Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health

Introduction

The paper opens from the observation that a range of transcendent experiences—contact with nature, spiritual practice, moving music, collective dance, and psychedelic experiences—are associated with improvements in mental and physical health, but the mechanisms linking these domains to health remain underdeveloped. Earlier research has shown broad links between positive affect and health, and subsequent work has examined specific positive emotions such as gratitude or compassion; however, the literature has paid relatively little attention to awe, an emotion often considered ineffable. The authors situate awe as a distinct emotional state that may explain how diverse sublime experiences ‘‘repair’’ or strengthen mind and body functioning. Monroy and colleagues set out to synthesise existing empirical and theoretical work on awe and to apply that synthesis to five domains that reliably elicit awe: nature, spiritual and mystical encounters, collective movement (music, dance, ceremony), and psychedelics. Their central proposal is that awe engages five processes—shifts in neurophysiology, diminished self-focus, increased prosocial relationality, greater social integration, and heightened meaning-making—that together form pathways by which awe can benefit mental and physical health. The review aims to integrate evidence across laboratory, daily-diary, computational, neuroscientific, qualitative, and clinical studies to support this model and to highlight directions for future research.