Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Feel Less Stress, More Joy and Boost Your Physical & Mental Wellbeing | Dr Dacher Keltner #591

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Today’s guest proposes that awe is an emotion that’s all around us, waiting to be discovered – and in doing so, we can begin to transform our health and lives for the better.  Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 340 of the podcast with professor of psychology and author of the book The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, Dr Dacher Keltner. Dacher has spent decades studying the science of happiness and in this clip, he shares how experiencing awe can transform our physical and mental wellbeing and why one of the ways we can access this best is through something called ‘collective effervescence’. I truly believe that Dacher’s work can help all of us find greater meaning and greater health. He’s done a fantastic job of finding the science to support his words, but I think we also know intuitively that what he’s saying makes perfect sense. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore⁠⁠ Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/340 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Today's bite-size episode is sponsored by the brand-new formulation of AG1, the daily health drink that has been in my own life for over six years. Now, some of the upgrades in the new formula include more magnesium, which supports muscle function and the ability of our nervous systems to relax, and it also now contains five instead of two strains of bacteria to reflect the latest advancements in microbiome science. It also contains key nutrients in bioavailable forms the body can easily and readily utilize maximizing their potential benefits.

AG1 makes it simple to be the best version of you. Over 70 ingredients, one scoop once a day for less than a cup of coffee. And right now, AG1 are giving my audience a special offer worth 58 pounds, which is almost 80 US. you will get 10 free travel packs and an awesome welcome kit with your first subscription. To take advantage, go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More bite size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 340 of the podcast with Dr. Daka Kelton, professor of psychology, and author of the book,

Or The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder. Now, Daka has spent decades studying the science of happiness, and in this clip, he shares how experiencing awe can transform our physical and mental well-being and why one of the ways we can access this best is through something called collective effervescence. If I think about the common problem, that exist medically.

A lot of them are related to inflammation, the immune system, stress, the amygdala, the threat response part of the brain being overactive, right? And you have just beautifully explained that awe can buffer us against those. Yeah. Can be an antidote to many of the problems and things that we're suffering from in the modern world. So I agree with you, right? Or is critical. Every time I teach a large group of people about happiness, I'll have a mom come to me,

especially post-pandemic, and they're like, you know, my 17-year-old son is in real deep distress, and what do I do? And I turn to the science of happiness and I say, man, find some social connections, get them outdoors, you know, give them a way to find meaning or reflect on life. And now awe, you know, awe helps your immune system, reducing inflammation, helps your cardiovascular system activates vagal tone reduces activation in the amygdala a threat-related region in the brain helps you think more clearly and more creatively makes you feel like you have less stress in life for 75 years old and older it makes you feel less physical pain right I could go on I mean these are all studies where five minutes of awe five minutes gives you that suite of benefits that I think

are comparable to anything you can do. No kidding. And we didn't know that. And now it's starting to spread, right? Just to be thinking about, where are those five minutes of all? Yeah. You've really broadened out my perception of what awe is. Yeah. Honestly, like, if someone has said to me before reading your book, when do you experience awe, I probably would have said in nature. Yeah. Yeah. Right? But one of my favorite chances was the one collective effervesces. Yes. One of my favorite terms. I discovered it a couple of years ago. There's a New York Times article on collective effervescence. Yeah. Cool. I thought, wow, what a cool term. I'd never heard of that before. Yeah. And then when I open up your book and it's like, oh, you've written a chapter on this,

right? So it's one of those categories of awe, right? What is it? How can people experience it? And why is it so beneficial? Thank you for calling attention to that. It, you know, it was something that emerged in our studies, very hard to study scientifically, collective effervescence, but it emerged as just a surprising way to find awe. That is a term that the French sociologist Emil Durkheim coined when he was trying to figure out like William James did and others, like what is the core subjective feeling of religion? And he called it collective effervescence. And it's when you start moving in unison or you're synchronizing your. movements. Think of a ritual in a church, clapping, cheering at a football game, dancing together,

doing rituals before a basketball game, collective movement. Then you start to realize collective movement makes you have a shared consciousness. So you're all thinking about the same thing. Yeah. The religious figure leading the ritual, the football players on the pitch, you know, the movements at a concert, the band singing and you're all cheering. A political speech, right? And then emotion starts taking over, where people are like, I got this rush of chills. I was crying. I was almost ecstatic.

I was feeling like I was one with everybody around me. And that's collective effervescence, which is movement, attention, shared attention, and then this electric feeling that moves over you that makes you feel like you're united. One of the amazing things about thinking about these as contexts of all, which they are is they this allows us to find the deeper meaning in these wonderful venues like there are studies that suggest like you know your football team is is almost on par with a church it gives you that much meaning and sense of community and sense of history right following music and going to musical venues I love the the work on sort of spontaneous forms of collective

effervescence that you know people observe like pedestrians moving through streets and being at festivals or farmers markets you know i was just with my daughter natalie at a farmer's market and it felt there was collective effervescence we were all moving together getting the the street indian food sharing it in a park right that was awesome and and so this framework of all starts to allow us to see the richness of these common venues of all that we can enjoy i a couple of examples that have come to me in doing this work. One is singing together. There are all these singing groups out there. Yeah. And when I give talks on all, someone always comes up with tears in their eyes, like, you've got to study choirs because it's all collective effervescence, right?

