Nature as Medicine: The Research on Awe, Wonder, and Transcendence

I had a patient — I'll call her Elena — who came to me in the middle of what she described as an emotional flatness that had descended on her life over the preceding two years. No dramatic cause. No identifiable depression. Just a gradual graying of experience. Things that used to move her no longer did. She went through her days efficiently and effectively and felt almost nothing.

We worked together on sleep, nutrition, exercise, social connection. All of it helped incrementally. And then she told me about a trip she had taken to a national park — the first time she had spent real time in nature in years. She described standing at the edge of a canyon at dusk, watching the color drain from the sky, and feeling something she had forgotten was possible: awe.

"I felt small," she said. "And it was the best I'd felt in two years."

The science behind what Elena experienced is increasingly robust — and it suggests that access to nature, awe, and wonder may be one of the most overlooked elements of human wellbeing.

The Biology of Awe

Awe is the emotion we experience in the presence of something vast, beautiful, or powerful that exceeds our current frameworks for understanding the world. The Grand Canyon. A symphony that moves you to tears. The birth of a child. The night sky far from city lights. An extraordinary act of human courage or generosity.

For a long time, awe was considered a secondary emotion — pleasant but not particularly important to study. The last decade has dramatically changed that view.

Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley has built one of the most comprehensive research programs on awe ever conducted. His findings:

Awe reduces inflammatory cytokines. In a 2015 study, participants who reported more frequent experiences of awe showed lower levels of IL-6 and other inflammatory markers in their blood — the same markers associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, and accelerated aging. A single awe experience can measurably change inflammatory biology.

Awe expands the perceived sense of time. One of the most striking findings: awe makes people feel they have more time available — not because it slows the clock, but because it shifts attention away from the narrow self and toward the vast present moment. People in awe-inducing conditions were more willing to volunteer time for others and reported greater present-moment satisfaction.

Awe promotes prosocial behavior. People who had just experienced awe were more likely to help strangers, donate money, and report greater feelings of connection to other people and to humanity as a whole. Awe appears to quiet the ego — the self-referential machinery that separates us from each other — and in its place create something closer to unity.

Awe reduces rumination. People who spent time in beautiful natural settings showed significant reductions in a neural pattern called self-referential processing — the loop of repetitive, self-focused thought associated with depression and anxiety. Nature literally quiets the inner critic.

The Shinrin-Yoku Research

The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku — "forest bathing," or the mindful practice of walking in forested environments — has generated an impressive body of research since the 1980s, when the Japanese government began formally studying it as a public health intervention.

The findings consistently show:

• 20–30 minutes of walking in a forested environment reduces cortisol levels significantly more than the same walk in an urban environment
• Exposure to the phytoncides (aromatic compounds released by trees) measurably increases natural killer cell activity — the immune system's primary defense against cancer cells
• Blood pressure, heart rate, and nervous system arousal all decrease more rapidly in natural settings than in urban ones
• Mood improvements from forest walking persist for days after the walk

A 2019 study in Scientific Reports found that spending at least two hours per week in natural settings was associated with significantly higher wellbeing and health — and that the benefits plateaued at around five hours weekly. Two hours per week is twenty minutes per day. That's a walk at lunch.

What Makes Nature Different

The leading theory for why natural environments produce such consistent, measurable benefits is Attention Restoration Theory, developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. Their research distinguishes between two kinds of attention:

Directed attention — the focused, effortful attention we use for tasks, decision-making, and screen use. This resource is limited and depletes with use.

Soft fascination — the effortless, gentle engagement of attention that natural environments produce. The movement of water. The patterns of leaves. The sound of wind in branches. This type of engagement doesn't deplete directed attention — it restores it.

Natural settings are uniquely effective at providing "soft fascination" — which is why time outdoors reliably restores cognitive function and emotional wellbeing in a way that screen-based relaxation does not.

A Prescription for the Natural World

I began writing what I jokingly call "nature prescriptions" for certain patients — specific recommendations for time in natural settings, delivered with the same seriousness I give medication recommendations.

Here is what the research supports:

Daily: 20 minutes outdoors — even in a city park — produces measurable mood and attention benefits.

Weekly: At least two hours in a natural setting that involves some distance from human infrastructure. A forest, a beach, a trail, a body of water.

Monthly: One longer experience of genuine wildness — a place where the human presence is minimal and the natural world is expansive. These are the experiences most likely to produce awe.

We evolved in intimate relationship with the natural world. Our nervous systems were calibrated by millions of years of existence in natural environments. The modern indoor, screen-based life is, from the perspective of evolutionary biology, a very recent and very strange experiment — and our bodies register its strangeness in elevated cortisol, impaired sleep, and the kind of emotional flatness that Elena described.

The cure, in part, is older than medicine. It is available in any park, any tree-lined street, any body of water.

Go outside. Look up. Let yourself feel small.

It turns out that smallness, in the face of something genuinely vast and beautiful, is precisely the medicine many of us most need.

— Dr. Lemmon