A griever's need for SCALE

On awe, rooms that are too small, and the science of why open spaces help us carry what can't be fixed

There’s something I reach for first when I’m in a hard place - I go searching for something bigger than me. The ocean, a coast, the mountains, the desert. It’s not something I’ve ever been taught to do, it just feels more like a default setting. When the hurt or anxiety or ‘what the F is happening’ is loud and hard to wrap my arms around, invisible forces start to tug on the invisible string tethering myself to expansive, vast, wide open spaces.

It’s an instinct that isn’t unique to me, of course. About a month ago I asked 90k people (mostly grievers, a handful of therapists/coaches, I assume) what they would do if they could just pause everything right now without consequence. And out of hundreds of responses, the vast majority of them were the same - go to the ocean, or the mountains, or take a trip to nature somewhere. Be with the earth and away from spaces full of clutter and people-ness. All of it was a pull towards ancient, living things.

I’ve thought a lot about this, that in seasons of big pain and hurt, there’s this urge and need for SCALE. Not just nature only because it’s quiet, or pretty, or even grounding. But maybe we also have a primal need to be reminded our ache isn’t the biggest thing in the world, or, the only enormous thing. Maybe we need something so completely vast and mysterious to help us hold the vastness and unknown in our own hearts and bodies.

Because grief is, of course, massive and endless. It’s every emotion all at once, tangled and knotted around our limbs and words and interactions. It takes up ALL of the room, and for many of us it’s the largest and most complex thing we’ll ever carry. And these places we exist in - our homes and our rooms and the office and the stores… they’re just too fricken small.

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The First Cathedral

I was listening to an Andrew Huberman podcast sometime last year that had something to do with the brain and how we process, and he talked about ‘the cathedral effect’ (2007, Meyers-Levy and Zhu), which was something I hadn’t heard of before. It’s a term from environmental psychology that describes how ceiling height (think of a cathedral) impacts our cognition. Higher ceilings = encourages abstract, creative thinking and wider perspectives. Lower ceilings = encourages concrete, detail-focused processing.

And although Huberman was speaking in terms of arranging our physical spaces to support our work goals, I think this concept could be applied to emotional and psychological states, too. When we’re in distress and activated, our internal world often mirrors a kind of low-ceilinged room. We can have a narrower focus, reduced cognitive flexibility (more rigid thinking), and a lower capacity for taking in and considering other perspectives. Our systems are focused on survival and our threat detection is on high. Our scanner for what is wrong and what could go wrong is working overtime and it can be hard to access feelings of possibility. It’s all protective and it all makes sense, and, what a beautiful idea that this is one piece we can often control in the midst of so much that we can’t - our environment.

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And the one thing I want everyone to chase can often be found outside.

Awe is “the complex emotion we feel when encountering something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. It is a powerful blend of wonder, amazement, and reverence, often accompanied by a sense of feeling "small" but deeply connected to something greater than oneself”. It’s the word for what moves through you when you witness something or experience something too big to fit inside your usual sense of things. It could be anything - an impossibly beautiful sunset, a painting, a performance, witnessing an incredibly kind act between strangers, looking up at ancient redwoods.

Awe, for me, feels like this moment where everything I think I know is suspended and the veil is lifted and suddenly I’m remembering. It’s a coming back to, or a coming home to some deeper truth that I feel immense relief to touch the edges of when I’m in pain, or feeling lost, or scared. It’s the truth that I don’t know, and I can’t know, and I’m not supposed to know how all of this is connected. But it is connected. And the connecting thread is… love. I don’t get to fully understand the miracle that is energy and life and love, and I’m reminded that I am just one small part of this great mystery.

Feeling awe doesn’t make my grief smaller and it doesn’t negate the pain, but it does let me feel like there’s more around me to help hold it.

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I also think big open places are just easier on a worn-out mind.

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan spent decades studying something they called attention restoration. The condensed version is that the focused, effortful kind of attention we run on all day (the kind you use to focus on a task or filter out noise or make yourself concentrate) is a limited resource and often taxed by our modern day-to-day lives. And it doesn’t come back just from sitting still in those same environments. It’s resourced by being somewhere that holds your attention gently, without demanding anything, like water moving, leaves shifting, or colors in the sky changing. They call it soft fascination.

I think about this through the lens of grief because so much of the grief experience is exactly that - this enormous mental effort and labor to function in a world that needs you to keep going while everything inside of your experience feels foreign and wrong and too bright and too loud. Grievers are constantly running those exact systems all day - the effort of answering “how are you” and picking the version that won’t make the other person uncomfortable, or tracking who knows and who doesn’t and which subject to steer around at dinner, or getting through the grocery store or the pickup line or the meeting while some part of you is somewhere else entirely, and you’re spending a lot of energy masking that one.

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So we’re headed outside, but where and for how long?

You don’t have to move to a beach town or get on a plane. In another study about nature’s impact on general health and wellbeing, and how much time outside it actually takes to move the needle, Mathew White and his colleagues at University of Exeter pulled data from almost twenty thousand people across England. The answer was: two hours a week. That’s it. People who got at least that much, like in a park, a beach, a patch of woods (they called it ‘green spaces’), were substantially more likely to report higher wellbeing and good health than people who didn’t meet the two hour criteria. And, the results held across basically everyone - men and women, younger and older, comfortable and struggling, healthy and living with long illness. And it didn’t matter whether you got your two hours all at once or ten minutes here and there.

Big vast places like the ocean or the mountains are wonderful of course, but they can also take a level of access, means, and physical ability that many people don’t have. What I found hopeful is that most of the visits to outdoors in this study happened within about two miles of home. It didn’t have to be far, or expensive, just a total of two hours a week of getting to something green or nature-focused and open.

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So if any of this sounds interesting to you, or you’re curious, or this lands in your body in a way that feels inviting, this is your gentle encouragement to go outside if and when you can. Not to fix anything or even with the goal of feeling ‘better’, but to support your brain and system as it holds something as vast and mysterious as the sea.

See you outside,

Rio