Welcome to doctor Jennifer Stellar, who we will get to in a minute.

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time managing your health. You look at cholesterol numbers, you look at sleep scores, and steps on a watch, but I think the moments that really change us rarely feel clinical or numerical or even tangible.

There are these moments when something just changes, things open up, time slows or even kinda disappears, your perspective shifts, and maybe even the noise in your head fades.

The world is pretty crazy right now, and we’re filled with anxiety and exhaustion, so those kinds of moments are pretty rare, almost accidental. But what if they’re not? What if emotions like awe and compassion aren’t just beautiful experiences, but essential ingredients of health itself? That is the question we’re here to explore. Hello, Doctor. Jennifer.

Hello.

Welcome back.

Good to be here.

Alright. So you might remember Doctor. Stellar from the TEDMED stage back in twenty sixteen.

For those folks who may not have seen your talk back then, and I can’t believe there are many, you wanna just give everybody a quick synopsis of what you covered?

I’d love to.

So my original talk was about positive emotions, but, really, I honed in on a specific emotion called awe, which I think you already referenced a bit in your introduction.

And this is an emotion we feel when we encounter something that is so extraordinary that it falls beyond our ability to comprehend it sometimes.

And as a result, we feel this powerful sense of awe. And I talked about in my work some research and science that we had done in our lab suggesting that it could have powerful health impacts, in terms of your inflammation and immune responses. So really starting to figure out how these positive emotions, especially emotions like awe, like compassion, even gratitude, can help benefit our health.

Awe would come in pretty handy right about now. I’m sure every generation thinks they’re living through a really unusual moment, but this really feels like a highly unusual moment. Talk about how relevant the benefits of experiencing awe and compassion and gratitude are right now in a moment like this.

I can go back in time and know what other people experience, but I too feel that this is a time where there are a lot of existential threats and anxieties. So anxieties that feel bigger than one person can take on, whether it’s politics or climate change or inequality. And I think that these emotions that bind us together, that help us form into groups and collectives are exactly the kind of emotions we need when we’re facing these large existential and collective challenges. So I know that it’s a tough time to feel gratitude and compassion and awe, but I think that these are the emotions that we need right now so that we can weather these threats and anxieties that happen at this larger existential level.

Yeah. I mean, I think those moments would be very helpful. I think the question is how do we achieve them? Because when things are very stormy outside, we tend to spend a lot more time inside, and by inside I mean inside our head, which is already a really busy place. So how do we overcome our apparent gravitational pull toward being self focused, and open ourselves up to those kinds of connections?

Well, these emotions are deeply embedded in us. We see them in our primate ancestors. We see them in the historical anthropological records. So I think we do have this deeply embedded desire, tendency to experience these emotions.

So maybe making the space to experience them is a place to start, you know, connecting to other people around you if you see somebody in need. Compassion is something that naturally follows. If you’re outside for a walk and you’re not on your phone, you’re looking around, all is an emotion you might experience when you see how beautiful a tree is or the sunset that you’re seeing is. And so in the sense that we have these emotions embedded in us, I think we naturally gravitate towards them.

And so maybe your question is more about how do we make this space? How do we put ourselves in situations where we can feel these emotions? And removing distractions and connecting with others seems like a great place to start.

Yeah. I remember listening to a meditation app at one point. I was walking through Washington DC, and it was a special meditation for when you were in a city. And I think the gist of the meditation was just as you’re walking along, focus on somebody else, and in your head, wish them well. And frankly, just the sheer act of interrupting your own internal dialogue and focusing on other people has a freeing vibe to it, so I’m sure you’ve come across things like that in your work.

I think the challenge with these things, even though I think we’ve all experienced them, is convincing people of the medical value of doing them. Because you know, like steps on your watch and all of those kinds of numbers, we seem to need evidence, proof. What what can you offer us from your work that might satisfy our insatiable appetite for proof and something tangible?

Well, I think you really have two questions in there, and I wanna respond to both of them. The first, I think what you’re identifying is a key theme among these emotions we’ve been talking about that makes them so special, which is their ability to shift the attention away from ourselves.

Thinking about yourself is not a bad thing, but it is a balance between thinking about yourself and others, and I think our culture can shift us towards thinking more about ourself than might be healthy or good for us. These emotions do shift our attention outward. They can put our own anxieties in perspective, and I think that’s where the power of these emotions lie. Your second question, though, is about proof that they do have an impact on us, and there’s mounting evidence that they impact our well-being.

