Wednesday, 25 January 2017
Friday, 13 January 2017
New Android Malware Hijacks Router DNS from Smartphone
Security Researchers have uncovered a new Android malware targeting your devices, but this time instead of attacking the device directly, the malware takes control over the WiFi router to which your device is connected to and then hijacks the web traffic passing through it.
Dubbed "Switcher," the new Android malware, discovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, hacks the wireless routers and changes their DNS settings to redirect traffic to malicious websites.
Over a week ago, Proofpoint researchers discovered similar attack targeting PCs, but instead of infecting the target's machines, the Stegano exploit kit takes control over the local WiFi routers the infected device is connected to.
Switcher Malware carries out Brute-Force attack against Routers
Hackers are currently distributing the Switcher trojan by disguising itself as an Android app for the Chinese search engine Baidu (com.baidu.com), and as a Chinese app for sharing public and private Wi-Fi network details (com.snda.wifilocating).Once victim installs one of these malicious apps, the Switcher malware attempts to log in to the WiFi router the victim's Android device is connected to by carrying out a brute-force attack on the router's admin web interface with a set of a predefined dictionary (list) of usernames and passwords.
"With the help of JavaScript [Switcher] tries to login using different combinations of logins and passwords," mobile security expert Nikita Buchka of Kaspersky Lab says in a blog post published today.
"Judging by the hard coded names of input fields and the structures of the HTML documents that the trojan tries to access, the JavaScript code used will work only on web interfaces of TP-LINK Wi-Fi routers."
Switcher Malware Infects Routers via DNS Hijacking
Researchers said Switcher had used three different IP addresses – 101.200.147.153, 112.33.13.11 and 120.76.249.59 – as the primary DNS record, one is the default one while the other two are set for specific internet service providers.
Due to change in router's DNS settings, all the traffic gets redirected to malicious websites hosted on attackers own servers, instead of the legitimate site the victim is trying to access.
"The Trojan targets the entire network, exposing all its users, whether individuals or businesses, to a wide range of attacks – from phishing to secondary infection," the post reads.
"A successful attack can be hard to detect and even harder to shift: the new settings can survive a router reboot, and even if the rogue DNS is disabled, the secondary DNS server is on hand to carry on."Researchers were able to access the attacker’s command and control servers and found that the Switcher malware Trojan has compromised almost 1,300 routers, mainly in China and hijacked traffic within those networks.
The Bottom Line
Android users are required to download applications only from official Google's Play Store.While downloading apps from third parties do not always end up with malware or viruses, it certainly ups the risk. So, it is the best way to avoid any malware compromising your device and the networks it accesses.
You can also go to Settings → Security and make sure "Unknown sources" option is turned off.
Moreover, Android users should also change their router's default login and passwords so that nasty malware like Switcher or Mirai, can not compromise their routers using a brute-force attack.
Saturday, 24 December 2016
It's Not All About You!
Not only will the experience of awe make us feel alive, it might
also help us conquer our daily self-absorption. All this by simply
paying attention to nature and the world around us.
und us.
By Carlin Flora, published on March 8, 2016 - last reviewed on November 9, 2016
Learning about the universe—and our place in it—is one of the most mind-blowing experiences of childhood (that and realizing parents are just, well, people). Few children go on to explicate nature’s
greatest mysteries, but Michio Kaku, now a theoretical physicist and
science popularizer, did. When awe first struck him, Kaku was 8 years
old, and his teacher had just announced that a great scientist had died.
She held up a classic photo of Albert Einstein at his desk and pointed
out his unfinished manuscript in the picture. Kaku said to himself, “I
want to have a crack at it.” His feeling of awe came not just from the
formation of this grandiose goal but from the idea that the universe is
knowable. The world might seem unfathomable, he says, but,
astonishingly, “you can summarize it on a sheet of paper, using the
formulas of physics.”
Physicists struggled to reconcile Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum physics. As one of the originators of string field theory—which posits the existence of multiple universes and unknown dimensions, as well as one-dimensional extended objects known as strings—Kaku met his goal of carrying on Einstein’s work. Strings vibrate in space, not unlike the strings on a violin, and when they do, at different frequencies, they manifest as different particles and forces of nature. Gravity, then, would be like an F-sharp, while electro-weak interactions (part of quantum physics) would be like an E-flat. Kaku’s was a sublime achievement, especially for someone from humble and challenging origins—he was the son of a gardener and a maid, both of whom spent time in internment camps during WWII. That first moment of wonder, his youthful epiphany, is, he says, “ still the well from which I draw water when I’m tired and need refreshment.”
“There are thousands of papers on string theory,” he says. “Once in a while, one is beautiful.” To a physicist, Kaku says, symmetry is beauty: “It’s turning mounds and mounds of formulas into a simple, elegant, symmetrical equation. It’s symmetry that emerges out of chaos, like a diamond formed after years spent putting together pieces of shattered crystal.” Our drive to seek out beauty in the universe, Kaku says, has allowed humans to probe its most puzzling questions.
This kind of beauty also allows us to zoom the camera lens far out from our tiny settings. “All your selfish little concerns mean nothing next to the grandeur of the universe,” says Kaku. “Awe gives you an existential shock. You realize that you are hardwired to be a little selfish, but you are also dependent on something bigger than yourself. Einstein was a tremendous influence on us because he was a messenger from the stars. We look at the stars and think, ‘My problems are so trivial compared to the majesty of the night sky.’”
Kaku, who explains tricky concepts with witty metaphors and similes, appears on news programs as often as pundits and Hollywood celebrities. His popularity—along with that of colleagues like Neil deGrasse Tyson, TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory that celebrate nerds, and online entities like “I F*cking Love Science” that package scientific delight with an overlay of hipness—reflects our thirst for knowledge. But it also reveals a strong desire for staggering, eye-opening insights, a craving for awe in a jaded world.
The 2015 New Horizons expedition to Pluto, vistas atop the Himalayas, and Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam ignite intellectual curiosity and provide aesthetic pleasures, but they also pull us out of our default mode of self-absorption and could even be the antidote for our self- (and selfie-) obsessed age, in which taking and posting photos of oneself is a completely acceptable practice. Even solitary artists and thinkers are expected to “brand” themselves and share their private lives with the wider public in order to sell their wares. Cue the “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self,” as awe is defined by a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers. And recent research shows that in the wake of marvel, people feel more connected to their social groups and motivated to act for the greater good. Wonder pulls us together—a counterforce to all that seems to be tearing us apart.
