Zoo Camp fills up at the speed of light. Blink, and all the spots are gone.
And I blinked this spring.
My kids were so disappointed that they didn’t get in that I decided to create our own Zoo Camp experience. We bought a membership to Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, SC, and planned to make a few visits this summer.
As a result, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing a lot of this sound: “AWWWWWWWWWW!” (Imagine the pitch climbing higher with each W.)
We enter the Conservation Outpost tunnel and see the red ruffed lemurs lazing around. “AWWWWW!”
Lorikeets land on our arms and their plumage shines as they drink nectar from the cups of nectar nestled in our fingers. “AWWWWWWWW!”
We feed lettuce to the giraffes and their tongues lick our fingers while they retrieve the leaves. … OK, this one got an “EWWW!”
But you get the picture: My children erupt in adoration every time they round a corner and spot another animal.
Our most recent zoo trip stretched on for four hours as it included rock climbing, a ropes course, multiple carousel rides and a train ride, brushing goats, and more. Time flew. But one of the kids said, “It feels like we were here for a lot longer because we did so much.”
This sense that time sped up and slowed down at the same time has a lot to do with the cuteness explosion my kids experience when spotting their favorite animals, and maybe with the thrill of balancing across ropes course obstacles 30 feet in the air. That’s because awe-inspiring experiences can alter our perception of time and help us give more purpose to every second.
And if you’re looking for more time for the things that really matter, you might do well to seek more awe — or AWWW!
The power of awe
Awe is an emotion that marries two experiences: vastness and accommodation, according to the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt. “Vastness refers to anything … much larger than the self, or the self's ordinary level of experience or frame of reference,” they wrote in 2003. Accommodation, they proposed, is about adjusting your mindset to incorporate a new experience or truth.
Numerous studies have shown how awe boosts our well-being and our relationships to others. But awe also changes how we experience time. A 2012 study found that people who experienced awe were less likely to feel time-starved afterward and more likely to volunteer time to help others.
There are several reasons why awe helps us feel like we have more time. One, suggested by the 2012 study’s authors, is that “experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, [which] underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.”
Second, awe helps us see the big picture. “Awe experiences are self-transcendent,” Summer Allen, a fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, wrote. “They shift our attention away from ourselves [and] make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves.”
Third, awe calms our “default mode network,” the brain’s factory that constantly churns out mind-wandering thoughts about ourselves and what-ifs. It’s a vital part of healthy brain activity, but it can easily get out of hand, driving us deeper into rumination, negative thoughts, worry and social comparison. Brain imaging studies have shown that feeling awe slows this network and activates neurons that normally light up only when we are working on a specific goal. “Absorption in awe may be accompanied by a reduction in mind-wandering and spontaneous self-reflective thought,” the authors wrote.
If you put these three things together, you get a feeling of expanded time. Your rapid-fire self-thought factory slows down, so there is less mental content crammed into each milisecond. This gives you time to focus on something in front of you at the moment, which reminds you that you are part of something bigger. Time is on your side.
Even something as simple as a bird hopping in a tree can expand our awareness and remind us that we’re part of something bigger and more eternal than the electronics in our pockets. Awe, and its power to expand time, could be just around the corner.
How to find more awe
Unfortunately, many aspects of life today seem almost designed to reduce awe and, therefore, starve us of time.
Social media gives us nearly unlimited opportunities to compare ourselves to others and to go through mental time travel, ruminating about the past, stressing out over FOMO, and worrying about things we can’t change.
Smartphone notifications keep us focused on the non-vast. We can literally zero in on the latest Temu sale and miss a magnificent white rhino parading past us at the zoo.
Life is 24/7, with nonstop work where there is always something more to be done. It feels like we need to think and run at a mile a minute to keep up.
Fortunately, I believe awe can be just around the corner more often than we think. There are several steps we can take to seek more awe in our lives.
Look for awe.
In June 2020, a few months into COVID pandemic, a group of researchers assigned some study participants to keep a daily journal about their favorite experience from each day. Their results showed that the amount of awe people felt increased as the habit continued, and that awe supported their feelings of well-being. This assignment likely prompted people to look for awe. Therefore, they saw it more often.
So to experience more awe, look for it. Record it in a journal, or tell someone about it each day. As you train your mind to look for transcendent experiences, you will be more likely to find them, or to seek them out.
Read literature, experience art
Reading also invites more awe into our lives. Whether you’re reading the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, classic poetry or modern sci-fi, literature allows you to experience something vast — the accumulated wisdom of ages, the experience of other people, or the beauty of language — and at the same time update your concept of the world to encompass the experience and perspective of someone else, and maybe to adjust to the unexpected plot twists.
Ironically, reading excites activity in the brain’s default network because its circuits are used to simulate the story. But this particular kind of default network activity has an advantage over the standard operations that play out scenarios from our own lives on repeat. By having us simulate other people’s lives and emotions, it gets our brains off of ourselves, setting us up for transcendent awe.
We can get similar experiences from experiencing art. Art might mimic the natural beauty of our world, or it may stretch our imaginations about what is humanly possible, whether that be mind-bending visual art or a note that you had no idea human vocal cords could reach.
As one paper notes, “When listening to a moving piece of music, people may feel taken aback, feel small and part of the music, and be transported to a different state of mind with different laws of time, space, and causality.”
Spend more time in nature.
Natural scenes provoke awe when they make us pause, appreciate beauty in the world, and recall what the world is like outside of our electronics-mediated experience. Also, interacting with nature has been shown to restore our focus by guiding our thoughts gently. Gorgeous sunsets, vast canyons, powerful rivers, singing birds. All of these things can help us wrap ourselves in the universe and awe in our tiny place there.
Slow down.
It might seem counterintuitive to slow down our pace when the world seems to spin faster and faster. But the world will always try to spin faster. The only way to catch up with it, then, is to slow down. The other steps I’ve discussed — looking for awe, reading, and spending time in nature — require a slower approach to life. But as they help us find more awe, they help slow the world down for us. We will feel like we have more time.
I’ve been trying to slow my pace at key times. Sometimes I leave my phone on my desk and take a walking break at work. Or I close my eyes while waiting for a web page to load, rather than opening another tab to start the next page loading. So far, these slower moments have helped me create connection.
Finding awe in the small
Last week, I took my son to the library after a medical appointment. The walk from the parking spot to the library door would normally be a moment to check for texts or emails. But I left my phone in my pocket.
As we passed a tree, my son exclaimed, “Cute bird!” We paused and looked at the short tree nearby until he spotted the bird hopping from branch to branch. We smiled together and then continued our walk to the library.
Now that’s small. There’s nothing vast about that bird that could fit in the palm of my hand. But it helped me find a piece of awe in the concrete jungle of downtown Columbia.
Remember that Haidt and Keltner said vastness can refer to something larger than “the self’s ordinary … frame of reference.” When we spend hours of our days handling details in emails and managing notifications and social content on a 3x4 screen, even something as simple as a bird hopping in a tree can expand our awareness and remind us that we’re part of something bigger and more eternal than the electronics in our pockets.
And that’s good, because it means that awe, and its power to expand time, could be just around the corner. And if time slows down enough, my kids just might get to go to Zoo Camp next year.
Thanks for reading this edition of Idea Link! I have several articles in the works. Apparently I need more awe in life so I’ll have time to finish writing them. But in the meantime, please share this article with one person in your life who you think would say “Heck yes!” to the power of awe.