The Research On How Awe & Openness Can Help Us Bounce Back From Heartbreak

Divorce is known to sit near the very top of stressful-life-event lists. Some of the damage to our short-term physical health is easily apparent: People going through the end of a long, intimate relationship (especially the ones who might have wanted it to keep going) are likely to lose sleep for months, as well as losing copious amounts of weight. They may turn to unhealthy lifestyle habits, and they can get sick. In fact, the health outcomes for divorced people are generally worse1 than for single people overall, and they're even worse than for people who have lost a spouse to death. 

Divorced people are more likely to be depressed, suffer a heart attack, and produce disease-causing inflammation in their bodies. One major study2 examining records from 6.5 million people in 11 countries found that the divorced are 23% more likely to die early than the married.

It's fair to say that when my 25-year marriage ended, I was a wreck, both emotionally and physically. I was losing sleep and weight, and I was diagnosed with a new autoimmune disease. "Don't be heartbroken forever," one immunogeneticist warned me. 

I decided to visit Paula Williams, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Utah who has spent much of her career studying the factors that make us more able to weather life's tough blows, like getting enough sleep.

Our conversation didn't start auspiciously. Adding to the chain of bummer trivia, she told me that while men's physical health takes a dive after divorce (if they stay single), splitting up is harder for women emotionally, especially if they didn't initiate it. "For women, breaches of major attachment and betrayal are a major stress, maybe some of the most stressful of all," she said, because women tend to be more relational and more focused on keeping close relationships intact. Men don't like being heartbroken either, but they may take blows to their job or financial status harder.

While the health news regarding divorce looks bad when you consider data from large populations, Williams is more interested in its impacts on individuals. "Epidemiological research does not consider individual differences," she said, in a statement I found wildly hopeful. Data is not destiny. So why are some of us more resilient in the face of something like a breakup? Do personality traits matter? Early life trauma?

The short answers are yes and yes. But she's convinced even these factors can sometimes be outmaneuvered. Ultimately, she wants to help us figure out how. If individuals can game the odds, then maybe I could, too.

Williams is a fan of the so-called big-five personality theory, the idea that the traits defining how individuals move through the world can be broken into five broad categories: introversion/extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeability, and openness to experience. It's generally assumed that these traits, like IQ, change very little over our lives, or at least not much until we are geriatric. Where we fall on the spectrum of traits can influence our health and behaviors.

Conscientious people tend to get better grades and better jobs; neurotic people tend to be more anxious and depressed; extroverts can be more impulsive. All the traits have upsides and downsides. People high in neuroticism can be very motivated, for example, while people high in openness might be too easily distracted. But in general, openness is linked with many desirable qualities like curiosity, mental flexibility, and creativity.

The trait is broadly characterized as comfort with novelty and desire for "cognitive exploration." To measure it, psychologists use the extensive five-trait questionnaire called the NEO (the abbreviation stands for the first three categories: neuroticism, extroversion, openness). The openness category breaks down into five clusters of questions designed to gauge imagination and fantasy, adventurousness, attentiveness to inner feelings, tolerance of others' viewpoints and ideas, and ability to appreciate and be moved by aesthetic experiences.

People scoring high on openness really feel things, and they're tuned in to how they're feeling them. These are the tree huggers, the embarrassing burst-into-song people, the hopeless dreamers. It's basically like being a Pisces, or a William Blake (whose wife once said, "I don't see much of him. He's always in Paradise") or a Beethoven (who reportedly did, in fact, hug trees and once exclaimed, "Happy everyone in the woods. What glory in the woodland!"") or a Walt Whitman, who, don't forget, wrote a paean to the glorious smell of armpits. You don't have to be a transcendentalist to be open; the label would also apply to many religious people, gardeners, cooks, explorers, meditators, scientists, lovers, travelers, readers, you name it.

Williams' lab was homing in on an important subcategory of openness: aesthetics—what she calls the ability to be blown away by beauty—and its relationship to managing difficult times. Her interest started 12 years ago, when she and her students were measuring emotional reactivity and blood pressure while having people recount stressful events. Everyone registered the stress response physiologically, but only people who ranked as highly aesthetically engaged reported positive, growth-oriented feelings about their experiences.

