Good Life Project - How Awe Can Change Your Life | Dacher Keltner

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Discover the transformative power of the most under-researched human emotion, awe, in this enlightening episode with Dacher Keltner, renowned psychology professor and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.💡 Unearth the profound impact of awe on personal well-being and global change.💡 Understand how cultivating a sense of wonder can refresh your outlook and enhance your connection with the world.💡 Get a sneak peek into Dacher Keltner’s groundbreaking research spanning three decades, highlighting the untapped power of awe.💡 Learn about the tangible psychological and physiological benefits of awe from reduced stress to increased vitality.💡 Explore actionable ways to infuse awe into your daily routine for amplified well-being and human connection.This thought-provoking dialogue blends scientific evidence with personal experiences to redefine your understanding of emotions. It’s time to tap into the awe-inspiring power of awe.You can find Dacher at: Website | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Jeffrey Davis about wonder.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brief doses of awe, getting outdoors, dancing, listening to music, having a great conversation, it boosts well-being. We know it increases your feeling good about life. Brief moments of awe help you handle daily stresses better. Brief moments of awe, even when you're by yourself in nature or music, make you feel connected and they make you feel like the people around you, even ideological adversaries, you kind of share stuff, right? You're part of a community. So when you put that together, it just tells us like, if we're really thinking about the utility of awe, it's good news for human beings. So would it surprise you to know that there is a powerful human emotion, maybe even one of the most transformational ones, that was almost entirely ignored by the scientific community until fairly recently because they thought it just didn't matter. And that emotion and the experience of it we now know, not just through generations of personal experience, but a growing body of

scientific evidence, it holds the power to not only change your life, but maybe even the world. Well, it turns out just such an emotion exists and we call it awe. It is a stunningly powerful way to boost your wellbeing, gain a fresh perspective and reconnect with the world just by cultivating your sense of wonder and awe. And even better, it just plain feels amazing to be in it. And our guide today as we dive into the world of awe is Dr. Keltner, the author of the new book, Awe, The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. An expert in the science of emotions, someone who I have followed and his work for years, and a professor of psychology at the University of California, someone who I have followed in his work for years, and a professor

of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Docker has been studying emotion for over three decades. And though awe was often overlooked in early research on emotions, he began focusing on the experience and its impact on our lives. Through studies now with thousands of people across the globe, he and his team have uncovered the many physiological and psychological effects of awe. From feelings of self-transcendence to increased vitality and reduced stress, we dive into awe today, including not just those benefits, but also how to cultivate more of it in our everyday lives for greater joy, well-being, and human connection. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what's the difference between me and you? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The topic of awe has been something that I've been deeply fascinated by for many years now, both the experience of it, the research around it, the way it affects our lives, our access to it. So I'm really excited to explore. One of the things that you talk about, you actually, these are your words. For hundreds of years, awe has been a

central character in spiritual journaling in which people write to this day about their encounters with the divine. And yet at the same time, awe is this life-changing, sometimes transcendent emotion. Yet until relatively recently, among the scope of emotions that were recognized, validated, and in any way meaningfully studied by the scientific community, it didn't exist. Take me deeper into this because it sounds bizarre to me. Yeah, it's preposterous. The field of emotion, which I work in, which many of our audience probably know, really anchored to fight or flight kind of negative emotions. For 25 years, mainly what we studied was, you know, anger, fear, disgust. And then we started to think about the positive emotions at around 2000, like love and laughter and joy. And no one would touch awe. You know,

we wrote a theoretical paper, Jonathan Hyde and I, in 2003, I think. It wasn't forthcoming. And I think there are a few different reasons. I think most realistically, scientists felt like you couldn't measure it or find it in the lab, you know, but in point of fact, you can, you know, and we can talk about that. I think there was this sense that it is inherently a spiritual emotion, you know, as suggested by your introduction. But in fact, it's associated with a lot of human activity. And then, frankly, I think it was just like the last thing you wanted to be as a young scientist who's like, I'm studying awe. And people were embarrassed about it. And, you know,

thankfully, I'm in Berkeley and had the tools of science to dig into it. But yeah, it's stunning, in particular, when you think about like Rene Descartes, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, so many people saying that awe is just this fundamental emotion, a fundamental state of mind. And we just didn't know much about it until 10 years ago. Sometimes like in capital A always, sometimes in like lowercase a always. Yeah. It's a part of all of our lives. It affects us meaningfully. But your point about, this is part of my fascination, the notion that within the world of academia, often what you do or don't study isn't just based on your interests. It's based on how you're going to be perceived within the community of academia. And that often can so limit somebody's willingness to actually immerse themselves in something they're truly interested in.

Yeah, you know, the reputation consciousness of academics is legendary. I think somehow, and it was funny, like when I used to tell people on an airplane, like, oh, you know, what do you do? I study emotion. They're like, oh, cool. What do you study? And I could say, you know, fear or shame or depression. They'd be like, oh, that's serious. And then, you know, if I said awe or laughter, they'd be like, what?

You get paid to do that? But in point of fact, I think one of the lessons we learn is awe. Einstein said it too. It's like the cradle of art, science, and human creativity. It's fundamental. You know, we needed that. And now, thankfully, there's a whole network of all scholars out there who are trying to figure out this emotion. But it took a while.

