A brand new study in Scientific Reports finds that experiencing awe can reduce depressive symptoms and increase a sense of well-being.
The study particularly focused on individuals experiencing depression and stress from long COVID, but its authors suggest that it may be helpful for the psychological health of others dealing with chronic illness.
Okay, so first, how did the authors define awe?
They called it “an emotion elicited by stimuli that are vast, or beyond one’s current conceptual frame of reference” — you know awe if you’re human. When I stepped inside the Strasbourg Cathedral for the first time and felt the transcendence of the Almighty and everything else, yeah.
It’s powerful, isn’t it?
Now… It’s not hard to see why experiencing awe would lessen depressive symptoms, but what’s difficult is this — you and I aren’t in a world where it’s easy to experience awe every day.
Our day-to-day life is often pedestrian, at best (which precludes the idea of awe’s presence) or honestly unbearably hard and overwhelming and bleak and depressing, at worst.
So my question was — how did the researchers stage an “awe intervention?”
You can’t really do a study where you take everyone to Paris every evening and see the lights across the Seine, can you?
No.
So here’s what they did – it was a simple intervention you and I can do wherever we are.
Their AWE intervention consisted of this acronym and definition.
A = Attention. Tell folks to pay “full and undivided attention on things you appreciate, value, or find amazing.“
W = Wait. “Slow down, pause.”
E = Exhale and Expand. “Amplify whatever sensations you are experiencing.”
They asked one group (study group) to do this at least 3x/day for as briefly as 30 seconds a session, while the other group (control group) refrained from the practice.
So what did they find?
The group who practiced awe daily had a 17% decrease in symptoms of depression, 16% increase in well being, and12% decrease in symptoms of stress.
The results exceeded the control group in a statistically significant fashion.
In other words, it mattered.
The authors concluded:
Our work contributes to a burgeoning science suggesting that positive emotions, such as awe, can be leveraged in interventions to improve physical and psychological health outcomes in clinical and non-clinical populations
This is a fantastic area of study and even though the idea seems really intuitive, it’s something that’s a relatively new addition to the research field.
I think a lot of therapists get at the idea of “awe,” but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the word and the intervention incorporated into many of the popular writings.
Now, if you’re depressed – it’s awfully hard to find awe in anything. Even the things that once moved you.
I get that, and I’ve been there.
Everything, including the Lord’s salvation – the most awe-inducing reality imaginable – feels like “meh.” I can’t pretend otherwise. That’s the idea behind one of depression’s most well-known manifestations, “anhedonia,” where things that normally move you emotionally fall utterly flat. I’ve written about my own experience here.
There’s a strong underlying message in the church that Christians should never experience flatness over Christ’s salvation, over our future hope, over the fact that we will share in his glories. “Just think about that enough and voila, you’ll be moved!”
If you’re depressed, your brain might be mentally unable to get there, and we tend to beat ourselves up about that, but ask yourself – does anything in life get you there when you’re like that? Usually, no. It’s part of the disease.
That’s easy to understand.
But there are times, strangely, where the awesomeness of Christianity seems flat compared with the transcendent feelings of listening to music, for example, or other such ostensibly non-spiritual things. But as CS Lewis famously points out, all of the glories we see around us are reflections of the source of it, and it’s not a badge of shame that these things move us.
If they do move us, they should move us in the direction of thanking the Lord and realizing how incomprehensibly beautiful he is, particularly if you strip out the human, broken, sinful component.
But in moments of deep depression, yeah, it’s tough for anything to move you.
Nevertheless, I’m going to start trying to use this little acronym AWE in my daily life.
I think we all do, to some extent, but we let’s intentionally set out to do it, whether we feel it or not, and maybe it helps and maybe it doesn’t.
You might find it hard to even find the space in your mind or world to experience awe, and I get that. I struggle with that right now too. I’m confined to bed and the bathroom the vast majority of the time, and I won’t get into all the emotions with that, but awe can be difficult to access. Especially when we feel hopeless.
But let’s try the intervention. It’s so simple. If it doesn’t help, then no harm. If it does, well that’s fantastic.
(In my younger days, I had a restless pursuit of awe and could access stimuli for it more easily, but now it’s much harder, and I suspect it’s the same for many of you. Much of the beauty of youth, I think, lies in your ability to easily access stimuli for awe).
[PHOTO: Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland. Creator OGPhoto. Credit: Getty Images]
Re: the photo: I couldn’t come up with the place that’s produced the most feelings of awe, indeed, the moments, because, really, a place is a common conduit to producing a moment, and you can’t do that reliably with a photo, and moments are such unique constellations of weather systems that I can only borrow the phrase of Bono to describe what I think awe gets at and it’s…….. “that other place.”
“That other place.”
To me, that’s awe.
I remember a U2 interview somewhere where Bono said that when he and The Edge were deciding on a sound for the band early on (punk), they were keen on infusing it with a sense of transcendence that was missing both from punk and rock and roll, in general. At least in my mind – even as a lifelong fan of punk and rock.
But here’s that “other place” line in “Beautiful Day.”
“Touch me, take me, to that other place. You gotta teach me, Lord, I’m not a hopeless case”.
If you struggle with depression, anxiety, or any other such disorders — for readers in the United States…
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For salvation, Christ and Christ alone.