So our sense of connection to others, our sense of meaning, even just our enjoyment of life. We’re already seeing ways in which emotions like compassion can promote a more balanced and healthier cardiovascular system. We’re seeing that emotions like awe can potentially maybe even reduce levels of inflammation, but at a minimum are correlated with lower levels of markers of inflammation that are index of our immune functioning. So we’re starting to see that these emotions aren’t just good for our subjective or psychological well-being, but potentially also for our physical health.

And emotions do have powerful impacts in the body, and I think the emotions we’re talking about are no different than the ones that people might think of when they think of emotions like anger and fear and sadness. The impact that they do have hasn’t been as well studied, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have that effect.

Doctor Stellar, are you suggesting there’s a connection between the mind and the body?

That’s right. That’s right. I am. I am. And I think emotions are that bridge, actually. And positive emotions have been left out of the conversation for quite some time.

So that’s been my goal is to bring them into the conversation and encourage people to engage with those emotions instead of simply just trying not to feel angry, not to feel anxious or sad.

You must feel like there’s a growing acceptance of these beliefs or these these truths. I mean, I think the number of people who think of three things they’re grateful grateful for before they go to sleep, whether they write them down or not, has probably skyrocketed. The number of people who go outside and experience nature when they’re feeling down or stuck has probably skyrocketed. So there’s a lot of messaging out there.

I remember the comedian Sarah Silverman once said, of course the mind and the body are connected. That’s why I get diarrhea every time I feel nervous.

That is fair. I luckily haven’t seen those connections between the emotions I’ve studied and the body.

You focus on positive emotions. That’s why.

That’s right. That’s right. It’s funny you mention gratitude. I think gratitude is one of those pioneer positive emotions in really shifting the mindset of the public about the role of positive emotions in health and well-being.

But if you look back maybe just twenty years ago, it really wasn’t part of the conversation for emotion researchers, for health psychologists, clinicians, and even nature, which we know has been important for quite some time.

We haven’t really understood what it is about nature. And I think part of what it is is awe, is the emotion that you feel when you’re out in nature. And so some of the intuitiveness comes from there are things we know have been good for us, spending time with other people, being out in nature. But we haven’t exactly known why or how it impacts the body, and these emotions offer that bridge.

But I do think that it’s been kind of a seismic change in how we see positive emotions, but also specific emotions like gratitude. That’s quite recent. So sometimes we forget how new this is for people, because there has been such, I think, a concerted effort on the part of scientists to translate this and get this out to the public, and the public has been interested. That’s one of the nice things about these emotions.

People want to go out and experience them. They may not make the time for it, but they are not reluctant when you tell them, you need to go out in nature and feel some awe or find a way. Maybe it’s music. Maybe it’s watching planet Earth on your computer or your phone, but find a way to feel awe.

They’re not reluctant to engage in those kinds of activities. So I think we have a lot of opportunity to leverage those emotions for good.

Yeah. Maybe that’s why everyone is so open to these kinds of things because they’re seeking relief. If you have a headache, you want an aspirin, and maybe our level of discomfort is creating even more openness. I know I feel awe.

Every time I’m on an airplane, I look out the window, and suddenly, I feel so small, and my problems feel so small and insignificant. There’s something about making yourself seem smaller, or maybe making yourself feel a small part of something larger that seems to trigger the billions of awe. What actually happens in the body when someone is experiencing awe? What’s the biological goings on?

That is a big question. I think this idea of feeling small is a central component of awe. We see it a lot when we ask people about awe experiences.

If you think your experiences of feeling small are profound, imagine astronauts who often report their feelings of all when they see the Earth from space. They even have a name for it called the overview effect that’s dedicated to astronauts feeling this motion about looking back at Earth.

Again, this idea that you feel small but also interconnected, not just small. We feel very small when we feel shame, but we feel hyperaware of ourselves and isolated. When we feel awe, we feel small, but we feel less aware of the self, and we also feel connected to other people, maybe to humanity, maybe to the planet or some spiritual realm. So there is this element of awe and feeling small that I think is really important.

Now we don’t know exactly the pattern of effects that it has in the body. It sort of depends on the kind of awe you’re feeling. So certain kinds of awe experiences can feel a bit more negative than others. In our own lab, we’ve often used videos of the birth of a tornado to elicit that kind of more ambivalent feeling of all mixed emotion.

And so I think that that has a very different impact on the body. Now the kind of all you’re talking about is generally very positive, and so it seems to activate a more relaxed side of our physiological system. So we often break that system into sympathetic fight or flight and the parasympathetic rest and digest. And when people are feeling awe, we found some evidence that that parasympathetic rest and digest system becomes more active and that fight or flight system isn’t as much.

And so that is a balance that, ideally, you’d wanna tip towards sort of the parasympathetic less stress response in the body. So we do see evidence for that. And then what we’re working on now is trying to support some of the early provocative effects we found in in the talk I did for TEDMED to really use awe as an intervention to potentially reduce levels of pro inflammatory cytokines, these markers of inflammation in the body. We found that they are negatively associated, but now we really wanna get into the hard work of manipulating them to see if there’s a causal relationship between awe and these outcomes.

That’s really interesting because creating the conditions for awe to take place would certainly allow awe to take place more is first of all, how do you do that? And secondly, are there ethical manipulative aspects of that that you wanna talk about?

Well, we use whatever we think works. So that is a range. Sometimes we will show people videos. Planet Earth videos are excellent for inducing awe for many people.

We’ve actually pivoted more recently towards virtual reality because there’s equipment like the Oculus that makes it very easy for us. Most people use it for gaming, but we can actually use it so that participants are looking around and they’re seeing a full surround of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone. So we’ve used those. We’ve also gotten to people out in the field.

So we’ve gone to Niagara Falls. We’ve visited Yosemite and just let them experience awe in the natural environment that is conducive to it, and we just kind of sneak up next to them and say, hey. Can you fill out this survey? While you’re looking around, don’t mind us.

Just ignore us and and look at the impact that way. Awe is one of those emotions you can elicit in a variety of ways. Some people have used art and music, and I like that about awe as an emotion.

In terms of the ethical, tell me more about what you mean for the ethical concerns about manipulating awe.

Look, awe seems like a pure good. So anything you can do, in my view, to induce awe, especially since there are clear biological and health payoffs from experiencing awe, are good.

But there are people who feel like when you create something artificially, you’re intervening in a way that is not good from their world view. So I just wondered if you ever got any pushback or blowback or criticism on that line.

I haven’t gotten too much blowback because people enjoy feeling awe. They’re probably relieved that they’re coming in to do a psychology study, and instead of looking at a computer and clicking different boxes for forty five minutes, they’re putting on an Oculus and watching the Grand Canyon and, you know, looking at the stars in the sky. Generally, people like it. You know, one thing I do wanna mention, though, is that awe is generally good, but there are cases that all can maybe be bad. One example that comes to mind, and our lab has been interested in this, is they have been implicated in cults of personality. So we do feel awe towards people and often towards these singular figures, leaders, influencers, celebrities, athletes.

And what that means is that that leader can use that awe in whatever way works for them. And maybe that’s building bridges between people, connecting people, collective action to get people out and and working together, but they could also use it for more nefarious means. And I think we’ve seen examples of that. It’s very difficult to study, but I think that sense of connection that awe brings, that feeling of having a larger purpose and meaning, that could also be a pathway towards violence and hostility if it is guided that way by the leader who’s eliciting it.

So Yeah. That make that makes good sense. I mean, I can I can’t imagine a lot of people get mad at you for making them feel good, but I could see how, like most things, a lot of technologies and tools have a good side and a bad side? You’ve mentioned a few times the concept of connection.

You wanna feel small, but you wanna feel connected. You wanna feel connected to something larger than you are, social connection. I would think in the area of loneliness, there’s probably a fair bit of data because I think the connection between loneliness and unfortunate health outcomes, health problems, even shorter lives, and more expensive health care costs. Is there data? Has that been well studied? I imagine so.