Yeah. I mean, I wonder if also part of it, legendary meeting when Marty Seligman stands in front of the APA and says, like, we have a cake that's half baked here. And, you know, it's sort of like the world of psychology and psychology research shifts from focusing on what's wrong with you and bringing you back to baseline to like baseline to flourishing, which kind of kicks off in no small way, the entire field of positive psych. Do you feel like that was an important stepping stone to people unlocking or being willing to actually then turn around and study off? Yeah, it definitely was. I mean, before positive psychology, not a big fan of the phrase, but that's neither here nor there. And then before scholars like Barb Fredrickson writing about the purpose of positive emotions, very important paper, scholars just felt like, well, if I study emotion, it's got to be fear or disgust.

And Seligman, you know, for all the, you know, you can critique positive psychology, but he said, rightfully so, these are just as serious areas of inquiry, you know, to study awe as fear or horror. There's no logical reason why we shouldn't. And then furthermore, maybe these are really important to how we do well in life. And awe is an important contributor. So that was a liberating moment. You know, whatever you say about positive psychology, how it's evolved for young scientists like myself, 35, 40 years old when positive psychology, how it's evolved. For young scientists like myself, 35, 40 years old when it launched, I was like, wow, here's a leader of the field saying study anything that's anything about human nature, but also the stuff that brings tears to our eyes and makes us feel good. Yeah, I love that. We've used the word awe a number of times now, and it

occurs to me that maybe we actually need to take a beat to define what we're actually talking about here. So when we talk about awe, what are we actually talking about? Yeah, and that took me about 15 years to figure out. Only 15 years. Because it's a tough one. You know, a lot of people feel, you know, when you look at the literature on defining mystical awe, they feel like you can't define it. But I really was influenced both by a lot of journaling about awe, spiritual journaling, environmental journaling, nature writing, and then Edmund Burke, this Irish philosopher in 1757, I think, who said, really awe comes out of the sublime as the result of two things. There's something powerful and obscure. You don't

understand it. And Jonathan Haidt and I translated that to things that are vast, vast skies, vast sets of stars, big people, big ideas, and then mystery, right? Like your mind tries to grasp it and it's like, I can't make sense of that. And so those two qualities produce this emotion we call awe. And then, you know, a lot of science helps us kind of get an embodied understanding of awe that we tear up. We get a lump in our throat sometimes. We get the chills, these goose tingles that go up our back. We might feel warmth in our chest during awe. So there are all these sensations that help anchor the definition. And then we feel small. We feel like we're just

part of something large as the core meaning of awe. It's interesting when you say we feel small. I would imagine some people would hear that and think, well, that's actually not a good thing. I want to feel big. I want to feel I have a sense of agency. I want to feel like there's a presence here, but you're actually using it in a positive frame here. That's not like, it's not about shrinking down or shrinking back. There's a different context when you use that language. Yeah. You know, it's so funny too, that, that really, and that probably was one reason we didn't get to awe because the Western psychological science has been so obsessed with the self. It's this massive area of inquiry in the field. And here's an emotion that makes you feel selfless or ego death in the psychedelic

literature. And yeah, you know, it was really interesting. And we took a lot of care to show and that that sort of small self isn't problematic. You feel connected to larger things. You don't drop in self-esteem. You still have a sense of agency. And we got inspiration to study that. I mean, people writing about awe, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson out in the woods, like, you know, he's standing in these woods and he says, I am nothing. A lot of the spiritual journalings of people like Julian of Norwich just, you know, I am no one.

I am nothing. And it is this liberation of the absence of the self that a lot of contemplative types talk about that. And we documented empirically is it's okay to feel small because what's great about all is it connects you to these large things that really mean a lot in life. As you're describing that, I'm flashing back to the very first time years ago in a younger time in my life as a rock climber. And one of the fantasy places for me was always Yosemite. And I remember after years of reading about it and seeing pictures in have been told. But the experience of actually just looking up and seeing the vastness, like just the sheer gargantuaness for like the fun of making up a word to me, it just immediately creates a frame where you're like, oh, this has been here for a gazillion years. Is any of you here for a gazillion more? I am but a speck in the context of like the time span that we're measuring everything by. And you're right. Like the feeling wasn't like, for me, I'm so little and insignificant. The feeling was, it was freedom,

actually. It was expansiveness, which is a little bit disarming because it wasn't expected. Yeah. You're giving me so many good research ideas to go to the lab with. Thank you, Jonathan. You know, yeah, the central theme of awe across the ways in which we feel that from music to nature to morally inspiring says, isn't it amazing? We're amazed at things outside of the self. And to compliment your wonderful description, which gave me chills, by the way, is we took veterans and really poor high schoolers out rafting on the American River where I used to raft as a young boy in California. And one of the veterans who it helped reduce PTSD 30% wrote, he said, you know, there's something about looking up at the stars splattered in the sky that makes me feel less significant, but the things I'm part of more significant. And I love that quality of awe. It's like, ah, you know, my worry about my bank account or it's not as important as I thought or my status,

but what I'm part of in life is more important. And that's what awe shines a light on. Yeah. I think it's so powerful to have those. And I wonder if these days, you know, part of the pace of life and the rate of acceleration of life and how brittle so many of our calendars and schedules have become, it starts to close off, you know, those moments of serendipity where all can, either the random moments of serendipity where all can just drop into our experience or the space for us to intentionally go and do things that might expose us to this experience. Yeah. I'm emotionally moved by your comment because, you know, anybody whom., no breaks, you know, no awe. And I felt that in my parenting and regret that. And the simple antidote is exactly what you said. And we've actually tested it, which is like, pause, take a breath, drop all your assumptions,

and, you know, go somewhere you don't know, go on a walk and look at it with fresh eyes. And then suddenly people feel awe. So thankfully, in spite of the pressures of today, especially on young people and all of us, there are easy ways to find it. And it begins with what you just described, like put aside stuff, take a breath, don't do anything and look around. You know, and next thing you know, you start to find things that can bring you on. Yeah, I love that. I almost wonder if we can sometimes take the very, because I think a lot of times technology pulls us out of this place of being present enough to really see what's in front of us. But at the same time, you know, I'm not a Luddite, you're not a Luddite.