Depending on your particular interests, you might be stunned by an intricately designed mosaic or, like Kaku, a graceful equation. Paul Piff, assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, says that though some people are predisposed to feel awe more often than others, there are common elicitors of marvel. “An awe-inspiring thing can be literally large or just conceptually large, but in either case your current understanding or frame of reference can’t accommodate it.” He points to funny videos of babies riding through tunnels for the first time, their faces twisting into confusion and surprise. “No wonder we have the intuitive sense that awe mimics a childlike wonder at the world and all its novelties.” An early magnificent moment for Piff took place when he was 11 and went on a safari in Kenya with his family. “I had no conception of real wildlife. We were in a big national park, and like a cloud morphing across the landscape, thousands of wildebeests charged toward us.”
Robert Leahy, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, the director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, and the author of The Worry Cure, sees awe as a cousin to appreciation and gratitude, and links these to the experiences often found in places of worship, where architecture, music, and prayer conspire to draw attendees outside of themselves. In a recent paper, Piff and colleagues echo the thought by describing religious institutions as places that “elicit, organize, and ritualize awe.” (A not particularly religious friend of mine recalls walking down the street when, precisely as the sun burst through the clouds, an organ at the nearby church bellowed out a glorious soundtrack. She was wonderstruck.)
Nature, of course, is a frequent awe-generator. “What is the first
window into wonder?” asks journalist Richard Louv, the author of The Nature Principle: Reconnecting With Life in a Virtual Age.
“It’s crawling out to the edge of the grass, listening to the wind and
the trees, turning over a rock, and realizing that you’re not alone in
the world.” Louv has come to think that the immune-system boost,
improved cognitive functioning (such as increased attention span), and
other consequences of being in the great outdoors are all elements of
this one essential gift of awe: feeling truly alive.
The link between exposure to nature and well-being is strong. Urbanites are more likely to be anxious and depressed and to suffer from other mental illnesses. But city dwellers who visit nature-rich environments see an immediate reduction in stress hormones. In one of many such studies, Stanford researcher Gregory Bratman found that college students who walked through green, leafy parts of their campus were happier and more attentive afterward than those assigned to hang out near heavy traffic.
A 2014 review study by David Pearson and Tony Craig concluded that the cognitive benefits of being in nature are due to “restorative environments,” which provide the experience of escape from daily demands and a perception of vastness. The authors note that greater attention spans and less mental fatigue are found after people just watch films or view photographs of natural scenes—good news for urbanites who don’t have a chance to flee home. And as long as the key elements of “being away and fascination” are present, monasteries, museums, art galleries, and urban scenes containing water are all suitable alternatives to the countryside.
When anxiety strikes, its sufferers are overwhelmed by, and hyperfocused on, their own worrisome, dark thoughts. It’s a state that infuses an often misleading sense of “realness” or “correctness” to those thoughts, says Leahy.
Rumination—or mulling over worries—is the biggest predictor of depression and anxiety, according to a large-scale British study published in 2013. “Awe is the opposite of rumination,” says Leahy. “It clears away inner turmoil with a wave of outer immensity.” Whether it’s a sunset with colors more vivid than you’ve ever seen or a rapidly expanding sense of love felt when staring into another’s eyes, “being in awe is losing yourself in something or someone else. The anxious person’s sense that ‘it’s all about me; I must control my situation’ disappears.”
Hallucinogenic trips often produce mystical sensations of awe, so it’s perhaps not surprising that in study trials, psilocybin—the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”—relieved cancer patients’ anxiety and fear of death. Psilocybin can even change people’s personality, making them more open-minded. This kind of awe, researchers speculate, can change the brain’s chemistry over the long haul.
Daniel Smith, the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, recalls panicking as a kid in the face of the realization that the universe is overwhelmingly vast—an anxious person could conceivably be made to feel too small by something so big, after all. But lately, looking for wonder has relieved him of “morbid self-involvement.” During a time of personal upheaval, he sought out reverential experiences by sitting under a linden tree near his Brooklyn apartment every day for months.
“I would just hang out there for about 15 minutes and gaze up at its branches,” Smith says. “I needed something to remind me that my concerns were temporary, local, minute. I wasn’t blissed out in a trance, and it wasn’t a cure-all, but it was a very good remedy. The tree is large and old, and it is just wonderful, in a literal sense. It’s a reminder of the kind of strange, ridiculous wonder of creation.” Living in a city full of people with “faces that I have to constantly interpret as friendly or not,” he says, can exhaust a generally anxious person—or any person for that matter. The tree was imposing, yet posed no threat.
At first thought, wonder-as-therapy might seem to be in opposition to standard talk therapy. Seeing a therapist requires focusing on and sharing your thoughts and feelings. It’s an inward dive. As Leahy sees it, though, cognitive behavioral therapy is about, yes, examining your thoughts, but also learning to take them less seriously, to look at how they might be inaccurate or silly or useless, to stop taking what happens around you so personally, to realize it’s not all about you.
Smith also sees chasing awe as complementary to psychotherapy: “Therapy is about finding new perspectives and forming new habits. Learning to seek out amazement is a good habit. And a good therapist is telling you to gaze at your navel to get you to stop gazing at your navel and to actually see what was before unconsidered, or automatic. Therapy helps us accept reality, and awe is a component of reality: It’s a way to remove the tyranny of ego.” As a writer, Smith appreciates how the experience is often sensory, providing a break from hyper-developed verbal capabilities that can “imprison us in the logical world.” Awe leaves us speechless.
A decade ago, when Paul Piff said that he wanted to study the
psychology of awe, his mentor cautioned, “Good luck.” While he and other
researchers suspected that awe has an impact on human behavior and were
well aware of the attention philosophers have given the subject, “it’s a
hard thing to stick in a test tube,” he says.
Piff noticed that awe arises in very different contexts—from the ocean’s edge to the hospital birthing room—but he wondered if, even though we often feel it while alone, it could serve an important collective function. When the constant buzzing of “me, me, me” recedes, we might become sensitive to loftier principles. Could awe make us better citizens?
Previous research has shown that awe expands people’s notion of available time, which in turn increases their well-being; that those high in “dispositional” awe are less likely to call themselves “special” and more likely to identify themselves as a member of a group or larger category; and that subjects primed to remember an awe-filled moment in their past feel less significant and less focused on day-to-day concerns.
