Awe Walks Might Be Better Than Meditation for Some People—Here’s Why
You sit down to meditate. Three breaths in, your brain remembers an email, tonight’s dinner, something mildly embarrassing you said in 2019, and the mysterious noise your car made yesterday. Instead of emerging serene, you emerge with a surprisingly detailed administrative agenda.
Meditation can be genuinely helpful, and research supports benefits for anxiety, psychological stress, and other aspects of well-being. But sitting still and focusing inward is not everyone’s easiest doorway into calm; for some people, an awe walk may offer another route—one that gives the mind something meaningful to notice instead of repeatedly asking it not to wander.
Awe Gives a Busy Brain Somewhere Else to Look
Traditional mindfulness meditation often asks you to notice thoughts, sensations, or breathing without becoming carried away by them. That skill can be enormously useful, but if your internal monologue currently has the energy of six people talking during a conference call, focusing inward may initially feel difficult.
That shift may be particularly appealing to people who become more self-conscious when instructed to calm down. Awe is commonly associated with a diminished emphasis on the self—sometimes described in research as a “small self”—which may temporarily place everyday concerns inside a larger frame rather than requiring you to wrestle those concerns into silence.
The practical version is wonderfully uncomplicated: look for something that makes you forget yourself for a moment.
It Combines Two Useful Ingredients Instead of Asking One Practice to Do Everything
An awe walk is interesting because it is not one intervention. It layers an emotional experience onto physical movement.
Walking has its own benefits, and exposure to natural environments has separately been studied for effects on mood and repetitive thinking. In one well-known experiment, participants who took a 90-minute walk through a natural setting reported lower rumination afterward, while participants walking through a high-traffic urban environment did not show the same reduction.
That study was about nature exposure rather than awe walks specifically, so the findings should not be mashed together as proof of one mechanism. But they help explain why walking through an environment that captures your attention may feel psychologically different from sitting indoors trying very hard not to think about Slack.
You are moving, perceiving, orienting, and noticing at the same time. For certain personalities, that may simply be a friendlier way to practice attention.
It Doesn’t Require You to Become Good at “Doing Nothing”
Meditation beginners commonly assume successful meditation means producing an empty mind. It does not; thoughts appearing during meditation are normal, and mindfulness practices generally involve noticing them and returning attention rather than eliminating thought altogether.
Still, perception matters. If every session feels like repeatedly catching yourself “failing,” you may abandon a potentially beneficial practice before developing the skill.
Awe walks remove much of that performance anxiety because noticing more is the assignment. Your curious brain gets promoted instead of disciplined.
Try giving yourself one mission: find three things you have never really looked at before. The strangely complicated roots beneath an old tree, the geometry of fire escapes, light moving across a building, an enormous cloud formation, or the fact that a bird approximately the weight of a sandwich somehow knows where it is going.
You do not need a spiritual breakthrough. Interest is enough to start.
Awe May Shrink the Problem Without Pretending It Isn’t Real
One reason generic advice to “put things in perspective” can be irritating is that it often sounds like a polite request to stop caring.
Awe offers a different kind of perspective. It does not necessarily tell you that your problem is insignificant; it may temporarily remind you that your problem is not the entire landscape of your attention.
Research on awe describes it as a self-transcendent emotion associated with shifts away from narrow self-focus and toward a sense of connection with something larger. Researchers have also linked awe with prosocial emotions and behaviors, although this field is still developing and individual experiences can vary.
That distinction can be surprisingly useful after a difficult workday, argument, rejection, or period of overthinking. Your deadline remains your deadline after looking at the night sky—but it may return to its proper size.
Sometimes that is enough space to think more clearly.
Movement Can Be an Advantage If Stillness Makes You Restless
Some people genuinely enjoy closing their eyes and sitting quietly for 20 minutes. Other people spend minute seven wondering if it would technically ruin the meditation to reorganize a drawer.
Neither personality is morally superior.
An awe walk gives restless energy somewhere constructive to go. You can move while practicing deliberate attention, which may make the experience feel less like controlling yourself and more like exploring.
