This Feeling Rewires Your Brain—and Your Immune System

Did you know there's an emotion that is better for your health than love or joy? This single emotion can reduce inflammation more than three times as much as joy. And if I made a facial expression that goes with it right now, anyone on earth would know exactly what I was feeling. Can you guess the emotion? I can guarantee you felt it probably this week, maybe this morning, and you might not have thought much about it. The name for this emotion is awe. If you've been around this channel, you already know it's an emotion I keep coming back to and with very good reason. Today, I'll explore where it comes from, how it manifests on your face and even in a single molecule in your blood, and by the end, you'll know how to find it without even leaving your home. The researcher who has spent more of his life on this than almost anyone is Dacher Keltner at Berkeley. He, along with Jonathan Haidt, came up with a definition of awe worth memorizing. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Vast and beyond what you currently understand. Let's hold on to both halves of that. The vastness can be physical, like a mountain, but it can also be artistic, like a piece of music or a painting, or even intellectual or spiritual. Something so big, it briefly breaks your model of the world and forces you to rethink it. And awe isn't an ambiguous mood. It has a unique signature that your body performs automatically. A study published in Nature mapped emotional expressions across a dozen regions of the world and found that awe produces its own distinct facial expression, much like amusement or pain. You've definitely seen it. The eyebrows go up, the eyes widen like they're trying to take in more than they can hold, the jaw loosens, the mouth falls slightly open, and the head tilts back, as if pulled by a thread, and a little smile creeps in at the corners. And it even has that universal sound. Researchers tested vocal sounds for 16 emotions across 10 cultures, including a remote village in Bhutan. What happens when we see a firework, an impressive feat, or a shooting star? Wow! The sound of awe is correctly recognized around the world about 90% of the time. That makes awe one of the most universally understood emotions we have. So this is a real innate cross-cultural thing, which leaves us asking, what exactly triggers awe? If you ask people to think about awe, they'll give you nature most of the time. Mountains, trees, and the ocean on the horizon. and nature is absolutely a source of awe but Keltner wanted the real answer not the assumed one so he and his colleagues collected more than 2600 stories of awe from people around the world in dozens of languages and then they sorted them by what cost the feeling nature didn't win neither did art nor music nor religion the single most reliable and common source of awe worldwide was other people being good. This is so-called moral beauty. Witnessing someone's courage, kindness, and strength. Ordinary people doing extraordinarily decent things. Someone who steps up for what's right. Someone who helps out when they don't have to. Keltner found that this kind of purity of intention moves us more reliably than any sunset. And it doesn't matter where you're from. Someone in California and someone in China are moved by the very same thing. And interestingly, a lot of that moral beauty clusters around the very beginning and the very end of life. There's the case of a woman in Japan who shared that she was deeply moved by the realization and responsibility of becoming a parent, as well as the preciousness of life. From now on, I felt that I would desperately live just to protect this life. And then there's a mother from Russia that she said she just wanted to hug the entire world. Fathers also feel awe. A man from Indonesia wrote that I just couldn't believe what a beautiful and wonderful gift God has bestowed on my wife and I just couldn't stop smiling and feeling awe and grateful to God for giving us a son. And then there's what nobody mentioned, what did not stimulate any awe. In all 2600 stories, not one person found awe in a possession or a purchase. So no phones or laptops, no cars, no new shoes, no Facebook, no new Nikes, Tesla, or Gucci bag. Keltner writes that awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling. A realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred. One quick note before we keep going, these findings come from Keltner's book and the paper I mentioned about the 2600 stories is still under peer review. So there's that, but the health studies we're about to get into are published and replicated. And that's where all of this turns undeniably physical. To understand how a feeling reaches your immune system, you need to meet the messengers. Your immune cells talk to each other using small signaling proteins called cytokines. They're kind of like a text message. One group, the pro-inflammatory cytokines, all carry the same basic message. Basically, they say, hey, something's wrong. Get ready. Let's bring inflammation here. Now, in the short term, that message is exactly what you want. Let's say you caught your hand with something dirty that contains bacteria and viruses. Those cytokines coordinate the swelling, the heat, and the immune response that kills a pathogen and eventually heals the injury. So acute inflammation is one of the smartest things your body does. The problem is when the message never stops. When pro-inflammatory cytokines stay high for months or years with no infection to fight, that low-grade inflammation starts doing real damage. Chronically high levels have been tied to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer's, and clinical depression. The marker scientists watch most closely is a cytokine called interleukin-6 or IL-6 for short. Interleukin-6 works like a dial for inflammation. It tells your liver to pump out C-reactive protein. This is a protein that your doctor measures to gauge how inflamed you are. We take interleukin-6 so seriously that there are now drugs built specifically to block it and they're used in severe cases of arthritis and in the worst COVID cases. Now that word COVID is where most people learn about the idea of cytokines without even knowing the term. You might have heard of cytokine storm. That's when we call it when the signaling system loses control and overloads the body. In severe COVID cases, the term cytokine storm became synonymous