You may have noticed a little more silence than usual from me. That's because ’ve spent the last few weeks travelling around China with my family. There has been a lot of walking, a lot of food, a lot of tea, some very questionable sleep and rather less attention to my usual health data than you might expect from someone who owns more trackers than handbags.
I’m back! You may have noticed a little more silence than usual from me. That's because ’ve spent the last few weeks travelling around China with my family. There has been a lot of walking, a lot of food, a lot of tea, some very questionable sleep and rather less attention to my usual health data than you might expect from someone who owns more trackers than handbags.
And then there was the Great Wall.
My legs burned on the ascent. I sweated. I wished I'd spent considerably more time climbing stairs before I went. But when I finally stood there, put my hand on the stone and looked across miles and miles of mountains and wall, the feeling that overwhelmed me wasn't achievement.
It was awe.
That strange feeling of being very small in the presence of something unimaginably big. Two thousand years of human endeavour beneath my hand. Mountains disappearing into the distance. A structure so vast that my brain couldn't quite comprehend how human beings had created it.
I stopped. I looked. And I wondered: what does awe actually do to your biology?
Quite a lot, it turns out. Let’s dive in....
Where insight becomes impact
What I’ve been looking at this week…
Awe sounds wonderfully unscientific. You know it when you feel it, but how on earth do you put something like standing on the Great Wall into a laboratory?
Psychologists describe awe as the emotion you experience in the presence of something vast that challenges your existing understanding of the world. That vastness might come from a mountain, music, art, an extraordinary idea, watching a child being born or looking up at a completely dark sky full of stars.
Your brain essentially encounters something it cannot immediately fit into its existing mental model. And this is where it gets intriguing. In a 2015 study, researchers looked at positive emotions and levels of interleukin-6, or IL-6, a pro- nflammatory molecule involved in immune signalling. Among the positive emotions they studied, awe showed the strongest relationship with lower levels of pro-inflammatory molecules.
Why do I care about IL-6? Because chronic, low-grade inflammation is one of the processes associated with ageing and age- related disease. Your immune system needs inflammatory signalling. It is part of how you respond to infection and injury. The problem is when inflammatory signalling remains chronically elevated rather than switching on when needed and resolving afterwards.
Then there is stress. Across six studies, researchers found that people experiencing more awe reported less daily stress. In experimental work, awe was also associated with lower sympathetic nervous system arousal when people subsequently talked about their everyday stresses. In other words, after awe, the problems were still there, but the physiological and psychological response to them appeared to change.
I love the proposed explanation for this. Researchers call it the "small self." Awe seems temporarily to shrink the amount of attention you give to yourself and your immediate concerns. Standing beneath a mountain, looking across an ocean or, in my case, standing on a wall that has survived dynasties, invasions and centuries, tomorrow's to-do list suddenly occupies rather less mental real estate.
Your problems haven't disappeared. Your perspective has expanded around them.
I don't think the conclusion is that awe is directly a longevity treatment. But inflammation, chronic stress, autonomic regulation, social connection and psychological fitness all contribute to how well you age.
Perhaps your longevity toolkit needs to contain something that can't be swallowed, injected or strapped to your wrist.
Track it to hack it.
What I’ve been monitoring this week… This was perhaps the biggest reminder for me in China.
I love data and devices. I measure biological age. I look at sleep, glucose, HRV, resting heart rate, cognition, cortisol and a long list of biomarkers because measurement lets me see changes that feelings alone can miss.
But my Oura ring cannot tell me that I stood on the Great Wall and felt completely awe by what I was seeing. It might capture some of the physiology surrounding the experience. My heart rate. My movement. My sleep later that night. Potentially changes in nervous system activity through HRV.
But it cannot give me an Awe Score: 97%.
And I rather like that.
The more health technology becomes capable of measuring, the easier it becomes to assume that what isn't measured doesn't matter. It does.
A device can tell you that your HRV improved. It can't tell you that the reason might have been sitting beside someone you love, listening to a piece of music that moved you, walking through a forest or looking at a view that made you forget yourself for five minutes. This is why I don't want technology to replace self-awareness. I want it to deepen it.
Measure what you can. Notice what you can't. Both are data.
From knowing to doing.
What this means for YOU…
Take an Awe Walk
You don't need to fly to China or climb the Great Wall to experience awe. This is probably my favourite piece of research I came across this week. Researchers at the University of California San Francisco recruited 60 healthy adults aged 60 to 90 and asked them to take weekly 15-minute walks for eight weeks. Half were simply asked to walk. The other half were encouraged to take an "awe walk", deliberately directing their attention towards things that created a sense of wonder and vastness.
Same 15 minutes. Different attention.
The awe walkers experienced more awe, reported greater feelings of social connection and showed greater increases in positive emotions such as compassion and gratitude. Their daily distress also decreased more over the eight weeks than in the control walkers. Intriguingly, researchers also analysed photographs participants took of themselves during their walks. Over time, the awe group made themselves physically smaller in the photographs and gave more space to the world around them.
The "small self" captured in a photograph. I find that fascinating.
So here's what to do this week: Take one 15-minute Awe Walk.
No podcast. No phone call. No step target. And please don't turn it into another performance metric.
Look up. Look further into the distance than you normally do. Notice scale, colour, light, architecture, trees, clouds, water, people. Look for something you've walked past a hundred times but never properly seen.
Don't try manufacture some enormous emotional experience. Just become more available to wonder.
💼 Case in point:
For me, it was the Great Wall. There are moments when you intellectually know something is impressive and moments when your body seems to understand it before your brain does. Touching those stones was the latter. Parts of the Great Wall have stood for centuries. Brick upon brick. Strong foundations underneath everything that came later. I talk about health in much the same way. Muscle built over decades. Bone laid down and protected. A brain continually challenged. Relationships nurtured. Sleep protected. Thousands upon thousands of small decisions creating the biological foundations you will eventually depend upon. But standing there reminded me of the other reason I want those foundations to be strong. I want legs capable of climbing the steps (there were so many steps!!) A heart capable of carrying me up them. A brain capable of comprehending where I am. A memory capable of holding onto it afterwards. And enough years ahead of me to experience many more moments that stop me in my tracks. That's what the million hours are for.
🎯 If you'd like to make decisions with precision based on your personal data and using devices that are specific for you, then book a private consultation and let's start to decode your health.
Where you’ll find me…
LAST WEEK Marvelling at China's beauty... THIS WEEK I'm home, re-syncing to my circadian rhythm. NEXT WEEK Back into full Million Hour mode and back on the road, speaking to CEO's in Preston, with a very exciting autumn ahead and much more coming from me on brain health, cognition and what it takes to keep a brain working brilliantly for a very long life.
A thought to pause on…
The Great Wall was built brick by brick. So is your health. Build strong foundations. Protect them. And remember what you're building them for.
"Build the wall. Then remember to look at the view. And stay in complete awe of being alive."
Wishing you a wonderful week ahead (that's 168 hours of your Million Hour life!! Dr Alka
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