And, and, you know, a lot of the, it's interesting, a lot of the informal help your body movements like yoga, 20 million people practice yoga in the United States, and a lot of its collective of effervescence. You're doing motions together. Your attention is shared. And you start to feel this joy. Yeah. I really appreciate you sharing that. One of the things that I've been, I guess, concerned with a little bit for a while. Yeah. You know, a lot of people are struggling to find that sense of community. I agree. And one of the things I said, literally a few days ago at one of my thoughts was, look, what do you like doing? Okay, someone said yoga. I said, okay, you like yoga. One of the big problems over the last years is that because of some of the restrictions,

a lot of this stuff has gone online. I know. So let's take yoga as an example. For many people, a phenomenal practice that helps them physically, mentally, emotionally. And a lot of people now, in our bid to save time and be more efficient, we go on the Zoom class. We do a 10, 50 minute YouTube video. And again, that can have a role. But I say, listen, if that's you, sign up for a class as well. Do 10 minutes a day on YouTube, sure. That's great. But make sure once a week you sign up and you go to the class. Because it's one of the tips I give people that struggling with loneliness says, you know, what hobby do you have? What passion do you like? Is there a local class? Go there. You'll meet other people like you. Right? So it's a very clear message throughout your book that one of the powerful qualities of all is that it takes us outside of ourselves to something much bigger and greater.

Yeah. Wow. You've just spoken to a very important empirical question. Does solitary activity on Zoom compare to collective activity of the same thing? We know in the education world it does not. And Zoom classrooms for most people are a disaster. You need the collective mind and so forth. Yeah, I love Your recommendation, Rangan, Jane Goodall, awe, she saw it in chimpanzees. It is the beginning of our sense of spirit because it allows us to be amazed at things outside of our self-self. And the central challenge of the mental health crises of today is too much self-focus. And we're not going to find awe with Zoom and smartphones where we're, you know, we've got to get with other people.

You know, I was with a minister a couple of weeks ago, Malcolm Clemens Young, a remarkable mind, and he said, you know, and I suspect this is true of a lot of the domains that you refer to, you can pray by yourself, but there's something about praying with people who are praying with you together. He said, and there's a lot of spiritual traditions around that, you know, playing ping pong with other groups of people, doing dance together, doing yoga together. There's no such. And the answer for that is awe, that it makes you realize your collective, like Jane Goodall said, and you said, I'm amazed at things outside of myself. But what I will take note of, you know, Rangan, is a lot of our 20-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 30-year-olds feel that viscerally, right? And a lot of collective things are starting to emerge again. And game nights are really popular where you play with, you know, actual games with people physically present. listening to vinyl albums, right, where you get back to that ritual of listening to music together. So it's too strong to take out of our experience and I think it's coming back. But critical for us to think about.

But one of the really exciting things about awe is it's easy to practice. It may not sound like it, but it is. So when I teach health care providers, which I do a lot of, one of the things they do is they say, I only have 20 minutes for lunch because, as you know, they work very hard and they're busy. But I'll go sit in the garden, you know. I'll go on a walk with my colleagues when I have this next conversation. Or we will share awe stories in a huddle. And you can do this anywhere, right? These are little three to five minute shifts in how we do things, be it eating or sharing a nice quote or an awe story from work that are easy to do and bring us some of the benefits of

awe. You've done some studies, I think, on something called an all walk. Yeah. So tell us about that. And there are thousands of people leading awe walks around the world right now, which makes me really grateful. Yeah, you know, that study begins actually with the great British tradition of walking and the Brits walk in spectacular ways, you know. And there's, you know, and there's And Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant writer, did this book on wandering and just how much we derive meaning from walking. And she called it, she really talked about it in terms of all. Like when you walk, your body is moving through space, but you feel like you're part of the environment, a path, et cetera, and a tradition. And so in our study, we had people who are 75 years old or older, which is an age in the United States where people start to feel more anxious.

