By Erin Parker – Women’s Adventure Host & Travel Writer

How the feeling of standing small before something magnificent could be the most powerful mental health tool you’re not using – and why women are finding it through group adventure travel.

There is a moment – you’ll know it when it happens – when something so vast, so beautiful, or so ancient crosses your path that your whole nervous system just… exhales. Your worries, your to-do list, the noise of your daily life all shrink to nothing. Scientists have a name for it: positive awe and I am completely in love with concept and these words. The research on what it does to your mental health is extraordinary, let me share it with you.

You might have felt it staring up at a canopy of redwoods so tall they vanish into mist. Or standing on a frozen lake at midnight as the sky above you ignites in ribbons of green and violet. Or watching a wave the size of a building collapse on the shore in front of you, the sound reverberating in your chest. These moments are not accidents. They are, according to a growing body of research, among the most potent catalysts for psychological healing available to us.

They are exactly what my group adventure travel is built to deliver.

What is positive awe – and why does it matter?

Awe is defined by psychologists as the emotional response we experience when we encounter something that is both vast and beyond our current understanding. It isn’t just admiration or appreciation. Awe is the feeling that reorders you. That makes you simultaneously feel very small and paradoxically, deeply connected to something larger than yourself.

Researcher Dacher Keltner, who has spent two decades studying awe at the University of California Berkeley, describes it as one of the most undervalued positive emotions in modern life. His research shows that awe is the one emotion most capable of silencing the relentless inner chatter – what psychologists call the ‘default mode network’ – the part of our brain responsible for self-referential thinking, rumination and anxiety.

The Small-Self Effect: Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that experiencing awe produces what scientists call the ‘small-self’ phenomenon – a temporary, healthy shrinking of ego and self-focus. When we feel small before something vast, our personal worries lose their grip, directly alleviating anxiety and the kind of repetitive stress thinking that characterises burnout and depression.

Clinical outcomes: A 2025 randomised controlled trial published in Scientific Reports found that interventions designed to cultivate awe significantly reduced depressive symptoms and improved psychological wellbeing. Daily awe experiences were shown to reduce stress, lower somatic health symptoms, and increase overall life satisfaction.

Your brain on awe: Research confirms that experiencing awe reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network – the same network linked to anxiety, rumination and overthinking. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure and releases mood-regulating neurochemicals including dopamine and endorphins.

Put simply, your brain, flooded with awe, cannot simultaneously catastrophise about your inbox, the chores that haven’t been done, the stress your children are causing you. The two states are neurologically incompatible. Travel – real travel, adventure travel, the kind that places you in front of something ancient and enormous – is one of the most reliable delivery mechanisms for awe that exists.

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Awe shifts attention from ourselves to the outside world — and in doing so, it repairs us.

Dacher Keltner University of California Berkeley

The mental health benefits of travel are real

The psychological research on travel and mental health has been building for years. Studies consistently show that travel reduces anxiety, lifts depression, improves creative thinking and boosts self-efficacy – the deep, embodied belief that you are capable of navigating life’s challenges. But what’s becoming clearer is that the mechanism behind much of this is awe.

When you travel, you step outside the familiar. You encounter environments your nervous system has never processed before. You are forced – in the best possible way – into the present moment. When those environments are the natural world in all its wildness and scale, the awe comes readily and reliably.

Stress & Cortisol Reduction

Research shows that immersion in natural environments lowers cortisol – the primary stress hormone – within as little as 20 minutes. A landmark University of Michigan study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that nature produced a 21.3% per hour drop in cortisol levels, with the greatest benefit landing in that 20-30 minute window of simply sitting or walking outside. Harvard Health summarises the findings clearly if you’d like an accessible read. It’s not just your stress hormones that reset – a University of Colorado Boulder study published in Current Biology found that even a single weekend outdoors was enough to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, shifting the natural cortisol and sleep cycle back into sync.

Reduced Anxiety & Rumination

Awe interrupts the default mode network – the brain’s ‘worry loop.’ By directing attention outward toward something vast, it physiologically disrupts the cycle of repetitive anxious thinking. This is backed by a neuroimaging study published in Human Brain Mapping which used fMRI to show that awe-eliciting stimuli reduced activity across key regions of the default mode network – the same network strongly linked to rumination, anxiety and depression. In other words, genuine awe and worry are neurologically incompatible. You cannot fully experience both at once.

Expanded Perspective

When we feel small before something magnificent, personal frustrations and stressors find their true proportion. Awe literally broadens our view – cognitively and emotionally – expanding our capacity for resilience. The research behind this is the landmark Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato & Keltner study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which tested this across five studies with over 2,000 participants – including one where people stood in a grove of towering trees and showed measurably expanded perspective and prosocial behaviour compared to a control group. If you want to read the full paper, the APA publishes it here.

