Awe Makes the Self Smaller — and the World Bigger

Most of our emotional energy is spent on a single, exhausting subject: ourselves. The replayed conversation, the imagined verdict of other people, the low hum of how am I doing? It is a small room to live in, and anxiety and low mood both know how to lock the door from the inside. Awe, it turns out, is one of the few feelings that can open it — not by making you feel better about yourself, but by briefly making you forget yourself altogether.

The Research

Awe is the feeling of meeting something vast — a night sky, a piece of music, an act of great courage — that doesn’t quite fit inside your usual way of seeing things. Researchers have spent the last two decades showing that this ordinary, overlooked emotion does something unusual and measurable to the mind.

Key Findings

✓ In a randomized study, older adults who took a weekly 15-minute “awe walk” for eight weeks reported more compassion and gratitude and less daily distress than those who took an ordinary walk (Sturm et al., 2020)
✓ The awe group literally shrank in their own photos: across the weeks their weekly selfies shifted focus away from themselves and toward the world around them, and their smiles grew wider (Sturm et al., 2020)
✓ Across five studies of more than 2,000 people, awe produced a “small self” — a diminished sense of one’s own importance — and, with it, more generosity, more ethical choices, and less entitlement (Piff et al., 2015)
✓ Standing in a grove of towering trees for one minute was enough: people who looked up at them afterward helped a stranger more readily than those who looked at an ordinary building (Piff et al., 2015)
✓ Of several positive emotions, awe was the single strongest predictor of lower levels of a proinflammatory marker (IL-6) — a correlation, not proof, but a striking hint that wonder may reach all the way into the body (Stellar et al., 2015)

The Small Self Is Not a Diminished Self

The phrase researchers use — the small self — sounds at first like something to avoid. We spend a great deal of effort trying to feel significant. But the science points the other way: much of our suffering comes from a self that has grown too large, that fills the whole horizon until there is no room for anything else. Rumination, the engine of both anxiety and depression, is self-focus that has forgotten how to stop.

Awe interrupts it. When you stand under something genuinely vast, attention turns outward, and for a moment the endless internal audit goes quiet. This is why the feeling is so consistently linked with kindness. A self that is briefly smaller is a self with room to notice other people. In the studies, awe didn’t make people withdraw into private bliss; it made them more generous, more helpful, more grateful. The feeling that puts us in our place also puts us back among our neighbors.

There is a humility built into this that the data keep circling. Awe, by definition, is the experience of encountering something that exceeds your current understanding — a reminder that the world is larger and stranger than your model of it. That is not a defeat for the mind. It is arguably its healthiest posture: awake, curious, and no longer pretending to have measured everything.

What the Research Doesn’t Say

Honesty is the whole point of reading the science, so: awe is not a treatment for clinical depression or an anxiety disorder, and no one should hear it as just go look at a sunset. The distress reductions in these studies were real but modest, measured mostly in everyday moods, not in diagnosed illness. The inflammation finding is correlational. And for some people — particularly after trauma — a sense of vastness can feel less like wonder and more like threat. Awe is a nourishment, not a medicine. It belongs alongside real care, not in place of it.

Practical Applications

The remarkable thing about the awe research is how cheap the intervention is. You don’t need the Grand Canyon. The participants found what they needed on the same neighborhood blocks they’d walked a hundred times.

1. Take an awe walk (15 minutes)

Once a week, walk somewhere outdoors with one instruction to yourself: go looking for what’s astonishing. Slow down. Let your attention be pulled outward — the architecture of a tree, the scale of the sky, the improbable detail of a single leaf. Approach the walk the way a child approaches a new place, as if you hadn’t already decided what everything is. Leave the phone in your pocket, except to occasionally photograph what stops you.

2. Practice “fresh eyes” on the ordinary

Awe hides most successfully in the things you’ve stopped seeing. The oldest and most reliable source of wonder is not novelty but attention — looking at the familiar until it becomes strange and astonishing again: a face you love, your own hands, the fact of morning light. The world does not run short of wonders. We run short of wonder.

3. Keep a short list of your awe sources

Everyone has reliable doorways: certain music, the night sky, great skill, moral beauty, the ocean, cathedrals, mountains, the microscope. Name three or four of yours and return to them on purpose, the way you’d return to any medicine that works.

4. Let awe move outward

The research suggests the benefit completes itself in generosity. After a genuinely moving moment, do one small kind thing — a message, a gift, an offer of help. You’re not manufacturing virtue; you’re following where the feeling already points.

For Counselors & Practitioners

Awe is a promising, low-cost adjunct, particularly for clients whose suffering is driven by rumination and self-focus.

Target the self-focus directly. For anxious or depressed clients caught in internal monitoring, awe offers a mechanism — attention turned outward — that complements cognitive work. An “awe walk” is a concrete, prescribable between-session practice (Sturm et al., 2020).
Frame it as attention, not achievement. The instruction that worked was simply to notice — not to feel a certain way or reach a certain state. This keeps the practice from becoming one more performance to fail at.
Watch for threat-based awe. Vastness is not universally soothing; for some trauma histories it can destabilize. Introduce it gently and titrate.
Connect it to values. Awe reliably surfaces gratitude, humility, and a pull toward others — useful raw material for meaning-centered and values-based work, without ever imposing a particular belief.

Key Takeaways

Awe reliably produces a “small self” — less self-focus — which is a large part of why it helps (Piff et al., 2015)
A weekly 15-minute awe walk measurably increased compassion and gratitude and lowered distress (Sturm et al., 2020)
The feeling that humbles us also makes us kinder; awe turns attention outward, toward others
It’s a nourishment that belongs alongside real care, not a replacement for treatment
Wonder is not rare because wonders are rare — it’s rare because attention is

Getting Started Today

Pick one:

Schedule one 15-minute awe walk this week and go looking for what astonishes you
Choose one ordinary thing today and look at it until it becomes strange again
Name your three reliable sources of awe and put the next one on your calendar
After your next moment of wonder, do one small, generous thing

We tend to treat wonder as a luxury — pleasant, optional, faintly childish. The research quietly disagrees. The capacity to be astonished, to feel small in the presence of something vast, appears to be one of the ordinary human faculties most closely tied to our health and our kindness. It costs nothing, it is available on your own street, and most of us are starving for it in the middle of plenty.