In their recent set of five experiments, Piff and colleagues hypothesized that if awe does cause pro-social tendencies, the mechanism for doing so is the small self—a “relatively diminished sense of self vis-à-vis something deemed vaster than the individual.” This isn’t smallness in the sense of feeling ashamed or humiliated, Piff says. It’s that relieving notion that “I’m not that important or big, but I am a part of something much bigger.”
Piff found that people who are dispositionally inclined to awe were less selfish. Subjects who saw an awe-inspiring video also identified with the small self more than both those who were induced to feel pride or amusement and those in a control group. They were also more generous (behavior triggered by the small-self state, specifically) than those who watched a humorous video, and they behaved more ethically in lab experiments. Awe-filled subjects helped the study’s investigator pick up more pens that were “accidentally” dropped than did other subjects, for example. In addition, they showed less of a sense of entitlement.
Even those who watched “negative” awe-inspiring videos of tornadoes and volcanoes exhibited the pro-social behavior. So did those who watched a video showing droplets of colored water “colliding with a bowl of milk” in super-slow motion.
The pièce de résistance was the final experiment, where subjects were taken to the tallest hardwood grove in North America. They were asked to look up at the eucalyptus trees, some exceeding 200 feet, for one minute. The control group set their sights on a plain, tall building for the same amount of time. Sure enough, the tree-gazers felt more awe and were happier precisely because of what they felt. They also acted more generously in a lab test and reported feeling less entitled than the building-gawkers.
Why do we tend to find wonder in nature and in contexts that make us feel small, and why does awe stir us to behave more charitably toward others? Evolutionary psychology may provide clues. “It makes sense that beautiful landscapes, or even paintings depicting nature, produce awe,” says Glenn Geher, a professor of psychology at State University of New York at New Paltz, “because people who were well-connected to landscapes, animals, and water sources were more likely to survive.” Survival and, later, achievement have always rested on our creating cohesive non-kinship-based groups. “We needed mechanisms for coordinating these groups,” says Geher, “and a shared belief in something bigger than the individual is an effective one. The catalyst for adopting such beliefs was awe. Awe-inspiring sacred spaces connect expansive emotions with religious iconography.” Because of the cooperation it fostered, “awe has gone on to help us create universities, symphonies, and voyages to the moon.”
Erika Strand, chief of social policy at UNICEF Mexico, has sung in
choirs since she was 12. She recalls a performance, with her college
choir, of Verdi’s Requiem that stands out years later:
“Everything just came together and clicked,” she says. “It starts with
the Day of Wrath. Verdi is a sinner, and he’s terrified because it’s
Judgment Day. The feeling of fear we conjured was so powerful. The music
united all of us with the audience— we all have fears and regret not
having been the person we wanted to be—as the piece expresses something
so human.”
Strand’s director used to tell his singers that they needed to continually adjust themselves to be perfectly in tune and balanced with each other. “If the choir is a bit flat, you have to make yourself a little flat. If everyone is behind, you have to join them by compromising your pace. And if your voice sticks out, even if it’s pretty, the whole thing is ruined,” says Strand. When the Requiem was over, no one had to say anything—everyone knew they’d nailed it, escaping the mundane and achieving transcendence. “Moments like that give life meaning,” she says.
A few years ago, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, two professors at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, undertook an elaborate study of the most-emailed articles in The New York Times. Emotional articles in general were often shared, but awe-inspiring pieces topped the list. At the time, Berger explained (in the Times) that the motive for forwarding an awe-inspiring article to family and friends was not to show off or inform them, as might be the case with other types of articles, but rather to seek “emotional communion.” Just as Piff discovered that experiencing awe by ourselves rather paradoxically makes us feel more connected to others, reading to ourselves about beauty compels us to reach out. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself…I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together,” Berger said.
While Piff concurs that vicarious experiences of wonder can be powerful, he suspects that people are drawn to such breathtaking content because we are generally awe-deprived. “We have less time on our hands and fewer windows onto wonder,” he says, pointing to decreased funding for the arts and a decline in attendance at cultural events, increased urbanization, runaway materialism that keeps us working instead of stopping to take in sunshine and an intermittent breeze. Then there’s the attitudinal stance of our time—cynicism. A few recent cases in point: When Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would be giving the bulk of their fortune away to charity, commenters wasted no time putting the couple down and questioning their “true” motives. And when a married media executive was cruelly outed by the website Gawker, a longtime leader in snark, for attempting to solicit a prostitute, its publisher reacted to the backlash by asking his scribes to be a mere “20 percent nicer,” a figure he reportedly later adjusted to “10 to 15 percent.”
“It’s an insult to say, ‘That’s sentimental,’” agrees Leahy. “There is almost an enjoyment of making things profane, and all the cynicism takes away our propensity to feel awe.” Louv also points out that irony and cynicism are more aligned with depression and defeatism, as in “been there, done everything.”
Yet we need awe more than ever. Leahy points to research on how young people—a group more anxious than the youth of 40 years ago—are more likely to believe that they must attain special status in life, or even celebrity, to be happy. “Narcissism leads to unrealistic expectations,” he says.
How then, can we tip the seesaw to raise marvel and lessen self-centeredness? Keith Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and the co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, finds the idea that awe could reduce narcissism “totally reasonable because awe reduces some aspects of the ego,” and he would like to carry out experiments to test the theory.
Meanwhile, Louv’s primary mission is to create more “nature-rich” parks, schools, and homes. “As of 2008, more people live in cities than in the countryside for the first time in human history,” he says. “Studies of urban parks show that those with the highest biodiversity are the best for our health. We need to bring nature into our lives, not only to slow down the biodiversity collapse, but to make ourselves healthier—mentally, physically, spiritually.” Rather than use completely un-awe-inspiring terms such as “energy efficiency,” “sustainability,” or “survivability,” Louv says, we need to paint a positive, detailed picture of what our planet could be like in the future—in contrast to the postapocalyptic world so resonant with teenagers, as evidenced by the dystopian books and movies they devour (The Hunger Games, Divergent).
Educators would do well to add wonder to their lessons. Kaku says that teens, even those who had life-changing conceptual realizations about the universe as children, often lose interest in science in high school, where postulating hypotheses and collecting data are emphasized. “The scientific method is necessary, of course,” he says, “but at the cutting edge of science, the big breakthroughs and paradigm shifts are rarely based on it. Those come with a lightning bolt, a thunderclap, a moment of awe. That’s what drives the history of science.” Kaku’s passion for cultivating scientific literacy among grown-ups also helps us experience awe, as the more deeply we understand things, the more we have to continually accommodate our current notions of reality—via those exciting cognitive shifts that spark wonder.