We're having this conversation through technology that enables so many wonderful things. And I feel like we can get more intentional about subverting the ways that might take us away from the moment to bring us back to it. Yeah. It's interesting. I remember the early days when Instagram first comes out as an app on the phone and like everyone starts to use it. There's things where they would talk to people like to actually capture moments. And for a heartbeat, I thought to myself, this is kind of cool because we now have a tool to remind us to pay attention. But then in relatively short order, it becomes a tool of social currency.

And it's not about us paying attention anymore. It's about us proving to others that we were somewhere. So there's this fascinating dance that I think we all do all day long with it. Yeah. God, what a cool analysis. One of the magical powers of awe, we have to juxtapose this to where we are as a culture, and you really nicely illustrated it, which is there are a lot of data showing we're more self-focused than ever before. We want to let people know where we are, what cool things we're doing, what the great yoga posture is that we've mastered, and all this, what a great meal

we're eating. We're always focusing on the self. And just like you said, you know, with your comments about early Instagram, like awe orients our attention outward, you know, which is so important, you know, just to look at the beauty of an ecosystem or children laughing or, you know, the music that might be happening. And I think one of the challenges of tech, and I had never thought about this till you brought it up, is to like shift out of the self-focused selfie obsession to how do you use these technologies to orient to things in the world in an awe-inspiring way? You know, I have a friend who used to work at Google who's talked to the Google Maps team and imagined if Google Maps could put you on a path of awe to get to the corner store. So there are a lot of opportunities that hopefully someone will take on. That would be super cool if you could actually do it. Literally, you'd like to find ways to build technology or build an option into technology that would increase the likelihood of you experiencing awe.

Even doing things where you didn't think it was possible or it was going to be present in any meaningful way. Exactly. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. So you mentioned that you can see, you can measure empirically, like awe in the body, in the brain. Tell me more about this. How do you do that? Was it show up? Where does it show up? and how do you measure it? Yeah. You know, this was a really fun science to write about. And it, it really starts to, you know, when you study the brain and the other

branches of the human nervous system, you start to map emotions in different patterns in the body. And then you can trace them back evolutionarily, like do other mammals show this kind of process? And so just to walk through a few highlights, in the brain, when you feel awe, pretty reliably, what's called the default mode network, chunks of cortex on the side in front of your brain are deactivated. And that, the default mode network is where the ego is really cranking out computations or making sense of the world. So that makes sense. Like awe in response to nature and music and psychedelics deactivates the self, right? Selflessness, which is cool.

Then a lot of people report tears during awe. They will tear up and it's a certain kind of tear that produced by the lacrimal gland that's actually activated by the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, which is the opposite of fight or flight physiology. It's more calm and connection. Then we drop down and the vagus nerve, which is also parasympathetic, is activated during awe, our lab has found. So too is oxytocin in one or two studies, a chemical that helps you connect with others. And then my favorite is the goosebumps, which is, you know, the little tingly sensations that go up your back to your neck. And those are little muscles around hair follicles that are triggered by parasympathetic autonomic nervous system. The data suggests really are about sort of recognizing that something is really important that you're witnessing,

that this is an important sacred moment, if you will. You can take those goosebumps. Jane Goodall observed them in chimpanzees, you know, that they fluff up their fur when they're kind of leaning into other chimps to sort of perceive something that's really vast. And, you know, she said, isn't it amazing that we, that chimps show these early elements of awe, maybe spirituality of being amazed at things outside the self. And I think the body

response of awe is about opening to the world and connecting and really becoming more collective. How do you know when you're in it? I mean, if you, you know, cause you just talk about like, okay, so we can kind of check these things that are observable, you know, in a lab, we see these things and they're probably repeatable in a lot of circumstances, but like, you know, as a human who's just moving through the world, you know, what's the difference between, wow, that was cool. And wow, that like just feeling that, but not being able to even speak. Yeah. You know, that's such a deep question. I mean, if you're a real skeptic, you might say,

we probably will never know for certain whether we're feeling an emotion because they're so complicated. But, you know, the realist says, if I present somebody with, you know, I have them look at El Capitan for the first time, or they stand next to Shaquille O'Neal and how big he is. They're like, wow, you know, or they meet a movie star and their minds are blown. You know, we can feel pretty confident. They feel awe by, do they report feeling awe? Do they vocalize? Whoa. Do they open their eyes and lift up their eyebrows, the facial expression? Do they have vagus nerve activation? Do they show chills?

