Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How Experiencing 5 Minutes of Awe Can Improve Your Physical & Mental Wellbeing | Dr Dacher Keltner #405

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Today’s guest proposes that awe is an emotion that’s all around us, waiting to be discovered – and in doing so, we can 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 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 and everyday wonder can transform our physical and mental wellbeing. 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. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/340 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   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.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is 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 author and professor of psychology, Dr. Daka Keltner. Daka has spent decades studying the science of happiness. And in this clip, he shares how experiencing awe and everyday wonder can transform our physical and mental well-being. 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 get 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 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. 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 awe? If I think about the common problems 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. 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. Awe is critical. You've really broadened out my perception of what awe is. Honestly,, if someone has said to me before reading your book, when do you experience awe? I probably would have said in

nature. 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 awe, but there's eight ways that you've defined. So I came to the conclusion that, oh, wow, awe is around me every single day and 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 all is focus, I think, the two biggest surprises that blew my mind. I, too, like awe is nature. We're Western European. Then I thought, ah, I know the spiritual traditions.

Awe is 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 what you do. That's moral courage and beauty.

Nature, collective movement. That's moral courage and beauty. Nature, collective movement, you know? And what I love about this is like sports fans, like Arsenal fans, 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? That 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, Rangan, when I started teaching awe And then the final one, life and death. Rangan, when I started teaching awe eight, 10 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, I felt awe holding my sister's hand when she died 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 awe, Daka, 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 awe, it's our approach to that environment, right? Yeah. 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, 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 and 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 Pollan just, you know, when he interviewed 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 lives, right? We're all varying. 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 music's a great case study of that. And I think our audience should be asking this question of 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 I would encourage our listeners,

awe sounds sublime and ineffable or hard to find. It's very easy to find. Listen to music for awe. What gives you rushes of goosebumps? And that will bring you benefits. But one of the really exciting things about awe is it's easy to practice. And it may not sound like it, but it is. So when I teach healthcare 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. I'll go on a walk with my colleagues when I have this next conversation, or we will share all 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 awe 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 then 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 and 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 awe 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. And so 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. It again speaks to this kind of through line, which is it takes us outside of ourselves. It connects us to something much greater than our individualistic, potentially ego-driven existence. 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, 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. This is the power of awe, wherever you experience it, isn't it? That actually it takes you out of yourself. You know, thank you for that summary, 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 all moves us towards the things that are amazing outside of ourselves. I chatted to my wife this morning and I said,

I'm talking to you about awe. And I asked her about how often she experiences awe. She said all the time. And the thing she said to me was, when I'm meditating regularly, I experience awe everywhere all the time. I found that interesting. So that practice of solitude and the way she meditates

and what she taps into allows her then to go out into the non-meditative world, i.e. the parts of her life where she's not meditating and she's starting to see the wonder of life everywhere. So I wonder your perspective on that, but I also wonder, my last book, Daka, was on happiness, right? And I said happiness is a trainable skill. Yeah. And I believe it to be. And I can't shake that thought, like with happiness, like with gratitude, and now with awe, that the ability to experience or see or find awe is something you can get better at. Yeah.

Once you start looking for it. Yeah, yeah. Your wife is onto something really profound that I think we'll learn more about, which is when you find your, what you might call your contemplative practice, and it might be listening to music, it might be walking in the woods, reading theanishads for me believe it or not i was

playing pickup basketball for decades just like this i'm in a reflective moment about my life you often feel extensive awe about almost everything in life you know and in some sense that's what you find in the spiritual journalings of, and, you know, the great revelations of in the Bhagavad Gita or other texts is like, wow, there's so much that's incredible here. It's so much wonder. And the science and scholarship around awe says, as I show, like, this is a basic state of mind and it's not, you don't need to be on a plane and go into the barrier reef. It's just a basic thing about reality to wonder about it, that it's mysterious. And it is to your question, you can cultivate it. Like you said earlier, listening to music for awe or going for an awe walk or reading a poem that really moved you, watching children grow. If you just do that. I do that

every day when I walk to work. I walk by a little preschool and I just stop for about 30 seconds and look, oh, they're playing, you know, they have this weird, you know, Game of Thrones game going on. Kids are amazing. It's a mind blowing. So you listen to them speak language, whatever it is. So there's so much awe and your wife is in some sense the spirit of the book that I was trying to encourage, which is like there's everyday awe and wonder. Just go get it.

Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.