One 15-minute walk a week with a single instruction, look for what surprises you, lifted people's mood over two months. It costs nothing, and a city delivers it as well as a forest.
Of everything in the research on walking and mood, the awe walk is the finding I recommend most. It costs nothing and asks for one small change in where you point your attention.
An awe walk is an ordinary walk with one instruction: notice things that are vast, surprising, or bigger than you. A tree that has been there a century. The pattern of a wall. The sky doing something. In the study that named it, this single instruction changed how people felt across two months.
The study that put awe walks on the map came out of the University of California, San Francisco. A team asked 60 healthy older adults to take one 15-minute outdoor walk a week for eight weeks. Half were told simply to walk. The other half were told to approach the walk with fresh eyes, as a child might, and look for whatever inspired awe. Both groups took a selfie on each walk and rated their emotions afterwards.
Over the eight weeks, the awe walkers reported growing compassion, gratitude and admiration, and less daily distress, while the ordinary walkers reported none of those shifts. Their selfies changed too. Week by week they made themselves smaller in the frame and gave more space to the scene, and their smiles grew. It is one study of 60 people, and it is the one that started the field.
Awe also seems to keep working after the moment has passed. In a series of studies published in the journal Emotion, psychologists followed military veterans and young people from underserved communities on white-water rafting trips, then tracked college students through their everyday lives. On the river, the amount of awe people felt predicted how much their wellbeing and stress symptoms had improved a week later, more than any other emotion they reported. Among the students, the everyday brushes with nature that carried a sense of awe were the ones linked to feeling better.
There is a good explanation for why. Time in nature is known to reduce rumination, the looping, self-focused thinking that feeds anxiety and low mood. When researchers in Lisbon tested what drives that effect, the drop in rumination ran through awe and the lift in mood that comes with it. People who felt more awe during their time outside ruminated less afterwards.
The eight-week result came from walking, and a walk keeps putting new things in front of you, which is what awe feeds on. If walking is out, the same instruction still works on whatever is in view. A window with sky in it, a piece of music that overwhelms you, a photograph of a place you have never been, a clear night. The rafting studies found awe in people sitting in a boat.
No, and that is why it is useful. Awe includes a small sense of being humbled or unsettled. The researchers call it the small self, and that shift of attention away from yourself is the useful part.
Yes. The eight-week study was run in and around San Francisco, and the instruction was simply to look for what felt vast or new, which a city offers as readily as a forest.
The change in the study built over weeks. Give it three or four walks before judging.
If you would like the instruction delivered in your ear as you go, The Little Glimmers is a 45-minute walk on the High Line built around noticing.
On the science: every study here is real. The underlined phrases link straight to the papers, and the full list is below. The summaries and takeaways are my own reading, simplified to be useful rather than complete.
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