Listen To This If Your Life Feels "Meh" (A Simple Science-Backed Fix)
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What is awe and why is it essential for happiness?
Dacher, welcome to the podcast. I was just telling you how excited I am to have you here. I've never had a former professor of mine on.
It's good to be with you, Liz.
Has your research around awe made you not afraid of death?
No doubt. Awe becomes this powerful ingredient for trauma reduction.
I'll find it energy giving to connect with somebody. The initial hump feels hard. So instead, I scroll on my phone and retreat into myself.
Yeah.
How do I break through that blockage? Essentially, what fills us with awe can point us in the direction of what will fill us with a sense of meaning and purpose.
Awe gets you to meaning. The bigger challenge is to figure out your whole life context of awe and go get it.
Hello, friends, and welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where every week we are sharing real science, real stories and realistic tools that actually level up every part of your life. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a bestselling author and longtime journalist. And today I'm joined by Dr. Dacher Keltner, who is actually one of my professors back when I went to UC Berkeley. So this entire episode is a really crazy full circle moment for me. Dacher is one of the world's leading emotion scientists.
How can experiences of awe improve our mental and physical health?
He is a psychology professor at Berkeley, still to this day. He's the director of the Greater Good Science Center, and he's authored over 200, 200 scientific publications and six books. The man is prolific. And are you ready for this? This is about the coolest thing that I have ever heard personally. He was one of the scientific advisors for both Inside Out movies. So he was the one consulting on which emotions were shown on screen, how they would all be portrayed and all of that. And we get into some really fun behind the scenes stories about that actually in this episode. His most recent book is called Awe, The New Science of Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. It is so fascinating and it informs a lot of what we talk about today.
We get into what exactly is awe in practice, how it can have such a large impact on our happiness, and how we can harness the power of it to truly change our lives in much, much less time than you would think. This is one of my all-time favorite conversations that I have ever had. It is deep, it is powerful, and it's filled with these really actionable things that you can do in the moment to feel better, to feel wholer, to feel happier. And I am so excited for you to hear it. Dacher, welcome to the podcast. I was just telling you how excited I am to have you here. I've never had a former professor of mine on.
It's good to be with you, Liz. I've never been on a podcast of a former student.
Wait, really? Yeah. Oh, this is fun. Okay, this is going to be really fun. We're going to get into so many things happiness today. But let's start with awe because that is your most recent area of research. We're all so busy and we're told so many things that we should be doing all the time. So I'd love for you to start us off by just making a case for why awe is worth prioritizing in our lives.
I thought hard about that, right? I mean, awe sounds... rarified and available to only people who have resources and the like. But there's actually a really fundamental case for awe, one that people like the Surgeon General are taking really seriously. He's very interested in promoting awe. And the case, I think, is a couplefold and relates to your question. And the first is just 15 years of science shows that awe elevates vagal tone, which is good for your heart. reduces inflammation in your immune system, it reduces anxiety, it reduces daily stress, it helps with long COVID, it helps you be more generous with other people, helps you see the world in a less polarized way politically. So it's an antidote to all of the struggles of our times.
That science led me to really, you know, feel bullish in saying, Man, if you can go find three minutes of awe a few times a week, you'll do better. And that's what the science says. And the second reason, you know, that we really should make the case for awe is it's all around us, you know, and that was just striking.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is awe and why is it essential for happiness?
0:00–1:07
2
How can experiences of awe improve our mental and physical health?
1:07–3:54
3
What are the eight universal sources of awe?
3:54–7:10
4
How can we cultivate awe in our everyday lives?
7:10–10:00
5
What role does grief play in experiencing awe?
10:00–15:07
6
How do psychedelics relate to the experience of awe?
15:07–18:58
7
Can religious practices enhance our experience of awe?
18:58–22:31
8
What simple practices can help us incorporate awe into our daily routines?
22:31–1:25:41
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Liz Moody Podcast
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