You can measure the chills with these little cameras that pick up the goosebumps on your arm. Do you, I know, the goose cam, they call it. And then psychologically, like if you ask them, do you feel insignificant? They'd be like, yeah, I don't feel that. You know, I feel like a speck in a universe, as you said. Do you feel humble? Are you aware of what's around you? Once you put all of that stuff together and you can gather that within a minute or two, I feel pretty good. Like 80% of the time you'd be able to say, yeah,

that person felt some awe. Do you have a sense that they would be able to actually report that back to you also? I mean, like the difference between observing it from the outside in versus the inside out. Yeah, they do. I mean, mean, there are different studies of, you know, just tracking self-reports of my experience and how it tracks vocalizations and facial expressions of awe. Those track pretty well. They work together, co-vary together. There are really neat studies where people draw emotions in their body. And there's a lot of consensus in like,

yeah, awe is in the arms and the goosebumps and the back of the neck. So that seems to be pretty reliable. Probably harder for people to accurately perceive activation of the vagus nerve. You know, that's harder to access in some ways. But people are tracking it, you know, modestly. So, and then when you put the whole profile of all together, it probably tells you whether it's a whoa or a wow. So as you said, yeah, here's kind of why I'm asking also, as I was thinking down, you know, I'm thinking, okay, I'm checking the boxes of the different things that you felt in different circumstances. I've been very fortunate to do some traveling different parts of my life. And, and as you're describing it, it took me, it took me years back actually to the late 80s where I found myself

lying on top of a double-hulled boat in the middle of the blackness, in the middle of the night on the barrier reef in Australia with no land in sight, no light, no ambient light whatsoever. And there was, I guess, what is it? A new moon when there's no moon in the sky, right? Oh my God. It's a complete blackness. And all you saw, like you just, you feel the rocking of the water. You'd hear it like lapping against the, you know, the hulls of the boat.

And all you saw was just what appeared to be an unfathomable, like explosion of stars dropping into the blackness on every side. And I remember to this day, the feeling that I had, it wasn't the goosebumps. It wasn't, wow, my body's alive. It wasn't the tingling. It was almost like I wasn't physically in my body anymore. It was almost like post-sensory in a weird way. I mean, what an extraordinary description. And I think, you know, when you think about the small self, the default mode network deactivating, that frees up our representation of the world to be free of the self. And I think there are these really elevated states, the big wow that you talked about. In some literatures, they call it bliss, where you're just like, you dissolve into the

universe, you know, and I've felt that once or twice. And I think that's probably where you were, you know, is just all the reminders of the body that are keeping you anchored to the self a little in awe. In some really elevated states, they disappear. And you can feel like you're part of space or part of a guitar riff or anything. And those have not been studied. And I think they are fascinating when the mind really shifts to that degree of selflessness. Yeah. I just remember being so powerful and I've had a few moments like that in my life. And on the one hand, you're like, that was incredible. On the other hand, I feel like there's almost this tendency to spend all of the moments

that aren't like that chasing the feeling again. Yeah. And there's a worry, you know, we always have to be, you know, especially bliss, that kind of experience. I think awe doesn't quite have that addictive quality, although that's, we don't know. Yeah, I think there's reason to worry. You know, you think about the rise in psychedelic use, people seeking that, and sometimes the wrong person at the wrong time, chasing really the true loss of self. You think about, you know, religious cults, et cetera. I think it's a very real thing and worth keeping

an eye on as we understand this emotion more. I think it's a very real thing and worth keeping an eye on as we understand this emotion more. I do have concerns. I mean, especially if you're moving through a tough season of your life. And for some people, a lot of their life is a really tough season. If you have the ability to experience something where you feel like even for a heartbeat, you're transcending that, there can be this tendency to say, well, is there any way that I can live there for a long amount of time? And I think that's where you, sometimes we start to look to other ways, you know, substance induced or just, you know, dysfunctional behavior activities to try and find ourselves there. And yeah, it is a really interesting dance, I think, that you're

doing with that. Well, when you study the rock climbers that, you know, you know this, right? Like, man, you get into those, those guys, like a lot of them die, you know, and those serious free solo types and they're chasing it. And it's a, not a metaphor, but it's a reminder of what can happen in other realms of life. And one of the things we always keep an eye on in the emotion literature are the extremes when it becomes pathological. For a long time in my career, I studied compassion, and there's pathological compassion where you just give away everything. You don't stay rooted in your own identity. And I think you're pointing to this pathological extremes of awe, political fanaticism, the love of conspiracy theories, joining extremist groups, et cetera. And we have to look at those and think about what they tell us about the emotion.

Let's talk more about the functional expressions of awe though. You write about a couple of different sort of like general categories where this tends to show up. One of them is awe, the relationship to wellbeing. We kind of dipped into that a little bit. But tell me more about sort of like some of the specific things when you're talking, first, when we're talking about wellbeing, what are we actually talking about there? Oh my God. Well, there are 99 measures of wellbeing. I'm part of a group that's looking at that. And by wellbeing, we mean, you know, I'm balanced. Do you feel connected to people? Do you feel positive emotions? Do you feel like you've got some meaning in life? Do you feel less stressed than Do you feel like you've got some meaning in life? Do you feel

less stressed than you might ordinarily? Are you doing well creatively in the world? And one of the reasons I wrote this book, Jonathan, is that I wrote it in a hard time in my life during grief and really was struggling. And I went in search of awe. And the science shows that brief doses of awe, getting outdoors, dancing, listening to music, having a great conversation like this, you know, other ways, it boosts all of those well-being. We know it increases your feeling good about life. Brief moments of awe help you handle daily stresses better, right? Brief moments of awe, even when you're by yourself in nature or music, make you feel connected and decrease loneliness, which is really troubling these days.

Brief moments of awe make you more creative and they make you feel like the people around you, even ideological adversaries, you kind of share stuff, right? You're part of a community. So when you put that together, it just tells us like, if we're really thinking about the utility of all, it's good news for human beings, right? And I haven't talked about helps with inflammation in the body and inflation in the country. And it's also probably good for your heart. So a lot of good reasons to go after all. And when you think about this, it's almost like, is there some way to literally prescribe awe, right? Because what you're describing are the mental health and the physical health things that so many of us struggle with on a day-to-day basis.

