The Quiet Medicine of Wonder
WONDER · THE NERVOUS SYSTEM · COMING BACK TO YOURSELF
Why awe may be one of the most overlooked ways to calm a tired nervous system — and how to find more of it, right where you stand.
By Abigail Bruce, NP — Holistic Nurse Practitioner, Certified Coach, Meditation Teacher, & Nature Guide.
There is a particular hour at the coast, just after the fog lifts, when the water goes the color of hammered pewter and the whole world seems to exhale. I was standing in it one morning — coffee going cold in my hand, a long day of appointments ahead of me — when a pelican dropped out of the sky like a thrown stone and vanished into the sea. For one suspended second I forgot the day entirely. I forgot the to-do list, the bills, the ache in my lower back. There was only the bird, the water, and the strange lift in my chest that I have no better word for than wonder.
It lasted maybe four seconds. And then the world came back. But I noticed, walking up the path to my car, that my shoulders had dropped. My breath had slowed. Something in me had been reset — quietly, without my doing anything at all.
I have spent years now sitting with people in the hardest passages of their lives — in hospital rooms, in my practice, at the edges of grief and reinvention and the long tiredness we have learned to call burnout. And I have come to believe that what happened on that beach is not a small thing. It is medicine. We are only beginning to understand how it works.
We are a tired people, and we know it
If you are reading this, there is a fair chance your nervous system is running a little hot. Most of the people I meet are not in crisis, exactly. They are simply worn — carrying a low, humming vigilance that never quite switches off. The mind loops. The jaw is tight before breakfast. Rest does not feel like rest. We have become very good at surviving our lives and strangely out of practice at inhabiting them.
There is a name in physiology for the state so many of us live in: sympathetic activation — the body’s fight-or-flight gear, idling too long. It is meant to be a brief, lifesaving surge, not a way of life. When it becomes a way of life, the body pays: the sleep frays, the gut complains, the mood thins, and that self-referential part of the brain that narrates our worries keeps the engine running through the night.
We reach, understandably, for the big fixes. The retreat. The overhaul. The someday when things finally calm down. But the research that has most changed how I work points somewhere much closer and much smaller — to an emotion we tend to file under nice, but optional: awe.
What the science is quietly saying about awe
Awe is what we feel in the presence of something vast enough to stretch our usual frame of reference — a night sky, a piece of music that lifts the hair on your arms, an act of startling kindness, the ocean, a redwood, a newborn’s first cry. Dacher Keltner, the University of California, Berkeley psychologist who has studied it for decades, describes it as our response to vast and mysterious things we cannot quite take in. For a long time, science treated it as a pleasant garnish on life. That is changing.
It lowers the body’s alarm. Neuroscientist Virginia Sturm at UC San Francisco has shown that awe helps move the body out of fight-or-flight and into the calmer “rest-and-digest” state — the parasympathetic gear where the heart slows, the breath deepens, and repair becomes possible. Awe is one of the few emotional states that does this almost immediately.
It quiets the looping mind. Brain research has found that awe reduces activity in the default mode network — the circuitry behind self-focused rumination, the part of us that replays conversations and rehearses worry. In plain terms, awe turns down the inner monologue. Many of the people I work with describe the felt result without knowing the science: they say they suddenly feel in tune with the world instead of alone in their own heads.
It may even calm inflammation. In a striking 2015 study from UC Berkeley, published in the journal Emotion, researchers measured markers of inflammation in more than two hundred young adults and asked how often they felt various positive emotions. Of all of them — joy, love, compassion, pride — awe was the strongest predictor of lower interleukin-6, a key inflammatory marker. As Scientific American reported of the work, more positive emotion, and awe most of all, tracked with lower inflammation. Chronic inflammation sits underneath a sobering range of illness — the idea that wonder could move that needle was not something medicine had taken seriously.
It even bends our sense of time. Other research has found that after a moment of awe, people feel they have more time, not less — and become more patient, more generous, more present. The thing that feels like a luxury we cannot afford turns out to give time back.
Wonder is not childish. It is intelligence.
Here is where I want to say the thing I most believe. We have been taught to think of wonder as something we grow out of — sweet in a child, a little embarrassing in an adult with responsibilities. I think we have it exactly backwards. Wonder is not a distraction from real life. It is a way of perceiving real life. It is a form of information — a way the body and the soul orient toward what matters, what is alive, what is true. It interrupts autopilot and returns us to relationship: with the world, with one another, with ourselves.
