How Awe Helps You Overcome Anxiety

Most people have had the experience of losing themselves while listening to a musical album, viewing art, watching an athlete’s peak performance, or hiking in nature.

What all of these events have in common is that they minimize your ego. Not ego in the sense of look how great I am, but ego in the simplest sense: I am.

During awesome experiences, we forget about ourselves, or at least our usual ways of conceptualizing it. And when there is no self to worry about, well, then there’s not much to worry about at all. Anxiety dissipates and we feel not only moved but also free.

The anxiety-reducing effect of awe is true subjectively, in that just about all of us have experienced it at one point or another. But it is also becoming true objectively, thanks to modern neuroscience. For instance one recent study, published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, found that when people are experiencing awe, activity decreases in the default-mode network, or the part of the brain associated with referential (i.e., “I am”) thinking.

The artist Marcel Duchamp said, “Art cannot be understood through the intellect but is felt through an emotion presenting some analogy with a religious faith or sexual attraction — an aesthetic echo. The ‘victim’ of an aesthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, of a…