An awe walk is a simple, intentional walk where you shift your attention outward and focus on things that feel vast, surprising, or beautiful. Developed by researchers at UC San Francisco, the practice was tested in a clinical trial where participants took weekly 15-minute walks for eight weeks. Those instructed to seek out awe during their walks reported more positive emotions, greater joy, and less daily distress compared to people who just walked normally.
How an Awe Walk Differs From a Regular Walk
On any walk, you might enjoy fresh air and movement. An awe walk adds a specific mental shift: you deliberately look for things that feel larger than yourself, unexpectedly complex, or simply delightful. The goal is to notice what you’d normally walk past. A spiderweb catching light, the sheer scale of a building, the sound of wind moving through a canopy of trees. The key distinction is attention. Instead of walking while planning your evening or replaying a conversation, you keep redirecting your focus to the sensory world around you.
Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center describe it as approaching your surroundings “with fresh eyes, imagining that you’re experiencing it for the first time.” That reframing, treating the familiar as novel, is what separates an awe walk from exercise or a casual stroll.
What Happens in Your Body During Awe
Awe triggers a distinctive physiological pattern. It increases vagal tone, meaning your vagus nerve (the long nerve that connects your brain to your gut and heart) becomes more active. Higher vagal tone is associated with a calmer cardiovascular system and better emotional regulation. At the same time, awe reduces activation of your sympathetic nervous system, the “fight or flight” response, essentially dialing down stress.
There’s also an anti-inflammatory effect. Of many positive emotions studied, awe most strongly predicted lower levels of a key inflammation marker in the blood. And awe prompted by witnessing moral courage or kindness has been linked to increased release of oxytocin, a hormone tied to trust and social bonding.
Perhaps the most interesting finding involves the brain’s default mode network, the regions most active during self-focused thinking like rumination, worry, and autobiography. Awe quiets this network, creating what researchers describe as a “small self” effect. You become less consumed by your own concerns because your brain is literally less engaged in self-referential processing. This is the same neural pattern seen with psychedelic experiences, though awe achieves it through ordinary perception.
What the Research Actually Found
The landmark study, led by Virginia Sturm at UCSF, enrolled healthy adults aged 40 to 90. Half were assigned to take awe walks; the other half took regular walks on the same schedule (at least one 15-minute walk per week for eight weeks). Both groups walked the same amount, so any differences came from the mental approach, not the physical activity.
Over the eight weeks, the awe walk group showed growing increases in prosocial positive emotions like compassion, gratitude, and connectedness, both during their walks and in daily life outside of walking. Each additional awe walk was associated with a measurable bump in these daily prosocial feelings, suggesting a dose-response relationship: the more awe walks someone took, the stronger the effect. The awe walkers also smiled more intensely in selfies taken during walks, and that smile intensity grew over time. Daily distress declined as well.
The study did have limits. It didn’t find significant changes in trait-level anxiety, depression, or life satisfaction between the two groups. The benefits showed up in moment-to-moment emotional experience and daily mood rather than in longer-term psychological diagnoses. This suggests awe walks work more like a daily mood regulator than a treatment for clinical conditions.
Nature Works Best, but Cities Work Too
You don’t need a national park. Research using immersive environments found that urban settings can elicit just as much awe as natural ones. A stunning piece of architecture, a busy intersection full of human activity, or an unexpected mural can all trigger the response. That said, nature has a broader effect on wellbeing. In studies comparing natural and urban awe-inducing environments, both reduced feelings of depression and boosted positive mood equally. But only natural settings also reduced anxiety and negative feelings compared to a neutral baseline. Cities inspired awe without fully calming the nervous system the way nature did.
The practical takeaway: walk wherever you can. A tree-lined neighborhood street, a riverfront path, or a park will likely give you the fullest benefit. But if you’re limited to an urban environment, awe is still available.
How to Take an Awe Walk
The protocol used in research is straightforward. Plan for at least 15 minutes, though longer is fine. Before you start, turn off your phone or leave it behind entirely. Devices pull your attention inward, which is the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
Begin with a slow, deep breath. Count to six as you inhale and seven as you exhale. This slightly longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and helps you settle into the present moment. Come back to this breath periodically throughout your walk.
As you move, focus on physical sensations first: the ground under your feet, air on your skin, ambient sounds, smells. Then shift your awareness outward and look for things that feel vast, impressively complex, unexpected, or that simply surprise and delight you. Ask yourself open-ended questions like “What is new, unknown, or unexplored about what’s around me?” This kind of curious questioning keeps your mind in discovery mode rather than autopilot.
You don’t need to find something breathtaking every time. Awe exists on a spectrum. The pattern of light through leaves, the intricate structure of a flower, the sheer number of strangers going about their lives: all of these qualify. The practice is less about finding the perfect stimulus and more about training yourself to notice what’s already there.
How Often and How Long
The UCSF study used a minimum of one 15-minute walk per week for eight weeks, and that was enough to produce measurable emotional changes. That’s an accessible bar for most people. The dose-response data also showed that participants who took more awe walks saw greater benefits, so if you can fit in two or three per week, the effects may compound. There’s no established upper limit or point of diminishing returns in the current research.
Fifteen minutes is a floor, not a ceiling. If your walk naturally extends to 30 or 45 minutes, the same principles apply. The consistency matters more than the duration of any single session. Like most practices that shift emotional habits, the effect builds over weeks of repetition rather than arriving in a single outing.