depressed because people are dying around them. And so we just, once a week, they went out and did an all walk. And I love this because it's really simple. Go to someplace that's a little mysterious and look at small things like this rock on your table and vast things like your whole studio, right? That's all they did. And they did it once a week for eight weeks. We had a nice control condition, a vigorous walk condition. And our 75 years old participants in the all walk walk felt less distress. They felt more awe over time. And we had them take selfies out on the walk and their selfies, the self gets smaller and starts to fade off to the side and they're taking in more of the environment. So they're just aware of what's over. They're amazed at things outside

of themselves. Yeah. And so, you know, you put that together with a lot of the data on just walking outside to find awe is so good for you. And it's easy to do anywhere. Yeah. It again, speak to this, this kind of through line, which is it takes us outside of ourselves. It connects us something much greater than our individualistic, potentially ego-driven existence. Yeah. All seems to be the perfect antidote to everything we're struggling with today. Yeah. Which a lot of it is simply inward focus, me, me, me. I think it actually really helps us connect with life, connect with something bigger. Yeah. You know, remind. us of our insignificance, really, in this kind of ego-focused world where there appears to be

more and more people exhibiting narcissistic traits. Yeah. This is the power of all, wherever you experience it, isn't it? That actually it takes you out of yourself. You know, thank you for that summary, you know, Rangan. One of the things you can take from this book is there are these eight wonders that hint to us that there are big things to be part of music and life and death. and moral beauty.

And just, you know, when you feel awe, just ask yourself, what am I part of here, you know? And it usually points you towards, it makes you realize, like, I'm just a small thing that actually is okay. That's actually true. But I'm part of something really large, like fellow humans, you know, an ecosystem or something about culture. And we need that today, you know. Like you said earlier, a lot of the health challenges come out of this internal individual

focus that has just blown up today and awe moves us towards the things that are amazing outside of ourselves. And I think if you look at the broad trends that we've been noting in our largely globalized Western European cultures and now increasingly throughout the world, it's self-focused, it's individualistic, it's more materialistic. We forget the systems of people were part of, the families and the culture, and it's awe-inspiring to reflect on that. It really is. And of course, nature is a really good way to act. that what is it, the definition you put in the book was, or is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast

that transcends your current understanding of the world? Yeah, yeah. And I don't know what your experience has been going around the world, talking about this, but you show that, yes, nature is one way to experience all, but there's eight ways that you've defined. So I came to the conclusion that, oh, wow, Or is around me every single day in possibly every single interaction if I can train myself to see it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, thank you for bringing into focus. I think the two biggest surprises that blew my mind. You know, we, I too, like Oz nature, you know, Western European. And then I thought, ah, I know the spiritual traditions, Oz spirituality and mysticism. And so we gather these stories from 26 countries all over the world and awe comes to us through eight paths which I call the eight wonders and I'll just quickly the moral beauty of people their kindness and courage I teach medical doctors and once they think about this they think wow I just gave a patient a terminal diagnosis and they held my hand and said thank you for for what you do that's moral courage and beauty nature collective movement you know and what I love about this is like sports fans like Arsenal fans or, you know, they're like, I love, sports are almost spiritual, and that's because of awe. And then you get to the culture ones, which are music, visual design, and spirituality.

And then the two Rangan that really caught me off guard, epiphanies, big ideas, like, you know, wow, the web of life. That's the central idea in evolution, right? The Darwin was blown off the map by. We're all part of this, what he called a tangled bank of life. we're all interacting different species. And then the final one, life and death, you know, that, you know, Rangan, when I start teaching awe eight, ten years ago to audiences with people over the age of 55, there would always be a hand that would raise and the person would say, you know, I felt awe holding my sister's hand when

she died, you know, and just looking at that mystery, feeling it. And so, lo and behold, around the world, we really, get into a state of awe thinking about life and death. We all have our pathways to awe. And I think the eight wonders are useful. And we can all understand other people's pathways when cast within this broader framework of what humans find in awe. One of the questions I had around or DACA is, let's say the Grand Canyon, right? You could put 10 different people in the Grand Canyon. And yes, you would hope that everyone would feel awe, but some people possibly wouldn't, right? So it's not the environment that is creating the all. It's our approach to that environment, right? Yeah. It's,

that's so important, Rangan, to bring this into our focus here. And I think there are wonderful insights to be gleaned from those eight wonders of life we talked about. You know, we started to find, And if you ask people like, where do you tear up and get the goosebumps and cry and feel awe and wonder? And humans are remarkably varying. It's just a fundamental truth about who we are. And for some people, it's busy cities in the stream of pedestrians. And other people, it is sitting by trees by themselves in the quiet. And for some people, it's classical music.

And for other people, Michael Paul and just, you know, in the interview of me, he's like, I was just at a pussy riot show, and I felt awe, you know, punk rock. For some people, it's wild art for other people. It's still, still lives, right? We're all varying. And music's a great case study of that. And I think our audience should be asking this question to themselves, which is, think of a time when you last got goosebumps and teared up at a piece of music.

And most people have had that kind of experience. And that will bring you benefit. And that's one of the mysteries to me of awe is we find it in such unique ways, but also universal ways, right? And I would encourage our listeners, you know, awe sounds sublime and ineffable or hard to find. It's very easy to find. There's everyday awe and wonder, just go get it, you know. I hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip.

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