with patients who did not do so well. So that dial really matters. Now let's bring awe into it. In 2015, in the journal Emotion, Stellar and colleagues, including Keltner, measured interleukin-6 in healthy young adults. Then they asked them how much they tended to feel a range of positive emotions. These included joy, love, contentment, pride, and yes, pride can be positive, and of course, awe. They found that several positive emotions correlated with lower interleukin-6. But when the researchers put all of them head-to-head, one outperformed without a doubt, awe. The strongest predictor of lower inflammation of any positive emotion they tested was awe, about three times as strong as joy in their model. Okay, but there are some caveats. This was a relatively small study in healthy college students, and they measured interleukin-6 in oral fluid, not in the blood. And it's correlational, which means it can't prove that awe lowers inflammation. Rather, perhaps you already have low inflammation, which makes awe easier to feel. The researchers themselves say that it is possible and probably likely that there's a bi-directional relationship between positive affect and cytokine production. But this study does give us a real connection between an emotion and an immune marker. And that connection just keeps showing up. During the pandemic, a 22-day study in scientific reports tracked adults and healthcare workers daily. The more awe a person felt on a given day, the less stress they reported and the fewer somatic, that is physical, symptoms they had. Things like fewer headaches, less pain, and less trouble sleeping, which points to something practical. Awe might be the most useful exactly when life is hardest. A team led by Yang Bai at Berkeley ran a beautifully simple experiment in Yosemite. Over a few days, they stopped more than a thousand travelers from over 40 countries as they stood in front of the enormous valley view. Participants were asked to draw themselves on paper and write me next to their drawing. The control group did the same thing at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It's busy, fun, touristy, but not exactly awe-inspiring. The people at Yosemite drew themselves 33% smaller, and the me they wrote shrank as well. And that size of the self-drawing turns out to be a pretty decent gauge of how self-focused a person is. And why does this matter? Well, when the self gets smaller, your perception and behavior dramatically change. The first thing is perception. A study asked participants to complete the phrase, I am blank. After viewing either a giant T-Rex skeleton at a museum or a fluorescent-lit hallway. Those that were near the dinosaur were more likely to describe themselves in universal terms, such as, I am a human being, or I am part of the universe, rather than saying things such as, I am a sports fan, or I am a student. And there's another experiment I love to talk about where people spent one minute looking up at huge, towering eucalyptus trees. The control group spent that minute staring at a plain, tall, modern building. After the minute, on cue, a researcher accidentally walked by and dropped a bunch of books and pens. The people who had been looking at the trees, the awe-inspired group, ended up helping pick up more pens. They also reported feeling less entitled and took less money for themselves when paid for the experiment. One participant, when asked the reason, replied, I no longer believe in capitalism, man. One minute of awe nudged them towards kindness and selflessness. You hear the most extreme version of this from astronauts. It's called the overview effect. When they see Earth from outer space, they can't help but feel like they and all their problems become small. Maybe we can't experience that, but we can definitely contemplate it. On February 14th, Valentine's Day of 1990, NASA space probe the Voyager 1 took this photo from 4 billion miles away. You see that little pale blue dot? That's Earth. Now from this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest, writes Carl Sagan on pale blue dot, but for us it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love every mother and father hopeful child inventor and explorer every teacher of morals every corrupt politician every superstar every supreme leader every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam feeling awe like i just did and i hope you did too leads to open questioning about what all of this is and who we are. And that's why it's not surprising that according to research, those who experience more awe tend to be more spiritual. Now, if we step back, we can see the whole map. A 2023 review by Keltner synthesized the research and outlined five ways awe affects your health. It lowers inflammation, it deepens your sense of meaning, it pulls you toward other people, so it makes you more socially connected and it quiets the self and it makes you more generous so there's five doors and they all open the same room lower risk of cardiovascular disease autoimmune disease diabetes depression ptsd anxiety and the everyday aches and pains we treat as just part of being alive Keltner writes that our bodies respond to healthy doses of awe-inspiring nature like we respond to a delicious and nutritious meal, a good sleep, a quenching drink of water, or an uplifting gathering with friends or family. We feel nourished, strengthened, empowered, and alive. He writes, everyday awe is a basic human need. So, where does all of this take us? We tend to wait for awe. We save it for the national park, the once-a-year trip, or the starry skies. But But the data points somewhere closer. The most common source of awe on this planet is other people being brave and kind, which means it's available on your street and likely in your house, but it's of course also outside. Trees are enough to change how a stranger behaves in just 60 seconds, and looking at the Yosemite Valley was enough to shrink a thousand egos. The skill isn't finding somewhere awesome, it's looking on purpose. how much of it is already here. Now before you go, just two quick things. If this was worth your time, please click like. It genuinely helps the channel reach more people who could use it. And while you're at it, please consider subscribing. And leave me a comment with the last thing that gave you real awe. I do read them and I might just be inspired by some of your answers for a future episode. Thank you for watching and go find some awe.