Micro-dosing ego death
A dose of awe can ease an overwhelmed nervous system
A couple of weeks ago, my family and I went to a local art exhibit. It featured dozens of local artists, each with their own little booth. As soon as we walked in and saw how many exhibits there were, I was immediately overwhelmed with feelings. By the time we’d walked down the first path of displays, I couldn’t stop the tears.
My emotions were bubbling up uncontrollably. While I hope the artists took some pride in seeing their work move a stranger to tears, my reaction wasn’t triggered by one specific piece of art.
It was the whole collective experience.
It was viewing these amazing works in person, seeing the human responsible for them, and having the opportunity to say, “Wow, I just love this, you did something truly amazing here!” Real people, who had used their hands and imaginations to create these pieces of beauty, brought something new and important into the universe. That’s actual magic, if you ask me.
I didn’t expect such a huge outpouring of emotion. Though I probably should have. I’ve always been someone who cries in the presence of something grand, whether it’s hearing live music, watching a firework display, or seeing mountains and the ocean for the first time. Awe has always affected me deeply. But I’d never experienced it at a general art exhibit with this kind of raw intensity.
Perhaps it hit differently because of how much my life has changed since the last time I’d been to such an event. In the past, I worked in busy salons, surrounded by people creating, collaborating, and doing tactile things with their hands every single day. I also got to go to plenty of live music events and parades because my oldest was in band and chorus throughout school.
Today, my reality looks much different. Working as a remote freelancer means I am constantly inundated with AI and rapidly growing technology, all from home in my tiny little bubble. When you combine that digital exhaustion with the deep isolation that so often comes with being a parent to an autistic child, your world can start to feel small and lonely. Being able to step into that exhibit and share a meaningful experience with my family and a tent full of strangers felt like a magical, even if temporary, desperately needed lifeline of connection.
When those tears started bubbling up, my body was undergoing a neurophysiological shift. People often talk about life-changing encounters with art or nature as spiritual, but researchers have mapped out exactly how awe affects an overloaded nervous system.
Awe is sparked when we witness something so vast, complex, or beautiful that it completely disrupts our everyday frame of reference, and it might be one of the most profound, underutilized tools we possess to heal our bodies, ease our isolation, and reclaim our connection to the world.
Experiencing awe activates and elevates our vagal tone while decreasing the over-activation of our fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system, easing panic and anxiety. Studies also show that it dramatically reduces activation in the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), the region responsible for self-reflective processing, ego, and internal rumination.
A hyper-focused attention on the self and our immediate stressors is a direct path to mental health struggles like anxiety or depression, but research confirms that awe can cause a healthy diminishment of the ego. By gently shrinking our personal significance, we can shift the internal spotlight away from narrow self-interest and redirect it outward toward the world around us, expanding our collective empathy.
Researcher Yang Bai and colleagues found that awe can also operate as a shield against systemic burnout. People who experience awe regularly view their daily struggles as significantly less bothersome and overwhelming.
Walking through the exhibits, I was reminded that my family and I are part of a sprawling, beautiful collective full of humans doing amazing things.
Everyday awe
You don’t need to journey to the Grand Canyon, attend a weekend-long music festival, or wait for a local art exhibit to access the benefits of awe. You can actively choose to seek it out in small, easy ways throughout your day:
Look for human kindness. Seek out stories of resilience or random acts of kindness.
Take an ‘awe walk’ and observe nature’s awesomeness, like the patterns on plants, insect movements, birds flying, clouds shifting, a sunset/rise, stars, etc.
Pop on some headphones and dedicate a little time to focus entirely on a piece of complex music without multitasking.
Experiencing awe is basically like micro-dosing ego death. When you can have these moments where you acknowledge how delightfully insignificant you are in relation to the vastness of the universe, you’re able to feel more connected to it and less self-focused. Which literally makes you a happier, healthier human.
When the feelings get too big, find something or somewhere that helps you feel small, in the best of ways.
Stay kind. Stay curious. <3
Nikki
Hey Look! A cool plant!
The Spiral Aloe
Aloe polyphylla
What it is: The Spiral Aloe (Aloe polyphylla) is a succulent native exclusively to the high-altitude, rocky peaks of the Maluti Mountains in Lesotho, Africa. This resilient plant thrives on steep basalt cliffs and can survive freezing temperatures and heavy snow.
Why it’s cool: As the plant matures, it coils its sharp, fleshy leaves into a perfect clockwise or counter-clockwise spiral, an awesome real-world display of the Fibonacci sequence in nature! What makes it even cooler is that young plants don’t start this way. They grow in a seemingly chaotic cluster at first, twisting into their signature geometric spiral once they reach about a foot in diameter.
Some things I found interesting and thought you might too
Researchers have discovered that fog isn’t just damp air, but a floating, living aquatic ecosystem teeming with millions of active bacteria that actually help clean our skies by consuming atmospheric pollutants.
New fossil evidence reveals that when the dinosaur-killing asteroid plunged Earth into a dark mass extinction 66 million years ago, the fungi kingdom seized the moment to thrive globally by feasting on the planetary decay.
Scientists have launched a massive global initiative utilizing AI to map neurodegenerative disorders at a cellular level, aiming to fast-track targeted gene therapies for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Google has requested U.S. government permission to release 32 million sterile male mosquitoes across California and Florida in a tech-driven effort to crash wild populations and stop the spread of deadly illnesses like dengue fever.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein