Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco tested whether a short weekly walk, framed to notice something vast rather than something familiar, could shift that pattern in healthy older adults.
Sixty participants took a 15-minute outdoor walk once a week for eight weeks, half assigned to notice awe-inducing sights and half to walk as usual. The awe-walk group reported greater joy during their walks, and selfies they took over time showed themselves taking up less of the frame.
Outside the walks themselves, the awe group reported bigger day-to-day gains in prosocial positive emotion and bigger drops in daily distress than the control group. Overall anxiety, depression and life satisfaction scores did not shift in either group over eight weeks, so the benefit showed up in daily mood rather than in clinical measures.
Read the original study
A walk that shrinks the self, briefly.
Source
- Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Chow, T. E., Morris, N. A., Neuhaus, J., Kramer, J. H., Miller, B. L., Holley, S. R., & Keltner, D. (2022). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044–1058. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000876