Those shifts and their life-affirming, anxiety-quelling, narcissism-squashing, and generosity-upping effects can happen anytime and anywhere, simply by thinking about our world and our universe. Take Kaku’s quest to complete Einstein’s dream of a Theory of Everything: A few years ago, to great fanfare, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland found the Higgs boson particle, the first of a series of particles physicists aim to discover. Kaku hopes the Collider will next find evidence of dark matter, an invisible form of matter, and then, eventually, even evidence of parallel universes and higher dimensions, all predicted by string theory. Despite such advancements, though, most of the universe is beyond our current understanding. And all of us here on Earth who are composed of the “higher elements” make up a minuscule percentage of the universe. As Kaku puts it, we are the exception, specks of dust, but ones that, as part of a rare universe with intelligent life, are the byproduct of countless miraculous accidents. Mind. Blown.
Physicists struggled to reconcile Einstein’s theory of general relativity with quantum physics. As one of the originators of string field theory—which posits the existence of multiple universes and unknown dimensions, as well as one-dimensional extended objects known as strings—Kaku met his goal of carrying on Einstein’s work. Strings vibrate in space, not unlike the strings on a violin, and when they do, at different frequencies, they manifest as different particles and forces of nature. Gravity, then, would be like an F-sharp, while electro-weak interactions (part of quantum physics) would be like an E-flat. Kaku’s was a sublime achievement, especially for someone from humble and challenging origins—he was the son of a gardener and a maid, both of whom spent time in internment camps during WWII. That first moment of wonder, his youthful epiphany, is, he says, “ still the well from which I draw water when I’m tired and need refreshment.”
“There are thousands of papers on string theory,” he says. “Once in a while, one is beautiful.” To a physicist, Kaku says, symmetry is beauty: “It’s turning mounds and mounds of formulas into a simple, elegant, symmetrical equation. It’s symmetry that emerges out of chaos, like a diamond formed after years spent putting together pieces of shattered crystal.” Our drive to seek out beauty in the universe, Kaku says, has allowed humans to probe its most puzzling questions.
This kind of beauty also allows us to zoom the camera lens far out from our tiny settings. “All your selfish little concerns mean nothing next to the grandeur of the universe,” says Kaku. “Awe gives you an existential shock. You realize that you are hardwired to be a little selfish, but you are also dependent on something bigger than yourself. Einstein was a tremendous influence on us because he was a messenger from the stars. We look at the stars and think, ‘My problems are so trivial compared to the majesty of the night sky.’”
Kaku, who explains tricky concepts with witty metaphors and similes, appears on news programs as often as pundits and Hollywood celebrities. His popularity—along with that of colleagues like Neil deGrasse Tyson, TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory that celebrate nerds, and online entities like “I F*cking Love Science” that package scientific delight with an overlay of hipness—reflects our thirst for knowledge. But it also reveals a strong desire for staggering, eye-opening insights, a craving for awe in a jaded world.
The 2015 New Horizons expedition to Pluto, vistas atop the Himalayas, and Michaelangelo’s Creation of Adam ignite intellectual curiosity and provide aesthetic pleasures, but they also pull us out of our default mode of self-absorption and could even be the antidote for our self- (and selfie-) obsessed age, in which taking and posting photos of oneself is a completely acceptable practice. Even solitary artists and thinkers are expected to “brand” themselves and share their private lives with the wider public in order to sell their wares. Cue the “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self,” as awe is defined by a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers. And recent research shows that in the wake of marvel, people feel more connected to their social groups and motivated to act for the greater good. Wonder pulls us together—a counterforce to all that seems to be tearing us apart.
Depending on your particular interests, you might be stunned by an intricately designed mosaic or, like Kaku, a graceful equation. Paul Piff, assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, says that though some people are predisposed to feel awe more often than others, there are common elicitors of marvel. “An awe-inspiring thing can be literally large or just conceptually large, but in either case your current understanding or frame of reference can’t accommodate it.” He points to funny videos of babies riding through tunnels for the first time, their faces twisting into confusion and surprise. “No wonder we have the intuitive sense that awe mimics a childlike wonder at the world and all its novelties.” An early magnificent moment for Piff took place when he was 11 and went on a safari in Kenya with his family. “I had no conception of real wildlife. We were in a big national park, and like a cloud morphing across the landscape, thousands of wildebeests charged toward us.”
Robert Leahy, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, the director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, and the author of The Worry Cure, sees awe as a cousin to appreciation and gratitude, and links these to the experiences often found in places of worship, where architecture, music, and prayer conspire to draw attendees outside of themselves. In a recent paper, Piff and colleagues echo the thought by describing religious institutions as places that “elicit, organize, and ritualize awe.” (A not particularly religious friend of mine recalls walking down the street when, precisely as the sun burst through the clouds, an organ at the nearby church bellowed out a glorious soundtrack. She was wonderstruck.)
Photo by Adam Levey
The link between exposure to nature and well-being is strong. Urbanites are more likely to be anxious and depressed and to suffer from other mental illnesses. But city dwellers who visit nature-rich environments see an immediate reduction in stress hormones. In one of many such studies, Stanford researcher Gregory Bratman found that college students who walked through green, leafy parts of their campus were happier and more attentive afterward than those assigned to hang out near heavy traffic.
A 2014 review study by David Pearson and Tony Craig concluded that the cognitive benefits of being in nature are due to “restorative environments,” which provide the experience of escape from daily demands and a perception of vastness. The authors note that greater attention spans and less mental fatigue are found after people just watch films or view photographs of natural scenes—good news for urbanites who don’t have a chance to flee home. And as long as the key elements of “being away and fascination” are present, monasteries, museums, art galleries, and urban scenes containing water are all suitable alternatives to the countryside.
When anxiety strikes, its sufferers are overwhelmed by, and hyperfocused on, their own worrisome, dark thoughts. It’s a state that infuses an often misleading sense of “realness” or “correctness” to those thoughts, says Leahy.
