On the eve of one of the most significant days of my life, I found myself sitting outside as the sky turned from pale blue to deep orange. I had not planned to be there. I was not chasing a view or trying to mark the moment. I was just tired and overwhelmed and somehow, without deciding to, I ended up sitting still watching the sun go down.
By the time the colour faded out of the sky, something in me had shifted. The tightness that had been sitting in my chest all week had loosened. I felt, unexpectedly, like I could breathe properly.
At the time I put it down to the relief of the day almost being over. But the more I have looked into what actually happens to the brain and body during a sunset, the more I understand that what I experienced was not just a coincidence. There is genuine science behind it.
The Feeling That Scientists Call Awe
The central thing a sunset does, the thing that drives most of what follows, is produce a feeling researchers call awe.
Awe is the feeling we get when we witness something immense and profound that we cannot quite comprehend. It could be a piece of art, a human achievement, or a natural wonder. Experiencing it changes our perception, often eliciting a physical response like tears or chills.
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.
That combination , beauty at scale, fleeting and unpredictable, is unusually effective at producing awe. You cannot scroll past it or skip it. You either watch it or you do not. And when you watch it, something happens.
Awe temporarily shifts our attention away from ourselves and places us in a more connected, expansive state of mind. The mental chatter that runs constantly in the background, the to-do lists, the replayed conversations, the low-grade anxiety about what is coming next, quiets down. Not because you forced it to. Because the sky demanded your attention instead.
What It Does to Your Brain
There is growing evidence that sunsets can have a meaningful impact on our brain and mental health, diminishing anxiety and depression while boosting memory, creativity, sleep and even altruism.
The memory effect surprised me most when I first came across it. Research looking at whether awe helps people retain information found that participants exposed to awe-inspiring content, including nature footage, showed better recall of what they heard afterward compared to those who had not experienced awe first. The theory is that awe clears cognitive clutter. It empties out whatever was filling the mind and leaves space for new information to settle in properly.
The creativity connection follows a similar logic. When you are stuck inside your own head, cycling through the same thoughts, you stop generating new ones. Awe interrupts that cycle. It points the mind outward toward something vast and, in doing so, gives it room to make unexpected connections. Some of the clearest thinking I have done has come in the hour after watching a sky do something remarkable.
What It Does to Your Body
The physical effects are real and measurable. Studies have shown that spending time in nature reduces stress hormones like cortisol, and gazing at a sunset extends these benefits.
Lower cortisol means lower blood pressure, slower heart rate, and muscles that are no longer braced against a threat that was never coming. The body returns to a resting state it often spends most of the day being pulled away from.
Research from the University of Exeter found that when scenes featured elements such as sunrise and sunset, participants considered them substantially more beautiful than the same environments seen under ordinary sunny conditions. The study also revealed that sunsets could trigger significant boosts in feelings of awe.
Researchers suggested that encouraging people to experience sunsets and sunrises could help boost wellbeing, and that it might be used as part of green prescribing, where nature plays a therapeutic role in mental health treatment.
The sleep connection is worth paying attention to. Evening light from a sunset, warm, amber, low on the horizon, signals to the brain that the day is ending. It supports the natural drop in alertness that should be happening as evening arrives. In a world where most of us spend our evenings staring at screens emitting the opposite of that, bright, cool, blue-toned light, a genuine sunset watched with real eyes is doing something quietly valuable for the sleep cycle that follows.
Why the Timing Matters
Humans appear to see sunrises and sunsets almost like bookends. They mark the edges of the day in a way that the rest of the hours do not. There is something deeply embedded in how we relate to those two transitions. They are the oldest markers of time that exist, present long before clocks or schedules or the particular kind of busyness that makes modern life feel relentless.
Watching a sunset is, in some sense, letting the day close properly. Not cutting it off mid-thought and falling into sleep still wired from the last screen you looked at, but actually witnessing the end of it. That act of closure seems to matter. The day had a beginning and now it has an end, and something in the brain responds to that with a kind of relief that is hard to manufacture any other way.
Chasing sunsets can become a form of daily or weekly ritual, something you look forward to that gives your day structure and joy. Having small rituals like these is linked to higher emotional resilience, increased motivation, and even better relationship satisfaction.
The Part That Requires Nothing From You
What I keep coming back to is how little this costs. No equipment, no subscription, no commute to a special location. The sky does it every evening regardless of whether anyone is watching.
The term sunset has over 300 million tags on Instagram, and people told researchers they would be willing to pay a premium to experience these phenomena, but of course we can all experience them for free.
Something about that feels important right now. So much of what we reach for when we feel overwhelmed costs money, takes time, or requires effort we do not have left at the end of a long day. A sunset requires only that you stop and look at it for a few minutes. The benefits do not require you to be in a particularly beautiful location. A strip of colour above rooftops is enough. The brain responds to the light and the scale regardless of the foreground.
I still watch whenever I can. Not every evening, and not always for long. Sometimes just a few minutes standing outside before whatever comes next. But I notice the difference on the days I do it versus the days I do not. The body does too, even when the mind is too busy to register it consciously.
The sky is going to do it anyway tonight. You may as well look up.