emotion research, said Judith T. Moskowitz, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Dr. Moskowitz, who has studied how positive emotions help people deal with stress, wrote in an email that “intentional awe experiences, like walks in nature, collective movement, like dance or ceremony, even use of psychedelics improve psychological well-being.”
So what’s it biologically? Awe wasn’t certainly one of the six basic emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness — identified back in 1972, Dr. Keltner said. But recent research shows that awe “is its own thing,” he said. Our bodies respond in another way once we are experiencing awe than once we are feeling joy, contentment or fear. We make a different soundshow a different facial features. Dr. Keltner found that awe prompts the vagal nerves, clusters of neurons within the spinal cord that regulate various bodily functions, and slows our heart rate, relieves digestion and deepens respiratory.
It also has psychological advantages. A lot of us have a critical voice in our head, telling us we’re not smart, beautiful or wealthy enough. Awe seems to quiet this negative self-talk, Dr. Keltner said, by deactivating the default mode network, the a part of the cortex involved in how we perceive ourselves.
But, Dr. Keltner said, even his own lab experiments underestimate the impact of awe on our health and well-being. If we will see these biological responses in experiments, he said, “just imagine what happens when you find yourself watching a baby being born, otherwise you encounter the Dalai Lama.”