Connection & Belonging

Group awe – experiencing wonder alongside others – amplifies all of the above and creates powerful social bonds. A 2024 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology found that beyond its individual benefits, awe serves a vital social function – shifting attention away from self-interest toward others and collective concerns and increasing social connectedness in measurable ways. The oxytocin connection is supported by Duke University research showing that oxytocin – the bonding hormone – is directly linked to experiences of awe, gratitude and felt connectedness. Sharing a moment of collective wonder doesn’t just feel meaningful. Biologically speaking, it bonds you to the people beside you.

Among the Redwoods: when ancient trees remind you who you are

We got out of the car in the Yarra Ranges National Park and the forest swallowed us whole. The California Redwoods – growing tall and straight since before any of us were born, before our parents were born, before the century turned – rise into a canopy so high it seems to belong to a different world.

Nobody spoke for a moment… and then, “WOW”.

The trees – hundreds of years old, completely indifferent to our deadlines or our worries about our kids, or workload, or washing that hasn’t been done – provide a scale reference that quietly demolishes the significance of every minor stress she arrived carrying. Psychologists call this the perspective-reset: when we encounter something genuinely ancient and vast, our nervous system recalibrates what actually matters.

Walking among those trees, we weren’t thinking about school lunches or work emails. We were breathing in air that has passed through centuries of bark and root. We were present.

Forest bathing research – or shinrin-yoku as it is studied extensively in Japan – consistently shows measurable reductions in cortisol, heart rate and blood pressure after even brief time among trees. A landmark study conducted across 24 forests in Japan measured these physiological changes directly and a 2024 systematic review confirmed the findings hold consistently across populations – reductions in anxiety, depression, fatigue and tension alongside increased vigour and improved sleep. But there is something specific about old-growth forest, about trees of this scale and age, that produces the awe response rather than mere relaxation.

Research has shown that walking through a forest of huge old trees changes the way we see ourselves in relation to the rest of nature – it is humbling and it inspires awe in a way that younger forests simply do not. These trees don’t just calm you. They reset you. They hand back a perspective you didn’t know you’d lost.

When you share that moment with a group of women, as we did at the Redwood Forest in Warburton, who are feeling exactly the same thing – the laughter that breaks out, the eyes meeting in quiet astonishment, the shared smiles – the awe compounds. You are not alone in it. That, too, is part of what heals.

Why nature travel specifically amplifies awe

Not all travel produces awe equally. Research by Keltner and colleagues identifies nature as the single most reliable domain for eliciting the awe response – specifically because of its scale, its complexity and its age. A mountain range, an ancient forest, a wild coastline – these are environments our nervous systems evolved alongside and that our modern lives have largely severed us from, unless we make a point of connecting with them.

When research participants took ‘awe walks’ – deliberately attending to moments of wonder in natural environments – the results were striking. A UCSF study published in the journal Emotion found that older adults who took weekly 15-minute awe walks for eight weeks reported increased positive emotions and less distress in their daily lives – with measurably reduced self-focus compared to those who took ordinary walks. The full peer-reviewed study is published here. The key was attending to vastness – looking up, looking out, allowing yourself to be temporarily dwarfed by something bigger than you.

Travel takes the awe walk to its natural conclusion. It removes you from the familiar entirely and deposits you in environments where vastness is unavoidable. Where it is, quite literally, in every direction.

The Reindeer Sleigh – when silence becomes medicine

It was January. I was sitting in a reindeer sleigh with one of my friends somewhere in the forests of Finnish Lapland and the world had gone completely quiet. Not quiet like a quiet room. Quiet like the volume of your whole life had been turned down to almost nothing. The only sounds were the soft pitter patter of snow falling from branches, the steady rhythm of reindeer hooves, the occasional creak of the sleigh. That was it.

Somewhere in that silence, I stopped performing.

You don’t realise how much of your daily life is performance until something strips it away completely. Out there, nobody needed anything from me. The snow didn’t care about my to-do list. The reindeer had absolutely no opinion on anything I’d been worrying about. The forest was just enormous and still – and for the first time in a long time, I was allowed to be the same.

This is what researchers call a reduction in self-referential thinking – that constant background monologue of self-assessment and worry that underlies so much of our anxiety. Awe in natural environments interrupts it like almost nothing else can. When you’re moving through an Arctic forest on a reindeer sleigh, that voice simply cannot keep up. It falls away behind you in the snow.

What you’re left with isn’t emptiness. It’s presence. For women who have spent years running on the hamster wheel of career, family and responsibility – that isn’t just a nice feeling. It’s medicine.

The Northern Lights – when the sky explodes and you’re rendered speechless

It begins as a rumour. A shimmer at the edge of the sky that you think you might be imagining. Then – slowly at first, then all at once – it moves. Ribbons of green swirl across the sky. They pulse, they reach, they bloom into violet and white and a green so vivid it seems impossible, seems like something the atmosphere simply should not be capable of producing. Then someone beside you grabs your arm without saying a word, because words are completely inadequate and you both stand there with your heads tipped back and your mouths open and everything you were worried about three hours ago has simply ceased to exist.

