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Attend a Star Party

Lift your spirits with an evening of stargazing and socializing


An illustration of two people looking up at the stars with a telescope
Larry Landolfi/Getty Images

Quick Win

Gazing at the night sky can be both calming and rejuvenating — especially when you share the experience with others.

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Why

Star parties, held by members of the amateur astronomy community, offer the chance to see planets, constellations, deep-sky objects and the moon in a community-oriented environment. The vastness of the night sky can help shift your perspective and fill you with a sense of awe, which may have beneficial effects on mental health, according to a review paper from 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology. A study comprising just over 1,000 university students in six experiments had participants experience awe through watching videos, writing about awe or enjoying a vast landscape, along with control group participants who instead addressed positive emotions such as joy, amusement or pride. Before and after, all participants were asked to describe a daily stressor in their lives. Afterward, a far larger number of participants who were exposed to ideas of awe in each experiment said their daily hassles seemed far less important. Awe seems to shift people’s self-appraisal, introducing “a sense of vastness” and “an awareness of a large force or entity to which the self is connected,” write the researchers. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2021.

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