What if one of the most potent health practices available costs nothing, requires no equipment and is probably something you’ve been dismissing as frivolous?

I’m talking about beauty. Not the beauty industry—the creams and procedures and endless self-improvement projects. I mean the practice of noticing beauty, seeking it out, letting it in. And equally, the practice of making it.

When I say beauty, I don’t mean prettiness. I mean the experience of encountering something that feels coherent, alive, right—something that creates a felt sense of yes. It might be a perfectly composed room or the way morning light falls across your kitchen table. It might be a poem that cracks you open or a meal you arranged on a plate with unexpected care. Beauty is what happens when form and feeling align—and when we recognize it, something in us says, this is true.

That’s the deeper function of beauty. It’s not just pleasant. It’s revelatory. Beauty has always been understood as a kind of knowing—a way the world shows us what matters, what’s real, what’s worth protecting. When something strikes us as beautiful, we’re not just having an aesthetic experience. We’re catching a glimpse of coherence in a chaotic world.

Consider this: the world didn’t have to be beautiful. It only had to function. Sunsets didn’t need to take our breath away. Birdsong didn’t need to be musical. Yet here we are, in a universe that is gratuitously, lavishly beautiful—far exceeding what survival requires. That excess feels like evidence, like the world is saying something.

This is why beauty isn’t a luxury. It’s a form of soul maintenance.

Yes, there’s science here. Research in neuroaesthetics shows that encounters with beauty activate the brain’s reward centers, slow the heart rate and reduce cortisol. But reducing beauty to neuroscience misses the point. Beauty doesn’t just regulate your nervous system—it nourishes something that has no clinical name. Call it your spirit, your interior life, the part of you that asks what is all this for?

Beauty commands a particular kind of attention—the kind that pulls us out of our endless self-referential loops and into relationship with something beyond ourselves. In that moment of pure attention, the ego quiets. The mental chatter softens. We stop being the center of everything and become, instead, a witness. And in that witnessing, something in us is restored that we didn’t even know was depleted.

Here’s what’s equally powerful: creating beauty does the same thing. When you arrange flowers, set a table with intention, make a collage, write something true—you’re not just producing an object. You’re participating in meaning-making. You’re taking the raw material of your life and giving it form. The act of making beauty is itself a practice of coherence, a way of saying, I am here, and this matters.

Now think about the environments you move through most days. The fluorescent-lit office. The cluttered counter. The inbox that never empties. We’ve normalized visual chaos, disorder and ugliness—and then wonder why we feel not just stressed but starved for something we can’t name.

I’ve come to believe that beauty, both witnessed and made, is medicine we’ve forgotten how to prescribe.

A few years ago, in a particularly grinding season of my life, I started a practice I call “beauty foraging.” Every day, I would look for one thing—just one—that struck me as genuinely beautiful. Sometimes it was a garden in full bloom. More often, it was small: the way steam rose from my coffee, a stranger’s laugh that sounded like music.

The practice didn’t change my circumstances. But it changed me. It trained my attention toward what was life-giving. It reminded me, daily, that the world is full of quiet evidence that meaning exists—if I’m willing to look.

So here’s my invitation: treat beauty as essential. Put flowers on your desk. Curate what you see first thing in the morning. Make something with your hands, even badly. Let yourself linger in front of something that moves you—not to photograph it, just to receive it.

Beauty is not the reward for getting through the hard stuff. It’s the thing that helps you get through—not just intact but awake.