These are not the outlier experiences where you're just struggling, especially over the last three years, I think for so many, like this has been probably like stress, overwhelm, burnout, loneliness, a feeling of lack of agency or control, inflammation that floods the body for all sorts of different reasons. This is a very common set of experiences, phenomena in our minds and in our bodies. And to the extent that we have control over the circumstances of our lives that can maybe ameliorate some of them, then we try and do it. We have medical interventions, we try and do it. But what you're offering is interesting in that context, because if what I'm hearing you say correctly is also, there may be this other category of quote interventions that is freely available to anyone.

And even in your toughest moments, it's still there and it can move the needle. Yeah. You know, for the list, I write about this in the book and, you know, I wrote this book during a time where my wellbeing, inflammation, stress profile looked like probably 30% of Americans during the pandemic, you know, just like anxious and struggling and confused and because my brother had passed away and altered those. And, you know, it's striking to me and you have framed it exactly how the promise of this laboratory science is let's start thinking about this full array of non-traditional interventions.

Like we know getting outdoors is good for you. Doctors are prescribing that, right? How about listening to awe-inspiring music five minutes a day? We know that's good for you. How about moving in unison or awe-based meditations, which are arriving? So even museums, there are data showing that, you know, when kids, we just published one, you know, study, get to be in an art museum and feel the awe of the art museum, their bodies look healthier. And I will add like hovering near awe in a lot of the conversations I have is psychedelics and people like, oh, psychedelic solves everything. It doesn't. But by the way, we have all these ways to feel awe without altering brain chemistry that are enriching and that have these same benefits.

So, you know, it's interesting, Jonathan, you really, I think, have anticipated where we'll be in eight or 10 years, because I'm just getting requests from medical communities to like, you study awe, give a presentation on non-traditional interventions. And I think awe is part of that promise. I mean, that's fascinating, right? Because as you've mentioned a couple of times now, the world of psychedelics certainly has exploded in terms of popular interest and also academic research. There's some incredible things happening in the field that 10 years ago, nobody would

have actually thought would be permitted or wouldn't have been as normalized or mainstreamed. And yet you raise a really interesting question also, which is, is part of the experience of going on that journey, that ego dissolution, like there's an interesting Venn diagram here, right? Where part of that overlaps with what you're describing as a state of awe, which does not in any meaningful way need, you know, require the inclusion of some sort of external substance to experience it. So like, how much of that can we actually get without having to step into that world? I think that's going to be one of the big questions of psychedelics. You know, David Yadin and Peter Hendricks in our lab have said like like awe, the bliss you felt on that boat,

not in the black, dark sea or the dark sky in the sea. Those emotions are what account for the benefits of psychedelics. It's not random that a lot of what you do on psychedelics or spirit medicines, as indigenous peoples call them, and I prefer, you go to sources of awe, you listen to music and you dance and you get in nature. And I think it's a really important question for our culture. Like, do you need these pharmaceutical interventions? And then secondarily, how can those interventions be pathways to the richer life of awe that

we've been talking about? And I hope we don't lose sight of that. And I worry about that a lot. So I think it's a good question. Yeah. I almost feel like I've done some breathing work and there are different styles, different approaches to breathing, where one of them being what's often described as holotropic breathing, where it almost feels

like you're in that place that so many people that I know have described on a substance-induced journey. But yeah, I feel like we're at the beginning of the exploration of like, okay, so what are the different ways to get there? And does it give an equivalent experience? And then does it give an equivalent afterburn effect in terms of how it changes us? I guess that's one of the big questions too, right? Oh, my God. You're making me humble to think about the little that we've learned because the question of dose and then also duration of these transcendent experiences of awe you know

there's a paper out recently showing that going to festivals with you know spirit medicines psychedelics you're more altruistic for a year and people really will say like so you know that psilocybin experience changed my life forever and and we don't know you know and we'll see i mean it's uh what a great question man calling my collaborators in the lab. Here's another question. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. One of the things that you explore in this, or like the larger category of well-being also, is this notion of being able to see things more holistically like i would describe as a capacity to be in a place of possibility to see possibility more readily maybe even when you're really struggling with grief or suffering or whatever it may be i was really interested by that being a potential experience that derives from all. What a terrific observation. Yeah, you know, when Einstein says like this emotion is the cradle or origin of science and art or all activities of the human imagination, what a psychologist would translate that as, or once

you get more specific is what you just said very nicely, Jonathan, is that awe transports you to the realm of possibility, right? Because what you're seeing doesn't fit your assumptions about reality and what that means. And this is really understudied, but profoundly important, you know, with respect to the realm of possibility is like one of the things we know when people are moved by somebody's generosity and they tear up, they're like, man, that was so generous. I feel awe. They feel themselves more capable of being kind. So you enter into this realm of the possible self and think, I could be a kinder human being. You know, when Darwin saw kind of all of these patterns in nature that were part of his five and a half years of voyaging on the Beagle, blown away, awe everywhere, and Amazonian rainforests and rivers and so forth. He's like, what is the possible universe and the natural processes that would produce this?

