The survival skill you might be missing

Here’s a fun experiment to try: how long can you scroll through your go-to social feed without plummeting into despair?

I just timed myself, and I hit my limit around minute 5. Along the way, I could feel my descent. I scrunched my shoulders, audibly sighed, shook my head, balled my fists. I stopped the timer when I caught myself shouting at my phone: “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

It’s no wonder my average heart rate’s been steadily climbing. Because, like most of us, I’m taking in way more than 5 minutes a day of pure horror.

The 64 percent of Americans who identify as doomscrollers know this isn’t good for us. This habit erodes our mental health, our sleep, and our overall sense of satisfaction. It makes it harder to focus at work—we’re four times more likely to miss deadlines and opportunities because we’re so distracted. It’s even bad for the environment—all that electricity use generates millions of dollars of waste year over year.

We don’t doomscroll because we’re weak. We do it because we’re scared. Thousands of years of evolution has primed us to be constantly monitoring for threats—and now they’re all around us: layoffs and restructurings, backslides in ethics, loss of rights.

These dangers are real. But they tend to eclipse another danger looming off-screen: losing your capacity to imagine a better future.

After all: How do we ever get our shot at playing offense if we’ve resigned ourselves to only being capable of deflecting blows? How do we grow and tend to the parts of our lives that matter most? How do we find the people who have the same dreams as us?

“The answer is to make our engagement with hope a discipline because of what’s at stake if we don’t: namely that designers will begin to believe that a better future is not possible within our lifetime,” as Vivianne Castillo writes.

I wholeheartedly agree. And I think if we want to take back our claims on the future, it starts right here in the present—namely, retraining our brains to reconnect to awe.

Notice how you reacted to my suggestion: Maybe your body tensed up. Or your gaze wandered away from the screen. Or you rolled your eyes a little.

Guess what? Your stress reactions are showing.

Have you been told one too many times to look on the bright side, to find a silver lining, to turn the other cheek? If so, your nervous system might shift into fight, where you go on the attack. That anger—righteous or not—is thrashing out against the unfairness of it all. Awe feels frivolous—a luxury you have no time for.

Have you been advised to just lay low, stay out of trouble, keep quiet to try to hold on to the status quo? If so, your nervous system might shift into flight, where you extract yourself from what’s happening around you as best as you can. Awe feels scary—an opening to mystery and uncertainty.

Are you stuck in a place where you feel powerless—like everything’s too big and out of your control? If so, your nervous system might shift into freeze, where you shut down and go entirely numb. Awe feels overwhelming, so misaligned with your everyday experiences that you can’t bear to face it.

It’s not unusual for the concept of awe to bring up strong reactions—we avoid it, we shut it down, we deny its existence entirely. It can feel safer to marinate in the known waters of despair than to take a dip in something as mysterious as awe. But awe does something crucial: it tells us that there’s something bigger and brighter than the ugly realities on the ground.

And if we want hope, we need that knowledge.

Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkley, defines “awe” as “the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world.” He’s spent decades researching the emotion, including writing a book I love on the topic.

The experience of awe, he explains, brings our nervous system, heartbeat, and breath into sync—an escape from the fight/flight/freeze states we’re constantly cycling through. And, importantly, it brings us into sync with the people around us—the polar opposite of the feelings of disconnection and distrust triggered by a quick scroll through most social networks.

But like the internet, awe can be accessed anywhere, anytime. The experiences that trigger it can be found in what Keltner calls the “eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany.”

And we can find traces of awe everywhere—even at work. We just have to remember to look.

Over the July 4 holiday, my mom and I spent a weekend at a retreat run by Deb Dana, a clinical psychologist and one of the original contributors to the study of polyvagal theory, which is one model for understanding the way the nervous system works.

In this model, when we’re not in a fight, flight, or freeze state, we live in the ventral vagal state—a place of wellbeing where life feels manageable, and where we can connect with ourselves and each other.

The very state we’re pulled out of when we’re reacting to threats—on and offline.

During the retreat, people kept identifying with their stress response states like they were astrological signs.

“I’m totally a freezer.”

“I’m always ready to run.”

“I’m most at home in fight!”

And again and again, Deb corrected us: our home is not in any of those places—it’s in that ventral vagal place of balance and calm. We just forget sometimes how to get back there.

So on day two, she shared a practice for finding our way home, to a place where hope is possible: noticing micro-moments of “awe,” or what she’s termed “glimmers.” Things like spotting a red cardinal from her window, or catching the scent of fresh-cut grass.

But glimmers aren’t something she just waits for. She actively seeks them with a defined practice:

• See: Notice the feelings, thoughts, and sensations that point to a glimmer moment.

• Stop: Use that knowledge to notice the glimmer moments that happen in your daily life.

• Appreciate: Acknowledge each glimmer moment as it happens—appreciating the experience.

• Remember: Track your glimmers in some way, and revisit them regularly to experience the same positive effects.

• Share: Tell others about your glimmer moments, to build connection and to transfer the positive effects to the people around you.

After the retreat, I started tracking my glimmer moments—a sky of fireflies, a just-bloomed lily, a family of monarch butterflies vacationing in my garden. These moments feel like the polar opposite of my doomscrolling reactions. Instead of scrunching and squinting and sighing, it’s when I catch myself softening, squealing, and gasping with delight.

But I struggled a bit with how to connect to these moments outside of nature—where most of us only spend a tiny fraction of our days. And then I remembered Dacher Keltner’s eight wonders of life.

In particular, I thought of the first one on the list: moral beauty. I’d have no idea what that phrase means without its description: “the aesthetic appreciation of virtuous qualities in individuals and their actions.” Basically, it’s observing moments of kindness, courage, creativity, and care.

It turns out, people—messy, complicated, imperfect people—are actually the most common source of awe for most of us.

Before the retreat, I’d been reading Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell—about the generosity and heroism that everyday people demonstrate in the midst of unthinkable disasters. Not as special cases—but as a widespread instinct shared by most. At least once a chapter I’d read an anecdote out loud to my partner, so moved by these people’s actions.

Each of those readings? Glimmer, glimmer, glimmer.

And for the first time in months, I was more excited to pick up my book than to scroll.

Here’s a new experiment to try: how long can you keep an eye out for awe before it finds you?

And can you find it in the places that seem to trigger you most?

For me, that’s my social feeds. So I’m training my brain to stop overindexing on spotting the negative and obscene, and start looking for glimmers instead. A quick, one-minute scan of LinkedIn sparked multiple—someone sharing how they’re letting go of fears of “falling behind,” a thoughtful endorsement of a beloved coworker, a thank you to a community that’s helped someone navigate lows (and LLMs).

Maybe for you, that’s your office. So you keep an eye out for glimmers throughout your workday—the coworker who stood up for a teammate, the celebration of a team effort that finally launched, an ingenious solution to a frustrating problem. Or maybe it’s reconnecting with peers outside your org.

This doesn’t mean ignoring or reframing the things that cause you pain or rile you up. It just means opening space to acknowledge that amidst the ugliness, beauty is always close by, too.

Then you can use those glimmer moments in the present to bring you back to a regulated state—the state where you can dream and scheme up ways to actively make more moments like those in the future. And guess what? Those dreams aren’t just blueprints for action.

They’re hope itself.