#340 The New Science of Awe & How It Improves Your Physical & Mental Wellbeing with Dr Dacher Keltner

<p>When was the last time you felt awe? Perhaps it’s an emotion you notice often, evoked by the trees, clouds, or people around you. Or maybe it’s something you associate with more dramatic, less frequent experiences.</p><br><p>Dr Dacher Keltner, has written a sublime book on the subject of awe. It’s called <a href="https://amzn.to/3ZlXeqX" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">A<em>we: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life</em></a><em> </em>and in it<em> </em>he proposes that awe is an emotion that’s all around us, waiting to be discovered – and in doing so, we can transform our health and lives for the better.</p><br><p>Dacher is one of the world’s foremost emotion scientists and Professor of Psychology at the University of California. He’s also Director of the Greater Good Science Center, which studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of happiness and wellbeing. He has spent decades studying the science of happiness and believes that across the world, we are collectively having a moment of reflection and looking for more meaning.</p><br><p>In this conversation, Dacher defines awe as our response to powerful things that are obscure, vast, and mysterious. They’re beyond our frame of reference, making us feel small and filling us with wonder. But you don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon or see the Northern Lights to find them. Having studied people’s understanding and experience of awe in 26 different countries, he’s found eight types that are common and easily available to us all.</p><br><p>They include nature, music, moral beauty (noticing others’ kindness), birth and death, and my favourite ‘collective effervescence’. This is that feeling of coming together with others, moving as one, and sharing the same consciousness – you may have experienced it in a sports stadium, at a music concert, on a dancefloor, in worship, in a choir, or even at parkrun.</p><br><p>We spoke in depth about how birth and death are strong triggers for awe, sharing our own painful yet precio