The Northern Lights might be the single most powerful thing I have ever witnessed. The whole sky moves. It pulses and shifts and blooms into colours that genuinely don’t seem like something our atmosphere should be capable of making. Then it’s gone and then it’s back and you just stand there with your mouth open because there is absolutely nothing else you can do.

I’ve read the research on what happens to your brain in a moment like that – when something so far outside your existing experience crosses your path that your whole understanding of what’s possible has to rearrange itself. Scientists call it cognitive accommodation. I just call it the moment everything reset.

It is not just wonder. It is transformation. The research on peak awe experiences shows that they are encoded differently in memory than ordinary experiences – more vividly, more permanently, with the quality of a before-and-after. Women who have witnessed the Northern Lights together describe it consistently as a threshold moment – something shifted.

From a mental health perspective, this kind of experience produces what psychologists refer to as ‘meaning restructuring’ – a reorganisation of priorities, a loosening of old anxieties, a renewed sense of what actually matters.

The Ocean – a force that holds both your smallness and your strength

The ocean is the oldest and most democratic of awe. You don’t need to travel to the Arctic to find it. It is here, on our beautiful Australian coastlines, on mornings when the sea is doing something extraordinary – when the swell rolls in grey and enormous, or when the water is so still and clear it looks like the earth breathing, or when a storm is moving through and the waves are so large and loud that you can feel them in your sternum.

The ocean is both calming and fierce. Both infinite and immediate. It is one of the few natural environments that so reliably produces awe in both its most peaceful and most intense forms – the millpond surface of early morning, the explosive violence of a breaking wave. Both versions dissolve the small self in their own way.

There is something specifically meaningful about the ocean for women in midlife – women who have been holding space for everyone else for so long that they’ve forgotten what it feels like to be held by something. The ocean holds nothing. It is simply and absolutely itself, indifferent and magnificent. Standing in front of it, you are reminded that the world is not, in fact, resting entirely on your shoulders. That there are forces vastly larger than your concerns that are getting on just fine without your management.

That is not helplessness. That is liberation.

Why experiencing awe together changes everything

Here is something the solo travel conversation tends to overlook – awe is amplified by shared experience. Research on collective awe – the experience of wonder alongside others – shows that it produces stronger social bonding, deeper feelings of belonging and greater prosocial emotions (empathy, generosity, care for others) than awe experienced alone.

When you stand under the Northern Lights with a woman you met four hours ago and feel the same thing at the same moment – when you both reach for each other in the dark without a word – something is forged between you that ordinary social interaction simply cannot create. You have been changed together. You carry the same before-and-after. You are now, in some real sense, part of each other’s story.

This matters enormously for the mental health picture, because one of the greatest threats to women’s wellbeing in midlife is isolation. The quiet shrinking of friend groups. The way the busyness of life erodes connection. The loneliness that accumulates, unspoken, beneath the surface of a very full-looking life.

“Nobody tells you that your friend group starts shrinking in your 40s. That the catch-ups get cancelled and rescheduled until they stop being scheduled at all. Travel fixed something in me that I didn’t know was broken.”

~ A woman on a group adventure trip

Group adventure travel – specifically the kind that is designed for women, by women who understand this landscape – addresses that isolation directly. It creates the conditions for awe and it creates the conditions for connection. It says, you are allowed to be here. You are allowed to be astonished. You are allowed to take up space in this enormous, beautiful world.

You don’t have to earn this

Perhaps the most important thing to say about awe, travel and women’s mental health is this – you don’t have to have reached a certain point in your life to deserve it. You don’t have to have ticked every box at home first. You don’t have to wait until the kids are older, the mortgage is smaller, the promotion is secure.

The mental health benefits of travel – the cortisol reduction, the anxiety relief, the perspective reset, the deep and lasting renewal that comes from standing in front of something vast and wild – are not rewards for performance. They are available to you now. This year. On a Women’s Adventure Weekender, or a winter adventure to Lapland, or a journey to the high peaks of the Andes.

The science is clear – awe heals. Nature delivers it. Travel amplifies it. Doing it alongside other women who understand exactly what it means to finally say yes to yourself – that is the experience that stays with you long after you’ve come home.

You don’t have to explain it to anyone who wasn’t there. The women who were will understand.

Travel Her Way  ·  Parkers from Australia

You just read an entire article about what happens when women finally say yes to themselves.

The Redwood Forest. The reindeer sleigh. The sky full of Northern Lights. These aren’t just stories — they’re trips you can actually book, with a group of women who get it completely.

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See our upcoming trips →

Warburton Women’s Weekender Lapland Reindeer Safari Lapland Northern Lights Peru & The Andes