Rumination—or mulling over worries—is the biggest predictor of depression and anxiety, according to a large-scale British study published in 2013. “Awe is the opposite of rumination,” says Leahy. “It clears away inner turmoil with a wave of outer immensity.” Whether it’s a sunset with colors more vivid than you’ve ever seen or a rapidly expanding sense of love felt when staring into another’s eyes, “being in awe is losing yourself in something or someone else. The anxious person’s sense that ‘it’s all about me; I must control my situation’ disappears.”
Hallucinogenic trips often produce mystical sensations of awe, so it’s perhaps not surprising that in study trials, psilocybin—the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”—relieved cancer patients’ anxiety and fear of death. Psilocybin can even change people’s personality, making them more open-minded. This kind of awe, researchers speculate, can change the brain’s chemistry over the long haul.
Daniel Smith, the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, recalls panicking as a kid in the face of the realization that the universe is overwhelmingly vast—an anxious person could conceivably be made to feel too small by something so big, after all. But lately, looking for wonder has relieved him of “morbid self-involvement.” During a time of personal upheaval, he sought out reverential experiences by sitting under a linden tree near his Brooklyn apartment every day for months.
“I would just hang out there for about 15 minutes and gaze up at its branches,” Smith says. “I needed something to remind me that my concerns were temporary, local, minute. I wasn’t blissed out in a trance, and it wasn’t a cure-all, but it was a very good remedy. The tree is large and old, and it is just wonderful, in a literal sense. It’s a reminder of the kind of strange, ridiculous wonder of creation.” Living in a city full of people with “faces that I have to constantly interpret as friendly or not,” he says, can exhaust a generally anxious person—or any person for that matter. The tree was imposing, yet posed no threat.
At first thought, wonder-as-therapy might seem to be in opposition to standard talk therapy. Seeing a therapist requires focusing on and sharing your thoughts and feelings. It’s an inward dive. As Leahy sees it, though, cognitive behavioral therapy is about, yes, examining your thoughts, but also learning to take them less seriously, to look at how they might be inaccurate or silly or useless, to stop taking what happens around you so personally, to realize it’s not all about you.
Smith also sees chasing awe as complementary to psychotherapy: “Therapy is about finding new perspectives and forming new habits. Learning to seek out amazement is a good habit. And a good therapist is telling you to gaze at your navel to get you to stop gazing at your navel and to actually see what was before unconsidered, or automatic. Therapy helps us accept reality, and awe is a component of reality: It’s a way to remove the tyranny of ego.” As a writer, Smith appreciates how the experience is often sensory, providing a break from hyper-developed verbal capabilities that can “imprison us in the logical world.” Awe leaves us speechless.
Photo by Adam Levey
Piff noticed that awe arises in very different contexts—from the ocean’s edge to the hospital birthing room—but he wondered if, even though we often feel it while alone, it could serve an important collective function. When the constant buzzing of “me, me, me” recedes, we might become sensitive to loftier principles. Could awe make us better citizens?
Previous research has shown that awe expands people’s notion of available time, which in turn increases their well-being; that those high in “dispositional” awe are less likely to call themselves “special” and more likely to identify themselves as a member of a group or larger category; and that subjects primed to remember an awe-filled moment in their past feel less significant and less focused on day-to-day concerns.
In their recent set of five experiments, Piff and colleagues hypothesized that if awe does cause pro-social tendencies, the mechanism for doing so is the small self—a “relatively diminished sense of self vis-à-vis something deemed vaster than the individual.” This isn’t smallness in the sense of feeling ashamed or humiliated, Piff says. It’s that relieving notion that “I’m not that important or big, but I am a part of something much bigger.”
Piff found that people who are dispositionally inclined to awe were less selfish. Subjects who saw an awe-inspiring video also identified with the small self more than both those who were induced to feel pride or amusement and those in a control group. They were also more generous (behavior triggered by the small-self state, specifically) than those who watched a humorous video, and they behaved more ethically in lab experiments. Awe-filled subjects helped the study’s investigator pick up more pens that were “accidentally” dropped than did other subjects, for example. In addition, they showed less of a sense of entitlement.
Even those who watched “negative” awe-inspiring videos of tornadoes and volcanoes exhibited the pro-social behavior. So did those who watched a video showing droplets of colored water “colliding with a bowl of milk” in super-slow motion.
The pièce de résistance was the final experiment, where subjects were taken to the tallest hardwood grove in North America. They were asked to look up at the eucalyptus trees, some exceeding 200 feet, for one minute. The control group set their sights on a plain, tall building for the same amount of time. Sure enough, the tree-gazers felt more awe and were happier precisely because of what they felt. They also acted more generously in a lab test and reported feeling less entitled than the building-gawkers.
Why do we tend to find wonder in nature and in contexts that make us feel small, and why does awe stir us to behave more charitably toward others? Evolutionary psychology may provide clues. “It makes sense that beautiful landscapes, or even paintings depicting nature, produce awe,” says Glenn Geher, a professor of psychology at State University of New York at New Paltz, “because people who were well-connected to landscapes, animals, and water sources were more likely to survive.” Survival and, later, achievement have always rested on our creating cohesive non-kinship-based groups. “We needed mechanisms for coordinating these groups,” says Geher, “and a shared belief in something bigger than the individual is an effective one. The catalyst for adopting such beliefs was awe. Awe-inspiring sacred spaces connect expansive emotions with religious iconography.” Because of the cooperation it fostered, “awe has gone on to help us create universities, symphonies, and voyages to the moon.”
Photo by Adam Levey
Strand’s director used to tell his singers that they needed to continually adjust themselves to be perfectly in tune and balanced with each other. “If the choir is a bit flat, you have to make yourself a little flat. If everyone is behind, you have to join them by compromising your pace. And if your voice sticks out, even if it’s pretty, the whole thing is ruined,” says Strand. When the Requiem was over, no one had to say anything—everyone knew they’d nailed it, escaping the mundane and achieving transcendence. “Moments like that give life meaning,” she says.
A few years ago, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, two professors at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, undertook an elaborate study of the most-emailed articles in The New York Times. Emotional articles in general were often shared, but awe-inspiring pieces topped the list. At the time, Berger explained (in the Times) that the motive for forwarding an awe-inspiring article to family and friends was not to show off or inform them, as might be the case with other types of articles, but rather to seek “emotional communion.” Just as Piff discovered that experiencing awe by ourselves rather paradoxically makes us feel more connected to others, reading to ourselves about beauty compels us to reach out. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself…I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together,” Berger said.