And he got to his theory of evolution. A whole theory of art, when we feel awe in response to visual art, my colleague F.D. Hiastamku is arguing, is that it unleashes our sense of what's possible. Like, oh my God, I can have a different gender. You know, look, we're more free than I thought, or this is what the world could be. So no one's mentioned that. And I think that's, in some sense, one of the most vital cognitive functions of awe is it frees up you to think about what's possible yeah and we need that you know it's interesting because what you're describing also again it feels like it's a lot of like the big capital a all experiences to me but but what i'm also curious about is

one of the things that so many people struggle with just day to day is is getting out of there like the chatter like you're in you know like persistent spin mode you're in anxiety mode maybe it doesn't really rise to the level of clinical anxiety or anxiety that actually stops you from living. But so many of us start to feel like we're almost trapped in our heads, you know, and there's a spin cycle. And I guess my curiosity is when we talk about the reframe around, you know, like possible adjacent experiences, if you're somebody who moves through life with a lot of spin in your head on a persistent basis, if you have an experience that even for a short moment allows you to step out of that, to opt out of that loop, like through the experience of, oh,

maybe it's just like literally just see something beautiful or you witness a beautiful act of kindness. And then you notice shortly after that, but for a brief moment, you weren't in your head, the spin stopped, the anxiety wasn't there. I wonder if that then has the ability to sort of plant that seed of possibility. Well, maybe it's actually possible to not always have to be there. And what would it take to be able to step out of that? Yeah. And you used the word freedom earlier, Jonathan. And I love that word.

And I'm embarrassed we didn't study that yet. But frees you, as Aldous Huxley said, about psychedelics of that nagging neurotic voice of the self that's always interfering with a more wonder-filled sense of reality. Our key test of that, I think, we have a lot of data on this idea that awe quiets the chatter of the self. You're not as self-critical. You're not as anxious. You're not as pressured by time. And I'll return to getting veterans out on the river rafting for half a day and they felt awe. And the awe that they felt reduced PTSDtsd and ptsd is an extreme version of chatter it's like i'm in danger i can't stop these thinking it's intruding on my mind at all times it wakes me up and i'll quieted that down for a week you know so so yeah i i really feel in other places i've been you know thinking about and writing about like the crisis of individualism, that too much self-focus, too much loneliness, too much self-criticism, too much shame,

individualism, and awe frees you of that. It might just be five minutes, it might just be 10 minutes, but then you have a better interaction with your roommate or you look differently upon your work in that state. So it's not bad. Yeah. And if even you have the meta-awareness to notice that actually you've been freed from it for five or 10 minutes, if that then lets you say, oh, it actually is possible to be free from it, that realization alone has got to be just greatly hopeful for a lot of people who thought this is just the way it's going to be. Yeah. That's so interesting. We haven't studied that either, but I love the idea. And it's interesting, we're starting to look at the, I'm starting to think about moral beauty. And one of the things that moral beauty, like, wow, that young girl is

courageous and you're awestruck. And then your mind starts to sort of reconfigure its beliefs about humans. Like, wow, we're not necessarily dog-eat-dog selfish. We're capable of a lot of kindness. So I do think there is this meta, and then the meta-awareness around that. Like, wow, humans can be capable, I can be capable of a lot of things. So really terrific, hopeful possibility about all.

Yeah, so what you just brought up also is another fascination, which is this notion of all was once described to me as an experience Possibility about all. looks like, which on the one hand, it sounds utterly terrifying, but on the other hand, it's incredibly opportune, especially if the model of the world that you had been living in wasn't one that made you feel good about living in it. And we, in some of our work on, I'll call it a destabilizing emotion for the very reason that you're talking about, Jonathan, like, man, you see extraordinary kindness or you see, you know, incredible storms or, you know, large waves and you feel awe or you encounter an incredible idea and it really destabilizes your understanding of the world for a while. It can be

kind of anxiety producing, but good, right? And I think the psychedelic literature is really interesting because what is being found in that literature probably produced by awe, it destabilizes or challenges your sense that you're an addict and you can kick addiction. Challenges your sense that you have to live forever when you have a terminal disease and reduces anxiety about it. And I think awe does very good work destabilizing beliefs that may be serving you poorly. it up with a whole set of biases that we're both aware of and also that we're unaware of. And built around those biases is a worldview. This is how this domain of life is. And when we have no idea that there are all these hidden scripts that are actually informing that worldview, it can be really dysfunctional, not just for us, but for our relationships, for our community,

for the world, when you scale that experience, what you're describing really is, you know, if it's destabilizing to biases that make our world smaller and potentially cause pain, it might not be a fun thing, but net-net, it's probably a good thing. Yeah. And boy, should we keep that in mind when we think about these complicated experiences of awe. And I have two examples for you. One, we did a really nice set of studies showing brief experiences of awe outdoors and hearing of stories of awe, et cetera. It shifts the bias to have an inflated view of the self, and it makes you more accurate about yourself or authentic and more open to other people's strengths, right? So you shift this narcissistic

bias that is so present and it makes you like, hey, people are amazing, you know, and it doesn't mean I'm not amazing. It's just the world has striking people. So I think that's good news. And the other one that really surprised me is a political polarization, which has risen dramatically the last 20 years, is caused by biases. And I actually studied these in my dissertation, you know, that, oh, those Republicans all over there are all fanatics and nuts and, you know, conspiracy theorists. That's a bias. And it's wrong. And awe makes political adversaries polarize each other less, right? They're like, well, we all believe in some degree of freedom and we all believe in some degree of taking care of everybody. Right. And so now let's sort out our differences. So I think there are a lot of biases that awe works against. And it's worth that kind of anxiety of giving up those cherished biases to land in a more accurate view of the world, I think. Yeah. I almost wonder if on the destabilizing effect, and maybe this is completely off base, but I almost wonder if somebody who has a very