This does not mean movement-based practices are scientifically “better” than seated meditation. Reviews of meditation research have found that mindfulness programs can produce small improvements in anxiety, depression, pain, and psychological distress, so there is good reason to keep meditation in the wellness toolbox.
The better question is: Which practice are you actually likely to repeat?
A theoretically wonderful habit you dread doing has one significant design flaw.
Awe Doesn’t Require a Wilderness Vacation
The phrase “awe walk” can accidentally summon visions of misty mountain ranges and someone wearing very expensive technical outerwear.
That is unnecessary.
Awe can emerge from nature, architecture, art, music, human skill, collective behavior, unusual patterns, acts of kindness, or anything else that challenges your normal scale of attention. Research on self-transcendent emotions treats awe as broader than simply appreciating natural scenery.
This makes the practice surprisingly accessible. A useful awe menu could include:
- Walk beneath large trees and study what is happening above eye level.
- Visit an unfamiliar neighborhood and look specifically at architecture.
- Walk around a museum, botanical garden, waterfront, or historic district.
- Watch changing weather from somewhere safe and open.
- Look for examples of extraordinary human skill, design, cooperation, or creativity.
Awe also benefits from novelty, which means changing your normal route can sometimes matter more than traveling far. The object is not to collect impressive sights; it is to become less visually asleep to your surroundings.
That is a very different kind of self-care from buying something new.
Meditation and Awe Walks Don’t Have to Compete
The headline may tempt us into staging a wellness cage match: meditation in one corner, walking beneath enormous trees in the other.
Science does not currently justify that conclusion. Evidence supports mindfulness-based meditation for several aspects of psychological well-being, while the research specifically on awe walks is much smaller; the awe-walk study does not establish that the practice is superior to meditation because meditation was not the comparison condition.
A better interpretation is that people may arrive at mindful awareness through different doors.
For someone who likes inward observation, meditation may be an excellent practice. For someone whose mind becomes louder when sitting still, an outward-facing practice that combines attention, movement, novelty, and awe could feel much more natural.
And you can use both. Five quiet minutes in the morning and an awe-focused walk after work are not competing philosophies; they are two ways of training attention.
How to Take an Awe Walk Without Turning It Into Homework
You do not need a special app, optimized playlist, distance target, or performance score. In fact, the more equipment you add, the easier it becomes to accidentally turn wonder into another productivity project.
Try 15 to 30 minutes somewhere safe and reasonably interesting. Walk at a pace that allows you to notice your surroundings, put routine audio entertainment aside when practical, and direct your attention toward things that feel unusually vast, intricate, beautiful, surprising, or moving.
When something captures you, stay with it a little longer than usual.
That last part matters. Modern attention has become very good at glancing and moving on; awe often asks for a second look.
Your Link to Balance
Use attention as the intervention. An awe walk works best when you are actively looking for something beyond your normal concerns, not simply logging steps while mentally answering emails.
Let your temperament choose the practice. If sitting meditation helps, keep it; if stillness makes you more restless, movement-based attention may provide another credible path into presence.
Look for scale, novelty, and complexity. Awe does not require dramatic scenery—a remarkable tree, building, storm cloud, artwork, or display of human skill may be enough to interrupt ordinary self-focus.
Give beautiful things a few seconds before documenting them. Experiencing first and photographing second may help protect the quality of your attention.
Do not demand a transformation from one walk. Think of awe as a practice in widening attention, not an instant treatment for stress, anxiety, depression, or other mental-health concerns.
Sometimes Calm Begins by Looking Outward
We spend a surprising amount of modern self-care looking inward: track your feelings, examine your thoughts, monitor your habits, understand your patterns. All of that can be useful, but constant self-observation can become tiring too.
An awe walk offers a gently different invitation: For a little while, stop making yourself the most interesting thing in the room. Look up, look farther, get curious, and let something larger or stranger borrow your attention.
Meditation may teach you to sit beside your thoughts without automatically following them. Awe may occasionally accomplish something complementary by making those thoughts less dominant in the first place.
Neither approach needs to win.
The better practice is the one that helps you return to your life with a little more room inside your attention—and that you can imagine doing again.
Martha Caruso
Editorial Lead, Mindfulness & Everyday Mental Well-being