While Piff concurs that vicarious experiences of wonder can be powerful, he suspects that people are drawn to such breathtaking content because we are generally awe-deprived. “We have less time on our hands and fewer windows onto wonder,” he says, pointing to decreased funding for the arts and a decline in attendance at cultural events, increased urbanization, runaway materialism that keeps us working instead of stopping to take in sunshine and an intermittent breeze. Then there’s the attitudinal stance of our time—cynicism. A few recent cases in point: When Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced that they would be giving the bulk of their fortune away to charity, commenters wasted no time putting the couple down and questioning their “true” motives. And when a married media executive was cruelly outed by the website Gawker, a longtime leader in snark, for attempting to solicit a prostitute, its publisher reacted to the backlash by asking his scribes to be a mere “20 percent nicer,” a figure he reportedly later adjusted to “10 to 15 percent.”
“It’s an insult to say, ‘That’s sentimental,’” agrees Leahy. “There is almost an enjoyment of making things profane, and all the cynicism takes away our propensity to feel awe.” Louv also points out that irony and cynicism are more aligned with depression and defeatism, as in “been there, done everything.”
Yet we need awe more than ever. Leahy points to research on how young people—a group more anxious than the youth of 40 years ago—are more likely to believe that they must attain special status in life, or even celebrity, to be happy. “Narcissism leads to unrealistic expectations,” he says.
How then, can we tip the seesaw to raise marvel and lessen self-centeredness? Keith Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and the co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, finds the idea that awe could reduce narcissism “totally reasonable because awe reduces some aspects of the ego,” and he would like to carry out experiments to test the theory.
Meanwhile, Louv’s primary mission is to create more “nature-rich” parks, schools, and homes. “As of 2008, more people live in cities than in the countryside for the first time in human history,” he says. “Studies of urban parks show that those with the highest biodiversity are the best for our health. We need to bring nature into our lives, not only to slow down the biodiversity collapse, but to make ourselves healthier—mentally, physically, spiritually.” Rather than use completely un-awe-inspiring terms such as “energy efficiency,” “sustainability,” or “survivability,” Louv says, we need to paint a positive, detailed picture of what our planet could be like in the future—in contrast to the postapocalyptic world so resonant with teenagers, as evidenced by the dystopian books and movies they devour (The Hunger Games, Divergent).
Educators would do well to add wonder to their lessons. Kaku says that teens, even those who had life-changing conceptual realizations about the universe as children, often lose interest in science in high school, where postulating hypotheses and collecting data are emphasized. “The scientific method is necessary, of course,” he says, “but at the cutting edge of science, the big breakthroughs and paradigm shifts are rarely based on it. Those come with a lightning bolt, a thunderclap, a moment of awe. That’s what drives the history of science.” Kaku’s passion for cultivating scientific literacy among grown-ups also helps us experience awe, as the more deeply we understand things, the more we have to continually accommodate our current notions of reality—via those exciting cognitive shifts that spark wonder.
Those shifts and their life-affirming, anxiety-quelling, narcissism-squashing, and generosity-upping effects can happen anytime and anywhere, simply by thinking about our world and our universe. Take Kaku’s quest to complete Einstein’s dream of a Theory of Everything: A few years ago, to great fanfare, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland found the Higgs boson particle, the first of a series of particles physicists aim to discover. Kaku hopes the Collider will next find evidence of dark matter, an invisible form of matter, and then, eventually, even evidence of parallel universes and higher dimensions, all predicted by string theory. Despite such advancements, though, most of the universe is beyond our current understanding. And all of us here on Earth who are composed of the “higher elements” make up a minuscule percentage of the universe. As Kaku puts it, we are the exception, specks of dust, but ones that, as part of a rare universe with intelligent life, are the byproduct of countless miraculous accidents. Mind. Blown.
Photo by Adam Levey
How Awestruck Are You?
Ask yourself these questions. Score each item from 1 to 5. If your total reaches 30, then you must be pretty enchanted by the world.- I often feel awe.
- I see beauty all around me.
- I feel wonder almost every day.
- I often look for patterns in the objects around me.
- I have many opportunities to see the beauty of nature.
- I seek out experiences that challenge my understanding of the world.
Ways to Be Awe-Inspired in Everyday Life by Dr. Myles Johnson.
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” (William Butler Yeats)
2. Go to repositories of awe.
Throughout human history, individuals have collected, preserved, and presented opportunities for remembering and experiencing the awe-inspiring in a variety of locations. Some cemeteries, conservatories, libraries, zoos, historical sites, houses of worship, theaters, concert halls, arenas, and museums, for example, are repositories of awe in some way. Given this, a second recommendation is to regularly seek awe in these kinds of venues. To do this, it is critical to personally connect with something vast – perhaps in terms of physical size, age, complexity of detail, an individual’s skill, or impact – that broadens your thinking.
The benefits of visiting awe repositories such as this can be illustrated by a study conducted by Michelle Shiota and colleagues at the Museum of Paleontology on the Berkeley campus. In this study, some research participants were told to stare for one minute at a full-sized replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton while others were told to stare down a nearby hallway. Those who started at the T. rex were more likely to define themselves in relation to a broader group – such as a member of the entire species – suggesting that awe enabled them to transcend themselves to connect with others across different backgrounds.
So:
3. Record awe experiences.
A third recommendation for experiencing awe in everyday life is to record awe experiences in some meaningful way. Several intervention studies show benefits from writing detailed accounts of previous awe experiences, in particular. For example, in one study, Melanie Rudd and colleagues found that research participants who took just a few minutes to write about “a response to things perceived as vast and overwhelming that alters the way you understand the world” reported stronger feelings of awe, less impatience, and greater interest in volunteering their time to a worthy cause than those who wrote about a happy experience.
In her book, "Positivity," University of North Carolina positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson encourages individuals to create a portfolio of positive emotions, including awe. To apply the above-mentioned research, you could follow Frederickson’s advice to:
Not all stories – but some – can create opportunities for awe, as they can transport us beyond our ordinary lives to other contexts. Considering this, a fifth recommendation for experiencing awe in everyday life is to personally connect with stories that stimulate awe.
Another study conducted by Melanie Rudd and colleagues demonstrates the potential for stories to elicit awe. Participants in this research tried to identify with what a main character felt as they either read about them climbing the Eiffel Tower to see Paris from on high or ascending an unnamed tower to see a plain landscape. Remarkably, those who read the passage about the Eiffel Tower felt more awe, believed that time was more available, and reported more satisfaction with their lives.
Given the potential for stories to evoke awe, you might:
The next recommendation is to intentionally use various forms of media to experience awe. Although there are some potential limitations to this – including the possibility that an awe encounter will be weaker if experienced secondhand – seeking awe through the media is very convenient, as there are countless awe-inspiring recordings of nature, virtue, skill, speeches, and music available online. And, perhaps surprisingly, several studies show that even brief media exposures can trigger awe and cause important effects. For instance, in another study by Paul Piff and colleagues, participants who watched a 5-minute video of vistas, mountains, plains, forests, and canyons reported experiencing a smaller self and displayed greater generosity than those who watched an amusing or neutral video.
Given this:
If there was a way to summarize all of the above ideas into a single, general, recommendation for you to apply, it would be this: learn to be mindful of opportunities to benefit from awe in your everyday life.
One way to do this is to recognize when you need a boost in a key area of life in which awe is implicated, and to intentionally seek awe during those times. For example:
This post was written with Dr. Myles Johnson.
In the past several years, a great deal of scientific and popular attention has been directed toward the experience of awe. For example, awe uniquely predicts indicators of the body’s inflammatory response, implicated in the onset and progression of various chronic diseases, cardiovascular disease, and depression; enhances critical thinking; and may reduce post-traumatic symptoms.
Applications of this research sometimes may fall flat, though, because of the common assumption that awe is rarely possible, perhaps even becoming less common in modern times.
But must awe be rare in today's world?
Two lines of research suggest the answer is “no.”
First, research conducted by Amie Gordon at the University of
California at Berkeley reveals that episodes of awe can be remarkably
common in everyday life. In one study, for instance, individuals
tracking their daily experiences for two weeks reported feeling awe, on
average, every third day.
Even more importantly, as discussed below, a number of studies show
that straightforward, easily applicable interventions can reliably
elicit awe and cause significant effects.
Overall, this means that awe need not be a rare occurrence: awe can be meaningfully experienced as a part of everyday life.
This possibility has changed the way I approach my everyday life.
Rather than assuming that awe is an infrequent experience normally
beyond my grasp, I now regularly implement practices intended to elicit
awe. These practices enable me to feel inspired, centered, and
wholehearted in ways that have transformed my everyday experience.
In light of this, in this post, I provide seven research-supported
recommendations – along with even more specific practices – for you to
apply in your everyday life.
1. Take awe excursions in nature.
Taking awe excursions in nature is one way to regularly experience
awe. The purpose of these excursions is to personally connect with
something vast – perhaps in physical size or space, age, or complexity
of detail – that expands your usual frame of reference.
Research supports the idea that nature excursions such as this can stimulate awe and cause significant effects. In one study
conducted at the University of California at Berkeley, for example,
Paul Piff and colleagues randomly assigned some study participants to
gaze for one minute at a stand of towering eucalyptus trees, while
another group was told to look at a nearby tall building instead. Those
who focused on the trees felt more awe and later were more likely to
help a person in need, show greater ethical decision-making, and report less feelings of superiority to others.
Based on this, consider implementing the following suggestions:
- Identify some ways you might personally connect with something
vast in nature that stretches your perspective. Maybe you could sit by a
large open area of natural beauty,
such as a nearby vista, lake, or river. Perhaps you could behold a
local stand of towering trees or the intricate details of flowers around
your home. If there is a particular wild animal that lives near you
that causes you to stop in your tracks, you could identify when they are
most likely to be observed in their natural habitat and go there at
that time. A starry night, the northern lights, the rising or setting
sun, and the unfolding of a storm all provide opportunities to be
awestruck. If you’ve had multiple encounters with the same source of
awe, look for new ways to be astonished.
- Take at least one minute to focus on – with your full attention – whatever strikes you as awe-inspiring during your excursion. Bring to mind elements of vastness – especially vastness of size, space, age, or complexity – to enhance your feeling of awe. Relax and allow yourself to become fully absorbed in that which most amazes you. (Click here for related information on the Eastern practice of "forest bathing.")
Throughout human history, individuals have collected, preserved, and presented opportunities for remembering and experiencing the awe-inspiring in a variety of locations. Some cemeteries, conservatories, libraries, zoos, historical sites, houses of worship, theaters, concert halls, arenas, and museums, for example, are repositories of awe in some way. Given this, a second recommendation is to regularly seek awe in these kinds of venues. To do this, it is critical to personally connect with something vast – perhaps in terms of physical size, age, complexity of detail, an individual’s skill, or impact – that broadens your thinking.
The benefits of visiting awe repositories such as this can be illustrated by a study conducted by Michelle Shiota and colleagues at the Museum of Paleontology on the Berkeley campus. In this study, some research participants were told to stare for one minute at a full-sized replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton while others were told to stare down a nearby hallway. Those who started at the T. rex were more likely to define themselves in relation to a broader group – such as a member of the entire species – suggesting that awe enabled them to transcend themselves to connect with others across different backgrounds.
So:
- Identify a local cemetery, conservatory, library, zoo,
historical site, house of worship, theater, concert hall, arena, or
museum where you believe you might personally connect with something
vast that stretches you beyond your normal point of reference. Consult
local resources to find locations you haven’t been before. If you’ve
been to the same place before, be open to new ways to be astonished.
- To better appreciate the vastness of what you may observe in these
settings, it may be helpful to do some research before going. In
particular, learn what you can about the history, stories, and impact of
the main attraction(s) so that you can call to mind this information to
enhance your feeling of awe in the moment.
- Take at least one minute to gaze at – with your full attention – whatever strikes you as awe-inspiring during your outing. Bring to mind elements of vastness – especially vastness of size, age, complexity, skill, or impact – to enhance your feeling of awe. Relax and allow yourself to become fully absorbed in that which most amazes you.
3. Record awe experiences.
A third recommendation for experiencing awe in everyday life is to record awe experiences in some meaningful way. Several intervention studies show benefits from writing detailed accounts of previous awe experiences, in particular. For example, in one study, Melanie Rudd and colleagues found that research participants who took just a few minutes to write about “a response to things perceived as vast and overwhelming that alters the way you understand the world” reported stronger feelings of awe, less impatience, and greater interest in volunteering their time to a worthy cause than those who wrote about a happy experience.
