What watching a sunset can do for your brain

Humans appear to see sunrises and sunsets "almost like bookends". Here's what a dose of golden hour can do for our memory, sleep and mood.

On the eve of my wedding, my parents, husband-to-be and I watched a beautifully memorable sunset from the deck of a house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Cape Cod is famous for its "golden hour" light. On a narrowing peninsula almost entirely surrounded by water, moisture scatters the light of the Sun when it nears the horizon, creating a series of especially vivid oranges, golds and pinks that appear to melt into the sea. 

That day, a storm was also approaching from the west, making the unfurling colours look almost psychedelic. While the men snapped photos of the scene, my mother and I stood and watched, shivering in the crisp September air. As we went back inside, I wrapped my mother in a hug. All our nagging pre-wedding worries seemed to have set with the sun.

While the release that comes with the end of a long day no doubt helped, watching the sunset likely also played a role. In fact, there's growing evidence that sunsets – and sunrises, for that matter – can have a meaningful impact on our brain and mental health: diminishing anxiety and depression while boosting memory, creativity, sleep and even altruism. 

The sunset awe effect

One of the main benefits stems from the awe a sunset inspires, which research shows can have a startling impact on many aspects of our health. 

Awe is the feeling we get when we witness something immense and profound that we can't quite comprehend. It could be a piece of art, a human achievement like watching someone give birth, or a natural wonder. Experiencing it changes our perception, often eliciting a physical response, like tears or chills. But it's also doing a lot more behind the scenes.

"One of the most reliable properties of awe is the feeling of being small, that one's personal issues, problems and life are insignificant in the grand scheme of things," says Michelle Shiota, a professor of social psychology at Arizona State University in the US and a long-time researcher of awe. "This is great for mental health because we realise that maybe some of the things causing us so much distress are not really that important after all."

Keeping an inward focus can lead to overthinking and anxiety, but when we get stuck in negative thought loops, awe-inspiring events can demand our attention, breaking the loop and bringing us back to the present.

Research has shown that this perspective shift also inspires more prosocial behaviour, such as volunteering and a greater sense of purpose.

While awe can be found in many aspects of life, from spirituality and moral beauty to wonderful music or visual design, surveys indicate that most people find it is nature that inspires it the most. "When we ask people in the US to tell us about a time they felt strong awe, the most common category of answers is natural phenomena – typically a panoramic view of some kind," says Shiota.

Sunsets and sunrises are the prime examples of this, according to a 2023 study, which measured over 2,500 participants' reactions to images of different natural environments.

"Sunsets are exceptionally beautiful [and] beauty tends to elicit awe," says Jennifer Stellar, a psychology researcher at the University of Toronto in Canada who studies the impacts of positive emotions on health and wellbeing. "[Sunsets have] a kind of beauty that is incredibly immersive, large in size and unusual, when you think about what the sky normally looks like." 

As well as making us feel better, a captivating sunset may also boost our brain power by increasing our information retention. In an........

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