deeply entrenched world of the view that they do not want to change because they feel safe as wrong as actually as much harm as it might be causing them, they feel safe and they feel like any other experience actually is going to be not okay for them. That even if they experience like this, a little micro dose of awe and they get a hint of the fact that, oh, there's this possibility here, but also there's this possibility of me having to endure a re-examination of the way things are, that they pull away from it just because the potential to have to deal with a slight destabilizing outvotes the possibility that lies on the other side of it. Man, you just outlined this fascinating,

it's almost literary theory of personal change, right? We're always moving in between like, wow, the awe of the mysterious and the new versus the feelings of certainty and safety of holding onto our biases. And those are trade-offs, you know, and you can think about people of religious faith, like thinking about facts that run counter to their religion and the mystery and awesomeness of those facts, but they don't want to give up their safe views to, or their solid views to change. You could think about this as it applies to your belief in a political candidate that, oh my goodness, there are certain things they've done that are mysterious and striking that we ignore. So I think you're onto something really deep about, you know, how we transform and sometimes awe fuels it. And sometimes the resistance to awe

can lead to greater ossification or, you know, entrenchment. So good luck studying that. That's a tough one to study, Jonathan, but I think you're right. I think it feels deeply true. And I think it speaks to so much of literature around how we handle uncertainty too, which I often see as tolerance for ambiguity in literature, which is not hardwired, right? Because I don't want to say it's not changeable, but we certainly arrive into adulthood with really strong orientations towards uncertainty, especially as the perceived stakes rise. I think when the stakes are low, nobody really cares. If I'm reading a book and the protagonist is in a precarious situation, whatever, the stakes are nominal. It's fun.

But as soon as the stakes are ours and they rise, we're like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not for me. And yet I can't think of a wonderful thing in my life that hasn't come on the other side of me saying yes to uncertainty lot of people. And for me, what spurred writing the book was the loss of my brother and his passing away. And what does it all mean? And I had no certain explanation of it, right? And so it became kind of this mystery and awe-inspiring in many ways. The grief and the meaning of life, et cetera. I think awe helped me. Finding awe during that period helped me embrace uncertainty, that science has no explanation of life after death or what life is really. And it was liberating to head into this very hard time with a move toward mystery and uncertainty that we see where awe takes us and wonder and what we learn from it.

So I think one of the key lessons for our culture from awe, the experience, is it's destabilizing, as we've been talking about. And like, hey man, come up with new ideas to make sense of this vast, mysterious experience. And it will lead you to a deeper understanding. Yeah, and maybe adopt practices and skills that allow you to actually be in a place of the unknown without completely melting down. Not just for awe, but I think

clearly that is a skill set for life or a practice for life. And we've kind of indirectly talked about a whole bunch of different ways that we can experience awe. And I think it makes sense for us to focus in on that a little bit because a lot of the question on people's minds as they listen is like, okay, I'm convinced, or at least I'm convinced to start like step into this and explore this. But what's the how of awe? You referenced a couple of things that I think are probably accessible to a lot of people, nature being one of them. And maybe one clarification to start out with is the notion of, does it have to be like the type of nature that leaves your jaw on the floor? Yeah, no, not at all. You know, first, you know, in response to your question, like what we've found in different countries is what we call everyday awe is people can feel awe two to three times a week easy, right?

And that means a little bit of practice. You can get it every day. And then throughout the book, I start to summarize, you know, different easy ways to cultivate everyday awe. I think it really begins with what we've been talking about, like pause, put your technologies away, take a deep breath, open your mind, look around you, look for things you don't know. But then, you know, practically we've tested awe walks that our listeners can Google and find where you just walk regularly, but look for awe. You can share stories of awe with your people at your dinner table. Amazing.

Hey, what's the last experience of awe you had? Let's talk about it. You can listen to music that brings you awe from your childhood or teen years. Very powerful. You know, there are a lot of nature focused contemplative approaches of, you know, I encourage my Berkeley students. It's amazing. Take a break in the day and just look at the sky for a couple of minutes, right? Just watch what's going on. And they send me pictures and kind of, whoa, I didn't realize that this color was happening, you know, focus on trees. So they're nature-based stuff. I think that

the visual realm is this rich possibility of awe that we often forget about that to get to forms of art that we're starting to study. So I've learned a lot on the road talking about awe, like look into people's eyes, you know, just think about the miracle of the hand. So there's a lot you can do to access this surprisingly commonplace emotion that is good for you. You described music, nature, art, visual art, eye gazing. I remember years ago, somebody I knew was having these eye gazing parties and it was stunning that you could literally like, it's almost like speed dating, but you would stand in front of a perfect stranger for four minutes looking into each other's eyes and you start weeping. You have no idea why. But when you talk about music, one of my curiosities

was, have you identified or have you seen the experience of what I could only call something like reminiscent awe? I remember when I got Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I remember being in the basement with headphones on the first time I listened to that and remember the feeling of it. Like I went somewhere. And when I hear that again today, I go back to that place, even though I've listened to that entire album on vinyl and digital times, thousands and thousands of times in intervening time. It's almost like I'm not experiencing awe in the moment. It's letting me time travel to experience the awe I heard when I first felt it. Is that real or am I kind of fabricating that? It's definitely real. And, you know, one of the things in the book, I write about eight wonders that give rise to awe, nature, movement with others, moral beauty, visual art, music, contemplation, life and death, and

big ideas. And they each are different. You have subtle differences in music. One of the most awe-inspiring qualities of music is, and I asked this musical director of the Philadelphia Symphony, what's the secret to musical awe? And he said, time, like you're saying. That music just plays with time in a much different way than paintings do or nature does. It just stretches it out and you transport from childhood to your death to past generations, what have you, almost like a mystical experience or like an indigenous mystical experience that people like Dr. Urias Alidwin write about. We don't understand how, you know, but it is this freeing of the self where, you know, Yumi Kendall, who's a cellist who I interviewed in the book

for the Philadelphia Symphony, world-class cellist, for her, music was always transporting her in time to when her grandfather died, to this early experience in childhood, to her family, et cetera. And that is powerful and liberating. And I'm glad you get to experience it. It's a really central quality to musical awe. Yeah. And such an easy one to experience it. It's a really central quality to musical awe. Yeah. And such an easy one to experience also. You've used the phrase moral beauty a couple of times also. Yeah. Take me deeper into this because I thought that was fascinating. six countries from Mexico to Brazil to Korea, South Korea to India. And the number one source of all, you know, I thought it was going to be religion or nature is moral beauty. And it's

other people and usually ordinary people, their sacrifices. Hey, man, I'll give you all my money, you know, courage, like facing disease, their overcoming of obstacles, parents writing about their children born with some kind of physical ailment that they then become dancers, their humility, very sometimes produced on people, just profoundly humble people, and also their extraordinary talent, physical talent, like, you know, great dancers or basketball players. And I call that moral beauty. Like these sources of all these human actions teach us like what we are capable of, you know, the aesthetics, the imagination, what we're capable of. And they're, they're moral. They're about selflessness in some deep sense. And that finding changed my life. You know, it suddenly

opened my eyes to like, man, when I walked through Berkeley, there is a lot of moral beauty going on that I ordinarily don't pay attention to. You know, people giving seats on the train to the elderly woman sharing kids, consoling somebody else, you know, that's crying, who's crying. I think it's an important reminder for our times. Like we have an emotion that evolved to really make us move by other people's potential and goodness. So it was a wonderful discovery. Yeah. I love that. And also really it explained a lot to me about like why I feel a certain way when I witness a

certain thing. And it's almost, I think part of the beauty of it also is sometimes I think we think, well, we have to be the person who's the actor in the scene. And what this showed me was that sometimes just witnessing it is enough to take me there. We don't have to create anything. We just have to open our eyes to it. What a profound lesson, you know, that we can find our morality and our moral compass and meaning by witnessing, by just observing. Yeah. Part of what you're talking about is also being really intentional here. The more present you are, the more you probably just start to realize, oh, this is all around me all day, every day. I guarantee you there are equal numbers of people who drove into Yosemite Valley the first time and didn't see El Capitan.

They were worried about that weird tire or whatever. Yeah. Or these days their head is down, like on like whatever the feed is on their device. And you're just like, look up, you know, like just for a heartbeat, do it. But it brings up one other question for me, which is, and maybe this is a completely fictional use case. Let's say somebody is like, I'm totally hip to this awe thing. And they come in and I'm going to literally this awe thing. And I'm going to literally

go on awe walks. I'm going to go down the eight wonders of awe. And I'm going to just say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And three times a day, they're like, awe bomb, awe bomb, awe bomb. Is there the same way that some of the early research around positive psych, and there was the description of a hedonic treadmill. Is there a risk of habituation to the experience of awe if it becomes such a regular part of our experience? Yeah. That was one of the vital questions that started to appear in our lab, like maybe you can get tired of awe or worn out or habituate to it. And to the best of our knowledge, I mean, obviously you can. Like if

I made you listen to your favorite piece of music a hundred times in a row, you'd be like, come on, man. But realistically, the answer is actually the opposite, which is it grows in depth and richness. We have various studies that speak to that, but our best is the AWOC study where we had people who are 75 years old or older do an AWWOC once a week for eight weeks. They knew they were doing it. They practiced it. They had instructions. They were fully aware.

But their awe rose over the course of the study, right? They didn't get tired of it. They actually got deeper. And it's interesting when you find awe in a real serious realm or realm for you, does it get deeper with practice? And most of the time they say yes. I was teaching high schoolers the other day and they were like, yeah, I'm learning to play the guitar. It just gets better. Or I'm learning how to taste beers and they become better with experience. And I think that's true. I think awe operates differently than the other pleasures. It's an aesthetic emotion, so it has more freedom to move around

and gain meaning. And I think it's encouraging that that's the case. I hope that's the case. And it sounds like the science is pointing in that direction. Yeah. I remember a longtime blues guitar fan and lover of Stevie Ray Vaughan. And I remember seeing him towards the end of his life, which sadly was a very young life. But on stage shortly before that, and you can see video of this now, and he'd been doing this literally 24 seven for

the time I was a kid. And he was gone. His body was on that stage, but he was somewhere else. He was in that place that was just completely mystical. And I had the great fortune of talking to his brother a couple of years back about like being on that stage right around that time with them. And he was like, they were on stage with, you know, like Jimmy, uh, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Clapton. Can't remember who the other person was. And they were just like looking at Stevie and they were like, yeah, he's somewhere else. And this is somebody where it didn't like you're describing. And they were just like looking at Stevie and they were like, yeah, he's somewhere else.

And this is somebody where, like you're describing, it's not only did it never get old, but it just continued to take him to a deeper and deeper and more expansive place the more he visited that universe. Well, perfect example. And I hope that's true of many of these experiences we've been talking about. Yeah. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this Container of Good Life project, if I offer up Yeah, feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container, a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? Go find awe. And I also, the other word that really kept coming to me is embrace mystery. Go in search of mystery. It will take you to good places. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan.

What an amazing conversation. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Jeffrey Davis about wonder. You'll find a link to Jeffrey's episode in the show notes. And of course,

if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them

to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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