You know, not as well studied as you would think. So we’ve been working on exactly that. I think the pattern is the same in the United States, but I know in Canada, we’ve seen some very worrisome declines in well-being, and they’re particularly pronounced for social connection, so feeling lonely, and meaning and purpose. And we think actually that these emotions are compassion, gratitude that do build a connection, they initiate it, and they maintain it in the relationships that we have could be particularly useful for people who are struggling with a lack of social connection, a lack of meaning and purpose. There’s less work than you would imagine, though, of course, we know that loneliness, lack of social connection, and a lack of meaning and purpose are really damaging for having, you know, high well-being and flourishing as a human.

So you’ve been studying all of this for quite some time. Share a thing or two that you’ve come across in your work that was profound for you, that just got under your skin and it just became a core part of your belief system.

I think it’s how liberating it is to actually let go of the self. I think we’re taught in our society that, you know, you’re supposed to think about what can you get out of the world in this sort of less generous interpretation.

And I personally didn’t find that particularly conducive to a meaningful life. And so these emotions resonate with me precisely because they shift that focus away from the self, and they speak to things that I’ve experienced, like feeling a deep meaning out of helping somebody else when they need it or feeling a deep sense of connection to something bigger than me, which I think I I long for when I look up at the night sky and see stars. So bringing that to the field of positive psychology has really been something I’ve been excited to be part of.

We do seem to live in a really individualized society. So this concept of separating a bit more from the self probably would help the collective quite a bit. You talked about manufacturing awe, putting on Oculus. How do you manufacture awe at population scale?

That is a good question. You don’t have to manufacture it at population scale.

I’ll say that first because people have their own ways of feeling awe, but the outcome reflects that you have rejected the premise of the question, which is an excellent technique.

That’s right. Well but I do agree there are ways you can do it. I don’t think you have to do it that way. There are ways you can that are really fascinating.

So one researcher actually studied eclipses and how they impact people’s sense of awe and subsequently outcomes like use of collective language, we versus I, and found an impact for people who were in the path of the eclipse versus those who were outside of it. There are these events that are population level that I think we can capitalize on. There are also we’ve talked about this already. Leaders that can somehow tap into that sense of awe and elicit some really amazing acts on the part of people, collective acts coming together to speak out against things they don’t like and speak for things they wanna see more of.

So I think we can see those, but they are very hard to do because they’re population level. So when you are feeling a sense of connection to humanity, we know that people become more interested in larger collective challenges like climate change. They feel maybe a sense that more can be done because they’re thinking at this larger population level.

And so I think as a scientist, I would be maybe even more interested in how can we harness those individual moments you might have, but direct that energy you now have because of that awe towards something that could help the collective good. That would be what I would wanna do.

Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, leadership is clearly a big lever, and hope is a really powerful drug. Leaders certainly can tell a hopeful story.

So let’s talk about the health care system for a bit. Many more people are open to these ideas, and have gratitude journals, and things like that. What is your take on how much attention the healthcare system pays to the emotional side of the equation. You’ve established they’re connected, so it seems like both would need to be attended to.

What’s your take on where we are?

That is a very modern approach to health and health care, and I think it’s the correct approach, which is that we can do more in the health care system to use positive emotions as an intervention for people who are struggling with both physical but also emotional disorders.

And we can also use positive emotions in a preventative way to sort of create a healthier individual who’s more robust against things like aging, which come with its own health concerns. So there have been some really amazing initiatives, especially in the United Kingdom, where they have used what they call social prescription programs where doctors can actually write a doctor’s note. This is sort of in conjunction with other organizations for, say, a trip to the museum that induces all sorts of positive emotions, including awe, and that’s actually part of a health care treatment plan. Now

this is not to say it replaces other traditional forms of medicine, but thinking about it as happening in conjunction with those. Maybe giving those traditional forms of medicine more fertile ground to take hold when you sort of reduce that negative affect and and build up positive affect seems like a good path forward to me. I’m not a doctor, but I do feel like we’ve seen enough effects from the field of psychology and medicine for positive emotions and even emotions like gratitude and awe and compassion that they’re worth considering as part of a more holistic treatment of the person. So I

do hope that we see that more going forward in health care, but it is gonna take, I think, an economic advantage in terms of motivating those who are involved in making those policies.

This is probably the silliest question you could ask someone who studies positive psychology, but has your research made you more optimistic or concerned about the future?

That is interesting.

