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Hi everybody and welcome back to another episode of calm your caveman. On this Christmas week, we're going to talk this episode about a strategy which many of us employ at Christmas. We're going to talk about its benefits, how it affects our brains, how it affects our anxiety. And we're going to talk about the pros of employing this strategy, not just at Christmas time, but throughout the year.
Now the strategy that we're going to talk about, the technique that we're going to talk about is awe. The emotion of awe. And the expert, that we're going to be relying on is professor Dacher keltner who is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. He talks about how we have a real need for awe, a psychological need for awe. And this is manifest by the fact that we have psychological and physical health when we experience awe regularly and that we become unwell when we don't. He talked about how many people nowadays are awe deprived. And how we need to seek out more awe in our daily lives. And he talks about how even engaging in some kind of a practice where you just feel awe at least a couple of minutes a day can already benefit us tremendously because of this basic need that we have wired into our brains and bodies to experience awe.
So what is awe? Dr. Keltner defines it as a feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. We've talked about the threat response and the challenge response, right? So we had the challenge response where you are evaluating that your resources are up to the demands. You approach the stressor. You have the threat response where you evaluate that the demands are too much for your resources, you avoid the stressor. Awe, On the other hand is different than both of these. We're not afraid of what this vast thing is going to do to us, because we have forgotten about ourselves. Awe produces feelings of wonder instead of fear. Maybe partly because it prompts us to approach the unknown and it gives this a sense of, of openness and curiosity and embracing the mysterious, it feels intrinsically good. Whereas horror and anxiety do not feel intrinsically good because they have this threat component which is fear, fear about myself. In awe, I have forgotten about myself. My ego boundaries are, are down and I am in a sense United with something greater than myself.
So, what are the consequences of feeling awe, what does it do to our bodies? To our minds? Dacher Keltner talks about how people who feel at least five minutes of awe per day, that this has an effect on their attitude. They are more curious and they are more comfortable with mysteries that can't be explained. Another interesting effect of awe is that it has an effect on our thought processes and it helps us to think more rationally. Awe also expands what researchers call our circle of care. Or in other words, the network of people that we feel kindness toward, the people that we're willing to sacrifice for and share with and put aside our self-interest in favor of. This is something that we see often at Christmas that we celebrate at Christmas. We tell stories of people doing this. We act it out ourselves. And this is one of the effects that awe has. It makes us more kind. Another effect of awe which is very important for us here on our podcast is that it leads to less anxiety and depression. In addition to giving us better mental health in the areas of anxiety and depression, it affects our physical health as well, . Awe helps us to be more conscious of what we don't know , and to be able to consider new ideas and new arguments and evidence. Awe also helps people to not think in such black and white terms and feel so polarized. So all of these wonderful benefits, these are all great things for us to want to access all year long.
So let's talk now about how to seek awe, how is it that we can seek awe in our daily lives and not just at Christmas time. Well, Dr. Keltner has given us a big step forward in trying to figure out how to do this. And he basically identified eight different categories, eight different pathways that we can go on to meet awe, to have experiences with awe. So the first direction that we can go is finding awe in what Dr. Keltner calls moral beauty. And this is kind of what we were just talking about at Christmas time. This is where we celebrate the strength and courage and kindness of other people, where we feel awe at how other people are able to deal with the challenges before them and how they are able to reach out to other people. Another source where we can find awe is in collective movement, collective physical movement. So this can be walking with other people. This can be dancing with other people. This can be singing with other people. This can be playing sports or even being at sports events where you do a collective wave. Another source of awe is nature. Fourth one that he mentioned is music. So listening to music. Especially listening to music with other people, playing music together with other people. Another category is, as we would expect, mystical or religious experiences or encounters, Another avenue is experiences with death and birth and big ideas or Epiphanes. So these are all different directions that you can go. To seek awe on a regular basis, to make it a bigger part of your life.
Now I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about my daily awe practice or what I call my daily awe hygiene. My daily awe hygiene has two parts, two ingredients. The first ingredient is that I start with gratitude. I have a notebook, and I write every morning in this notebook about things that I'm grateful that I have and things that I'm grateful that I don't have. So it helps me to feel that instead of the things that I don't understand, and in my life that I often tend to react to with threat, instead of feeling that they are against me, it helps me to feel that they are for me. The other part of my all hygiene is that I go out and walk on the beach almost every morning. I'm lucky enough to live close to a beach, a very long beach, where you can walk for four hours before you get to the end of it. So, what I find as I'm walking on that beach is physical contact with this vast nature, this vast universe that I don't completely understand. I have the vast sky and it's cloud systems and the swirling different types of clouds. I have the sunrise. My, my beach has an east facing beach. And so I often like to see the sunrise because it helps me to contemplate how amazing it is that I'm on this earth, which is turning. And there's a sun out there in space, which is burning and providing light and life to this world that I'm on. I'm in contact with this vast ocean, which is different every day, is a different color every day. The sounds of the waves are different every day. The size of the waves. I often have contact with ocean creatures that I have never met before, and that I certainly don't understand. Once for example, I came across a live beached whale. She was breathing still. She was blowing out of her blow hole. She was about six times bigger than me and there I was right next to her. So it's a chance for me to hear so many different sounds, feel the wind, feel the sand, feel awe before forces, the grandeur of forces that I touch and that are touching me and that are so much vaster than me. And in the middle of all this vastness, I feel awe at the fact that I am alive, and that I exist, that I am part of this. That this universe somehow gave rise to me, that this improbable thing happened that I exist. That I get to be a part of this universe, and it makes me feel curiosity and awe before what it is that the universe is going to create next. So it gives me a relationship to these vast forces around me. Helps me to realize that I'm small, that I don't have all the answers but it helps me at the same time to feel a wonder and a trust of these forces that I don't understand.
So that's my daily routine.
So one really interesting thing to note about awe is that it is different, it works differently in the brain than pleasure. We talked about what happens when you stimulate your pleasure circuits too much, when you overstimulate them, and how this leads to diminishing returns. The more you stimulate that pleasure circuit, the less pleasure you feel, the more pleasure you have to engage in in order to feel anything. Awe, on the other hand, does not work like this. In fact, what happens is the more you practice awe, the richer it gets, the more rewarding it gets.
So what a fantastic tool to have in our toolbox. It gives us so many benefits and they just keep giving. Life repeatedly demands that we come up against things that we do not understand. We can either decide to run away and be afraid of them, or we can decide to approach them with humility. And this is awe.
So I wish you a very special Christmas week. I hope that you can have an experience with awe this week. Maybe first of all, contemplating the miracle that you are alive today. I hope that you can also experience awe In contemplating courage and kindness that people show at this time of year in reaching out to others; in contemplating mysteries, but that it can also motivate you, when you notice how this benefits your emotional health, that this can also motivate you to seek awe on a more regular basis. To try and find it in one of these eight avenues that we've talked about. And to be the beneficiary of engaging in a practice where you become more conscious both of your smallness, but also of the vast mysterious forces around us that uphold us, that gave rise to us and that we are a part of. Have a wonderful Christmas week. Take care.