The Walk You've Been Taking Wrong
You've probably walked past the same maple tree, the same cracked stretch of sidewalk, the same neighbor's overgrown hydrangea a hundred times this summer without once actually looking at any of them. That's not a character flaw — it's what a brain optimized for efficiency does with a familiar route, filtering out anything it has already filed as "seen before" so it can spend its attention on the next email, the next errand, the next thing on the list. Most of us walk almost entirely on autopilot, and researchers who study attention have a term for it: inattentional blindness, the phenomenon where you can walk directly past something remarkable and register nothing, because your visual system decided in advance it wasn't worth the processing cost. There's a specific, testable adjustment that reverses this, and it turns an ordinary walk into something that shifts your mood for hours afterward. It has nothing to do with step count, heart rate zones, or the playlist queued up before you leave the house. And it takes about the same fifteen minutes you were going to spend walking anyway.
Psychologists call it an awe walk. The idea sounds soft until you look at what it actually asks you to do: walk somewhere unfamiliar or semi-familiar, deliberately widen your visual field instead of staring at your phone or the pavement, and hunt for something that makes you feel small in a good way — a canopy of trees, a skyline, a stranger doing something quietly remarkable. It is not a synonym for "go outside." It is a specific behavioral instruction, and the specificity is the entire point.
What UCSF Researchers Found When They Sent People Outside to Marvel
In 2020, a research team at the University of California, San Francisco, led by neuroscientist Virginia Sturm, published a study in the journal Emotion that split older adults into two groups for eight weeks. One group took a weekly 15-minute walk as usual. The other group took the same walk but was instructed to actively seek out awe — to notice vastness, novelty, and things that defied easy explanation. Both groups walked the same amount; only one group was told to look for wonder.
The awe-walk group reported greater increases in positive emotion over the eight weeks, and the researchers found a measurable shift in how participants photographed themselves during the walks — their selfies included progressively more of the surrounding landscape and less of their own face, a pattern the team read as a shrinking sense of self relative to the world around them. Dacher Keltner, the UC Berkeley psychologist whose two decades of awe research fed into that study design, has a name for this effect: he calls it the "small self," a state where your ordinary daily fixation on your own to-do list loosens its grip for a while. That loosening matters more than it sounds like it should. A large share of everyday stress runs on rumination — replaying the same unresolved worry in a loop — and rumination requires a stable, centered sense of "me" to keep circling back to. Awe interrupts that loop not by resolving the worry but by making it briefly less interesting than the skyline.
An Awe Walk Is Not a Nature Walk With a Better Name
Here's where people get it wrong: they assume awe requires a national park, a canyon, or at minimum a decent hiking trail within driving distance. It doesn't. Keltner's broader body of work identifies eight reliable triggers for awe, and only one of them is nature — the others include moral beauty (watching someone act with unexpected generosity), music, collective movement, big ideas, and even architecture. A walk through a downtown business district at dusk, when the office towers catch the last light and the sidewalks empty out, can trigger the same response as a hike. The mistake is treating this like Japanese forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, which is specifically about immersion in a forest environment and works through a different mechanism — lowered cortisol tied to phytoncides and green-space exposure. An awe walk works through attention and framing rather than location. You could do one in a parking garage if the light hit the concrete right, though nobody is suggesting you start there.
How to Actually Do One
Skip the fitness tracker for this one — glancing at a wrist screen every few minutes undercuts the entire mechanism, which depends on sustained, undirected visual attention. Before you walk out the door, do this instead:
- Pick a route you don't walk daily, even if it's only two streets over from your usual loop.
- Leave your phone in your pocket on silent, not in your hand.
- Widen your gaze deliberately every few minutes — look up at rooflines, across at a horizon, down a long block — instead of letting your eyes settle on the six feet of sidewalk directly ahead, which is where most people's attention defaults within about thirty seconds of walking.
- Ask yourself, at least twice during the walk, some version of "what here is bigger, older, or stranger than me?"
Fifteen minutes is the dose researchers actually tested, and there's no evidence that doubling the length doubles the benefit, so there's no need to turn this into an hour-long production. Three shorter walks a week beat one long walk on Sunday — the effect looks cumulative and mood-related rather than something that banks up and lasts a full seven days on a single dose.
How this differs from gratitude journaling
Gratitude practices ask you to look inward and catalog what you already have — your health, your relationships, the roof over your head — which is valuable but runs through a fairly effortful, verbal part of the brain. An awe walk asks the opposite: look outward, at something you don't own and can't take credit for, and let the noticing itself be the point. Some people find gratitude journaling starts to feel like homework after a few weeks, a nightly obligation to produce three sentences. An awe walk is harder to turn into homework, mostly because there's nothing to write down unless you want to.
Where This Practice Falls Apart
It won't work if you're doing it to check a box, timed and logged like an extra workout squeezed between meetings.
Awe walks fail for people who treat the instruction to "seek wonder" as one more item on a self-improvement list to optimize. That instruction only functions if there's some slack in your attention to begin with — if you're walking between two back-to-back calls while mentally drafting an email, no amount of widened peripheral vision produces the effect the UCSF study measured. This is also not a substitute for treatment if you're managing clinical depression or an anxiety disorder. It's a mood-regulation habit, not a clinical intervention, and conflating the two does a disservice both to the practice and to anyone who needs more than a walk to feel steady. Worth saying plainly, too: not everyone has a safe, walkable neighborhood to do this in after dark, and no amount of reframing fixes a genuinely unsafe route — daylight hours and a route you already trust matter more than any of the awe-seeking instructions above.
The Longer-Term Case for Bothering With This
A single awe walk shifts mood for an afternoon. The more interesting question is what happens if it becomes a repeated habit rather than a one-off. A 2015 study led by psychologist Jennifer Stellar, then at UC Berkeley, looked at which positive emotions best predicted lower levels of interleukin-6, an inflammatory marker linked to chronic stress and a range of health problems when it stays elevated over time. Awe came out ahead of joy, contentment, amusement, and pride as the strongest predictor. That doesn't mean fifteen minutes of looking at a nice sunset is a substitute for sleep, movement, or actual medical care — it isn't, and no wellness habit should get framed as one. But it's a reasonable argument for treating an awe walk as something closer to a recurring appointment than an occasional treat, the same way a lot of women already treat a standing therapy session or a weekly workout class.
Keltner's 2023 book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, makes a related point that's easy to miss: the amount of awe in an average adult's week has been quietly shrinking for decades, mostly because so much daily life now happens on a six-inch screen where nothing is ever genuinely vast. An awe walk is, in that sense, a fairly deliberate correction — not a cure for anything, just a way of putting something bigger than a notification back in front of your eyes on a regular basis.
The Version That Fits a Late-Summer Week
August has a specific texture in most American cities — the light goes gold earlier, cicadas peak, and there's a particular quality to a 7 p.m. walk once the heat finally breaks that makes the "seek something vast or unexplainable" instruction almost too easy. Take advantage of that before the season turns and the light starts arriving later and leaving sooner. Route yourself past whatever in your neighborhood tends to get taken for granted — a church with an oversized rose window, an alley someone's covered in murals, the spot where the street opens onto a wider view than expected. Fifteen minutes, no earbuds, eyes up. That's the whole practice, and it costs nothing beyond deciding to actually notice something for once.