The Lost Art Of Looking Up
By Mia Palacios
It’s a common scene on any city sidewalk or bus stop: a sea of people, heads bent, eyes locked on the small, bright rectangles in their hands. This isn’t just a social observation; it’s a measurable shift in human posture and attention. A growing stack of research from fields as diverse as spine health, psychology, and urban design is starting to piece together what this tilt might be costing us, and what we stand to regain by sometimes tilting our chins towards the sky.
Let’s start with the physical part, because the body keeps the score. If you’ve ever felt a dull ache at the base of your skull after a long day scrolling or typing, you’re not imagining it. Studies in orthopedic journals have quantified this.
Research by Dr. Kenneth Hasraj found that when we crane our neck forward at a 60-degree angle to look at a phone, a posture so common it’s been dubbed “text neck,” the effective weight on our cervical spine skyrockets from a normal 10-12 pounds to about 60 pounds. That’s the equivalent of carrying an eight-year-old on your shoulders for hours at a time.
“I didn’t notice until my mom pointed it out, says Sebastian Gutierrez, a sophomore at Coral Gables Senior High School. “She took a picture of me while sitting down on the sofa, looking down at my phone, and my neck was just crunched…, now every time I feel any sort of neck pain or headache, I check my posture first.”
It’s no wonder physical therapists like Maria Flores report a steady stream of patients, including younger ones, with chronic neck and shoulder pain linked to posture, not injury. “We spend a lot of time now on postural re-education,” she notes. “It often begins with simply reminding people where neutral spine is.”
But the effects aren’t confined to our muscles and joints. What we do with our bodies influences our minds. In a telling study published in Health Psychology, researchers found that people who sat upright reported better mood, higher self-esteem, and less fatigue than those who sat slumped over. Your posture isn’t just how you hold your body; it can shape how you feel.
Now, flip that finding on its head, or rather, lift it. What happens when we intentionally look up? This is where science gets fascinating. Psychologists like Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley have spent years studying the emotion of “awe,” that feeling of wonder you get gazing at a mountain range, a night sky, or the soaring interior of a grand cathedral.
Their work consistently shows that experiences of awe, which almost always involve upward or expansive gaze, can reduce stress, make us feel more connected to others, and even make us more generous. Looking up, it seems, can literally lift our spirits by shifting our perspective from the narrow self to something much larger.
The idea would have made perfect sense to architects and builders of the past. For centuries, they constructed spaces designed explicitly to pull our gaze upwards and inspire a sense of grandeur or reverence.
Think of the ribbed vaults of Gothic cathedrals, built, as Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis wrote in the 1100s, to lift the soul “from the material to the immaterial.” Or the domes of Capitol buildings, meant to symbolize the lofty ideals of democracy. They understood that our surroundings could —and should— elevate our visions.
Walk through a modern city today, and that intentional vertical engagement is often missing. While legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs taught us the vital importance of lively, eye-level street activity, much of that that exists above the first floor has become a visual afterthought.
