Awe in Nature Heals: Evidence from Military Veterans, At-Risk Youth, and College Students

Nature as Therapist: The Empirical Evidence

Anderson, Monroy, and Keltner’s 2018 paper moves the study of awe from laboratory to wilderness and from measurement to intervention. Working with three populations — military veterans with PTSD symptoms, at-risk youth from underserved communities, and college students experiencing high stress — the researchers designed multi-day white-water rafting experiences on the American River system in California. The trips were not framed as therapy but as outdoor recreation; the research question was whether the awe elicited by immersion in dramatic natural landscapes would produce measurable psychological benefits. It did. Across all three populations, participants reported significant reductions in stress, increases in well-being, and improvements in social connectedness. Veterans showed marked decreases in PTSD symptom severity. Critically, when the researchers controlled for other positive emotions experienced during the trips — happiness, pride, amusement — awe alone accounted for the therapeutic gains. The river healed not because it was fun but because it was vast.

The Body Before the Mountain

What makes this paper significant for depth psychology is its implicit demonstration that certain forms of healing bypass the cognitive apparatus entirely. The veterans on these rafting trips were not narrating their trauma, restructuring their cognitions, or processing their memories in any therapeutically supervised way. They were being carried by water through canyons, confronted by the scale of geological time, dwarfed by the physical immensity of the natural world. The healing occurred through the body’s direct encounter with vastness — through what Merleau-Ponty called the “flesh of the world” and what depth psychology recognizes as the ego’s submission to something that exceeds it. Van der Kolk’s central thesis in The Body Keeps the Score — that trauma lodges in the body and must be addressed somatically — finds unexpected support in Anderson’s data. Awe in nature appears to function as a somatic intervention: the body registers safety not through verbal reassurance but through the overwhelming evidence of a world that continues to be beautiful, vast, and indifferent to the traumas that have contracted the self.

The Small Self and the Restored Connection

Anderson’s finding that awe increases social connectedness resonates with Piff’s “small self” research and extends it into clinical territory. The veterans who experienced the most awe also reported the greatest improvements in social functioning — a finding that matters enormously for a population in which social withdrawal and relational disconnection are among the most treatment-resistant features of PTSD. The polyvagal framework suggests a mechanism: awe may activate the ventral vagal complex — the neural substrate of social engagement — by signaling that the environment is safe enough for the organism to shift from defensive mobilization to relational openness. The river’s vastness communicates safety precisely because it is not personal, not threatening, not asking anything of the traumatized individual. It simply is. And in that impersonal immensity, the nervous system finds permission to stand down.

Awe as Intervention: Clinical Implications

This paper opens a domain of therapeutic possibility that conventional clinical models have largely ignored. If awe-rich nature experiences produce measurable reductions in trauma symptoms through mechanisms that do not require cognitive engagement, verbalization, or therapeutic relationship, then the field must reckon with the possibility that the natural world itself functions as a therapeutic agent — not metaphorically but empirically. For depth psychology, this is not surprising. The tradition has always insisted that the psyche is embedded in and addressed by the more-than-human world. What Anderson provides is the data that institutional medicine requires before it can take that insistence seriously.