In her book, "Positivity," University of North Carolina positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson encourages individuals to create a portfolio of positive emotions, including awe. To apply the above-mentioned research, you could follow Frederickson’s advice to:
- Create an “awe portfolio,” consisting of photos and objects that
personally represent the most powerful experiences of awe you have had
in your lifetime. Acquiring these photos and objects is an important
aspect of this. In fact, recent research finds that taking photos of
evocative stimuli may enhance their emotional effects.
- As a part of your portfolio – or in a journal, blog, or social media
platform – write a series of responses to the following questions posed
by Fredrickson, in as much detail, and incorporating as many senses, as
possible: “(1) when have you felt intense wonder or amazement, truly in
awe of your surroundings?, (2) when have you felt overwhelmed by
greatness, or by beauty on a grand scale?, (3) when have you been
stopped in your tracks, transfixed by grandeur?, and (4) when have you
felt part of something much larger than yourself?”4. Meditate on the awe-inspiring.
Individuals have used meditation – whether they call it that or not – to experience a richer inner life for thousands of years. One specific form of meditation in which you intentionally use your imagination may be particularly effective in enhancing feelings of awe.
Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has pioneered the study of imagination-based meditative exercises. In one particularly provocative study, for instance, Luhrmann and colleagues randomly assigned Christian research participants to regular exercises – 30 minutes per day, six days per week, for four weeks – that engaged them in either (1) meditative prayer on key passages in the Bible or (2) lectures on the Gospels. Those assigned to the meditation condition were told that the most important element of the exercise involved “use of the imagination to draw close to God, to enter into the Scriptures, and to experience them as if they were alive to you.” They were taught to use all of their senses in doing so. At the end of the study, those who completed the meditative exercises more frequently indicated having powerful experiences, often of an awe-inspiring nature. (Here are some more links on connections between awe and religion, in general, and awe and Christianity, in particular.)
There are a variety of ways to meditate on the awe-inspiring in daily life:
- Identify poetic or sacred texts likely to evoke awe for you. Ask
for recommendations from trusted sources if you don’t know where to
start. Relax and slowly read and re-read your text, focusing on the
word, phrase, or idea that connects you with something overpowering that
stirs your heart. Close your eyes and connect with sights, sounds,
smells, and feelings you imagine that follow from the text, using as
much vivid detail as possible.
- Similarly, when listening to inspiring or sacred music, use your
imagination to transport you from the lyrics to a more evocative place
that you see, hear, and sense. Focus on the lyrics that cause you to
feel amazed.
- Take at least 10 minutes to remember a time when you had a powerful experience of awe. Relax and use all of your senses to recall in vivid detail where you were, what happened, and how you felt. Notice where in your body you are experiencing emotion and what that feels like now. Imagine these emotions expanding within you to flood your entire mind and body.
Not all stories – but some – can create opportunities for awe, as they can transport us beyond our ordinary lives to other contexts. Considering this, a fifth recommendation for experiencing awe in everyday life is to personally connect with stories that stimulate awe.
Another study conducted by Melanie Rudd and colleagues demonstrates the potential for stories to elicit awe. Participants in this research tried to identify with what a main character felt as they either read about them climbing the Eiffel Tower to see Paris from on high or ascending an unnamed tower to see a plain landscape. Remarkably, those who read the passage about the Eiffel Tower felt more awe, believed that time was more available, and reported more satisfaction with their lives.
Given the potential for stories to evoke awe, you might:
Source: Pexels
- Identify possible sources of awe-inspiring stories. Good literature, biographies, and sections of a sacred text often provide such opportunities. Ask for recommendations from trusted sources if you don’t know where to start. For biographies, in particular, think about people that have a certain mystique and that you admire. As you read, try to feel what the main character(s) felt.
- Arrange an opportunity to exchange awe stories in a group, perhaps as a part of a dinner party. Instruct individuals who participate to share details of where they were, what happened, what they thought, how they felt, and the impact of the experience long-term. Alternatively, identify natural opportunities to listen to others tell stories involving awe. For instance, when family and friends return from travel to an awe-inspiring location, take the opportunity to ask them to elaborate on their experiences of awe.
The next recommendation is to intentionally use various forms of media to experience awe. Although there are some potential limitations to this – including the possibility that an awe encounter will be weaker if experienced secondhand – seeking awe through the media is very convenient, as there are countless awe-inspiring recordings of nature, virtue, skill, speeches, and music available online. And, perhaps surprisingly, several studies show that even brief media exposures can trigger awe and cause important effects. For instance, in another study by Paul Piff and colleagues, participants who watched a 5-minute video of vistas, mountains, plains, forests, and canyons reported experiencing a smaller self and displayed greater generosity than those who watched an amusing or neutral video.
Given this:
- You might create an evolving “awe playlist,” consisting of
videos, music, talks, internet sites and movies that mentally transport
you to experience overwhelming vastness, expose you to hair-raising
virtue or skill, or connect you with something greater than yourself.
For instance, you could create a playlist of youtube videos or songs on
your smart phone that evoke awe. The process of creating such a playlist
may be more impactful than the finished product, so take your time to
explore and experience what you come across. Add to this playlist when
you find new media that stimulates feelings of amazement in you.
- Take some time to regularly be absorbed in parts of the playlist. Just a few minutes of exposure may make a significant difference in your emotional state.
If there was a way to summarize all of the above ideas into a single, general, recommendation for you to apply, it would be this: learn to be mindful of opportunities to benefit from awe in your everyday life.
One way to do this is to recognize when you need a boost in a key area of life in which awe is implicated, and to intentionally seek awe during those times. For example:
- Notice when you feel stressed or impatient. During those times,
awe may help you to become transfixed in the moment and to feel time
expand.
- Attend to when you are feel isolated or self-absorbed. Awe may aid you in feeling greater concern and connection with others.
- Note when you feel unsatisfied with your life, or generally when you
feel less well-being. Experiencing awe may give you an emotional lift.
- Observe when you feel spiritually empty or disengaged. Awe may help you to feel a connection with something greater or beyond yourself.
- You might verbally acknowledge each time you encounter awe.
Perhaps you could use a journal to record episodes, make a point to
share experiences on social media or in conversations with loved ones,
or simply note to yourself that you had a moment of awe as you purposely
reflect on your day before you go to sleep at night.
- Intentionally direct your attention to sources of awe in your everyday life – even those that are small, subtle, or quiet. As Henry Miller once stated, “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
This post was written with Dr. Myles Johnson.
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