This is not a soft idea bolted onto hard science. The deeper traditions of my own field have always known it. The nurse theorist Jean Watson — whose work braids rigorous caring science with the frankly sacred — built her entire framework on a single conviction: that we cannot be separated from one another, from nature, or from the larger universe we belong to. That the moment of true care is transpersonal — a meeting that changes both people. Awe, it turns out, is one of the surest doorways back into that belonging. The science of the nervous system and the oldest wisdom of healing are, on this, saying the same thing.
How to find more of it, right where you stand
The most freeing finding in all of this is that awe is not rare and does not require a plane ticket. Keltner’s research across many cultures found that the most common source of everyday awe is not the Grand Canyon — it is other people: their courage, their kindness, their resilience. Awe is available in the ordinary, which means none of us has to leave our life to find it. A few gentle practices I return to, and offer my clients:
1. Take an awe walk. Walk somewhere — a trail, a shoreline, even a tree-lined block — with one instruction: look for what is vast, beautiful, or surprising. Let your attention go wide. Researchers find that walking with the deliberate intention to notice measurably increases awe. Begin, if you can, with three slow breaths; a calm body has more room for wonder.
2. Lower your gaze to the small. Wonder lives in scale at both ends. The veins of a leaf. Light moving on water. The architecture of a single feather. You do not need the cosmos; you need attention.
3. Collect moral beauty. Notice, and let yourself be moved by, the goodness in others — the stranger’s patience, a friend’s courage through a hard year. This is awe too, and it knits us back to one another.
4. Let it be brief. My pelican lasted four seconds. You are not failing if wonder is fleeting. The body still registers it. Stacked over days, these small resets are not nothing — they are, quietly, a kind of medicine.
None of this is an argument against the hard, practical work of a life — the appointments, the healing, the bills, the real grief that no sunset resolves. I am not offering escape. I am offering the opposite: an invitation back into your life, more awake to it. Beauty does not deny the difficulty. It reminds us, in the middle of the difficulty, that we are still alive — and being alive is the whole astonishing point.
So tomorrow, somewhere between the inbox and the evening, let yourself stop for four seconds in front of something larger than your worry. Watch the light. Watch the bird. Let your shoulders drop. Your nervous system already knows what to do with it. You are simply remembering how to let it.
Do not miss your own becoming.
If something in you leaned toward this
I work with people navigating exactly these passages — burnout, big change, grief, reinvention, the long work of coming back to yourself. If you would like to explore working together, I offer a free discovery call. You can reach me directly at abigail@abigailmindbodysoul.com, or through the contact page. I would love to walk with you a while.
Keep reading
•When the Body Carries Too Much: Stress, Spirit, and the Need to Recalibrate — on how stress lives in the body, and listening to it as a signal.
• Reconnecting with Earth's Rhythms: 10 Elemental Practices to Restore Your Balance — on the earth as teacher and the body as compass.
Abigail Bruce is a double board-certified nurse practitioner, certified coach, hypnotherapist, doula, ordained minister, and nature guide. This article and her coaching are offered in a coaching and educational capacity and personal sharing for inspiration, not as medical or mental-health treatment, and do not create a provider–patient relationship. Nothing here is a substitute for care from your own physician, nurse practitioner, or licensed mental-health provider. If you are in crisis, please contact a licensed professional or emergency services.
Sources & inspiration
Stellar, J. E., et al. (2015). "Positive Affect and Markers of Inflammation: Discrete Positive Emotions Predict Lower Levels of Inflammatory Cytokines." Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. (PubMed: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25603133) Dacher Keltner, Awe (2023); UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. Virginia Sturm et al., awe-walk research, UCSF.
Dacher Keltner's awe research — via UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center (greatergood.berkeley.edu). His book Awe (2023) is the citable popular source; the eight-categories finding lives there.
Virginia Sturm (UCSF) — the "awe walk" / nervous-system work. Her UCSF faculty page and the awe-walk study (Sturm et al., published in Emotion, 2022) are the primary sources.
Default mode network + awe — this comes from several studies; if you want one clean citation, search "awe default mode network self-diminishment" for the peer-reviewed work.