I think studying positive emotions and especially these emotions, awe, gratitude, compassion, has convinced me that they are deeply built into us. So we have the capacity for such profound awe and compassion and gratitude and that it’s a choice that we make as individuals even at a societal level at which of those voices we wanna listen to. And so I feel like we have a fighting chance. We’re not just selfish creatures that have to undo millennia of evolution in order to be good. We actually can be either, and that choice is up to us.

As we near the end, let’s say TEDMED bought you the biggest billboard in Times Square, and you could deliver one message out to the masses from your work, what would it be?

I think it would be to make space for those positive emotions.

That these emotions aren’t a luxury that we can indulge in once we’ve done all the work we need to do and answered all the emails and, you know, done all the other things that you would consider necessities in your life, but actually that we should build into our lives time to be out in nature, time to go over to our neighbor and chat with them and see how they’re doing and and further build up that connection. Once you make space, I found that people feel them naturally. So it’s really not about trying to encourage people to feel awe when they’re out in nature. It’s about getting people out in nature, and then they feel the awe on their own usually. That’s the great part about these emotions.

We do do these things, but we tend to do them when we can fit them in, or once we’ve done the other stuff. Certainly resonates with me. I am also optimistic. That’s why I am sitting in front of a field of dreams image, so you can’t sit in front of that and not declare yourself an optimist. I remember from a TED talk a long time ago, Craig Venter said, I don’t know if the optimists or the pessimists are right. I just know the optimists will be the ones that get something done.

I like that. And it is a choice, and I feel like I I don’t wanna choose to be a pessimist. I wanna choose to be an optimist. That’s how I would wanna live my life, and I even if there isn’t somebody who’s right or wrong, which one would you want to be?

It’s easy to be a pessimist, but I think it’s more rewarding to be an You’re right.

It takes more work to be an optimist. Can you give us one specific thing we each can do that would make a little positive shift in our lives? A prescription, perhaps, doctor.

A prescription. A prescription. That’s right. I would say meta prescription would be to be in the present.

I think that it’s easy for us to be ruminating about things that happened in the past or thinking forward about what we’re anxious about in the future, maybe even just simply being on our cell phones as a form of distraction, but to really be in the present and in the moment when you are interacting with your family, when there’s opportunity to help someone who might need it. I think what I would say too at this more specific level is get out in nature. Go to concerts. If there if you feel awe from religion or spirituality, do those practices, but make space for those.

Once you find what it is that makes you feel awe, there’s no nothing wrong with just going back to that over and over again. So whatever that is for you personally, finding those small or big activities that make you feel that emotion, especially in the case of awe, that would be my prescription.

So you mentioned how being on our phones is a distraction, and there’s no question that all the technology in our lives is contributing, I imagine, to the anxiety. But do you see any positive aspects of all of this Uber omni connection that we’re all experiencing thanks to our phones?

There are two emotions that tend to be quite viral. And actually, I’m gonna ask you what you think those are.

Okay.

If you had to guess.

Love and hate.

Love and hate. Interesting. Okay. So you’re right about hate. Outrage is usually an emotion that tends to go viral.

Probably not that surprising to many people. But the other emotion that researchers who’ve studied this have found that goes viral is awe, and that might also track with your experience if you’ve gotten a message from a friend that’s like, hey. Check out these places to visit around the world or look at this weird crazy thing humans are able to do.

Those typically do elicit awe. And so as much as I would say getting off your phone is a good tactic overall, there are ways in which we seem designed as a species to wanna share those all experiences with others, and social media and phones and computers can be a way that we can do that. So I do wanna say there’s value to social media as a tool for either potentially dividing us, that would be less ideal, but also bringing us together through these experiences of awe. And I think that that speaks to this fundamental choice that we have to lean into one side or the other. Do we want to lean into the darker side, or do we want to lean in to the lighter side? And we have clearly the capacity for either, and if you look at virality, it suggests that as well.

I have spent the last sixty years trying to be more present in the moment, so hopefully I will take your prescription to heart. There’s something about ruminating over the past and worrying about the future that seems irresistible, but apparently life is happening right now. So thank you for joining us right now and sharing your work. I’m a believer, and I appreciate the work you’re all doing to make this a more accepted, routinized part of our lives and the health care system. Nice to see you again.

Yeah. Thank you for letting me share this work. I think part of the impact comes from people outside of my lab, outside of our academic silos, learning that these emotions can be important for well-being and for health. So thank you for giving me that chance.