"If you're connected to art, nature, and beauty, you are periodically being forced out of yourself to think about connectedness to something bigger than you," said Williams, who exudes a calm, warm quality. I was sitting across the desk from her, admiring her classic-but-not-matronly sweater layering. "And if you can do that, then learning is better and understanding is better."

I leaned forward in my chair. Nature? Beauty? I was a fan before, but I was no longer just interested in merely feeling happier or more creative. Now I felt my very survival was at stake. I needed a whole new understanding of myself, and I needed to make sense of a world that felt upside down, scary, and lonely—and this was before a pandemic rendered many of us feeling in need of similar balm.

Williams, who herself has been through a divorce, continued. "People who are open to experience are cognitively wired to grow and learn and move on, to do something that feels transformative."

I was already inclined to believe wilderness would help me. Now Williams was backing the idea with her data, and in ways that suddenly felt deeply relevant. But it also, I admitted, seemed a little far-fetched. Looking at beauty could change our self-image and help us transcend life's struggles? I'm not easily swayed by opportunities for transcendence, however carefully they may be wrapped in science.

Williams and her team analyzed brain scans and personality data from 1,000 healthy participants in the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map neural circuits, structures, and functional connections in the brain and to see how individuals differ.

The white-matter connections in the resting brains of high-open people were a little bit different in places, but where Williams saw consistently exceptional patterns in people who answered yes to one particular aesthetics question on the NEO: Sometimes when I am reading poetry or looking at a work of art, I feel a chill or wave of excitement.

These people showed a marked increase in connections between parts of the frontal cortex associated with self-concept and parts of the brain associated with processing sensory and motor information. It's hard to know what to really make of this, and it's tricky to attribute emotions or insights to people based on functional brain images. But Williams' theory is backed up by some other research. Well-connected brains in these areas, she said, tend to be pretty good at processing stressful information and making narrative and personal sense of it. In other words, these drunk-on-beauty people know how to tell themselves a story when something confusing happens. The single emotion they share is awe.

A classic awe experience incorporates elements of fear or surprise to the point that when we are truly blown away by beauty or the power of nature, we may struggle momentarily to understand it. But, she said, "people who are very aesthetically prone are making a connection between the environment and their internal sensations and feelings." This sensitivity, she believes, translates into the ability to integrate stressful life experiences into what she calls "narrative coherence."

An earlier study found that viewing awe-inspiring videos of nature or childbirth (but not merely happy or comic videos) led to a "tendency to orient oneself toward a larger transcendent reality4." Awe was the emotion that moved the participants to see themselves as part of a larger, meaningful reality, which is certainly a useful perspective if you're feeling singularly lonely.

I wanted some of that.

I was surprised, though, that not all brains respond the same way. We all like looking at beauty; we all tell ourselves stories. But apparently, some tales are more self-transcendent, or at least lean more to the thoughtful-yet-positive category after threatening events.

"Doesn't everyone get moved to tears when they hear incredible music?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Like when you describe aesthetic chill, they have no idea what you're talking about."

What she's talking about, to be clear, is a case of goosebumps. William Blake appeared to be correct when he wrote in a letter, "The tree that moves some to tears of joy is to others a green thing that stands in the way." In fact, only about half of the 1,000 volunteers in the Connectome Project reported a tendency to get goosebumps when experiencing a peak emotional experience driven by beauty.

Was I prone to goosebumps? I was pretty sure I was. But I wasn't going to wait around for beauty to find me. Williams was positing something radical: that awe was tied to the trait of openness, and that, regardless of how prone to goosebumps we are naturally, we could learn to become more so. We could potentially shift this facet of our personality. If Williams was right, we could actively entreat self-transformation through cultivating the ability to see beauty.

Could I do that? I needed to do something. Uchino, with his research on the health consequences of heartbreak and divorce, had made clear just how high the stakes were. Now Williams offered a possible, life-giving corrective, one that was transformative and yet little known. For the sake of myself and so many other love-skunked people out there, I would see if it could work.

To claw my way through heartbreak, I would try to awe my way through it.

I knew one place to find it: outside.