There is a particular feeling that arrives when you stand at the rim of a canyon, hear a piece of music swell into something enormous, or watch the Milky Way unfurl across a dark sky. For a moment, your usual worries go quiet. You feel small, but not in a diminishing way—small in a way that somehow makes the world feel larger and kinder. That feeling has a name, and increasingly, it has a science. It is called awe, and researchers now believe it may be one of the most underrated tools we have for healing stress and expanding the mind.
For decades, psychology focused on fixing what was broken. But a quieter revolution has been mapping the emotions that help us flourish—and awe sits near the center of it. Far from being a vague, poetic luxury, awe produces measurable changes in the body and brain. It calms our stress response, softens our self-absorption, and gently reorders our priorities. The best part? You don’t need a mountaintop or a passport to find it. Awe is closer, and more cultivable, than most of us imagine.
What Awe Actually Is
The leading scientist in this field is Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent much of his career studying this emotion. In his research, Keltner defines awe as the feeling we get in the presence of something vast—vast in size, beauty, complexity, or meaning—that transcends our current understanding of the world. Awe has two ingredients: a sense of vastness, and a need to mentally accommodate, to update how we see things to make room for what we just experienced.
“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”
— Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder
This is why awe feels different from simple happiness or pleasure. A good meal makes you happy. A symphony, a redwood forest, or an act of breathtaking human kindness makes you pause. Your mental model of reality stretches to hold something bigger than it was a moment before. That stretching is precisely where awe’s power begins.
The “Small Self” Effect
One of the most fascinating discoveries in awe research is what Keltner calls the “small self”. When people experience awe, their sense of their own importance shrinks—and paradoxically, they feel better for it. In studies, participants who gazed up at towering eucalyptus trees for just one minute afterward described themselves as feeling smaller and less self-important than those who stared at a plain building.
This shrinking of the ego is profoundly relieving. So much of our daily stress comes from a relentless focus on the self: our schedules, our anxieties, our endless mental to-do lists. Awe quiets that internal narrator. By making us feel like a small part of something immense, it loosens the grip of rumination and self-concern that fuels so much modern unhappiness.
How Awe Heals Your Body
Awe isn’t only a mental experience—it leaves fingerprints on your physiology. In one striking study, Keltner and his colleagues found that people who reported experiencing more awe and wonder had lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines—the immune molecules linked to chronic stress, depression, and disease. Of all the positive emotions measured, awe was the strongest predictor of lower inflammation.
The benefits ripple outward into how we feel and behave:
- Lower stress: Awe activates the calming branch of the nervous system, slowing the heart and easing the fight-or-flight response that keeps so many of us on edge.
- Expanded time: People who feel awe report that time seems to slow down and open up, leaving them feeling less rushed and more present in the moment.
- Greater generosity: Awe makes us kinder. Studies show that awe-struck people are more likely to help a stranger, share resources, and act with patience and humility.
- Sharper curiosity: Because awe nudges us to update our worldview, it leaves us more open-minded, creative, and eager to learn.
In other words, awe does quietly and naturally what we spend so much money and effort chasing: it lowers stress, restores a sense of time, and reconnects us to other people.
Where to Find Awe in Everyday Life
The most encouraging finding from Keltner’s work is that awe is not rare. When his team asked people around the world to keep diaries, they discovered that most experienced awe roughly two or three times a week. It hides in ordinary places, waiting to be noticed. Keltner identifies several reliable sources of everyday wonder:
- Nature: A sunset, a storm, the ocean, a single tree backlit by morning light—the natural world is the most dependable doorway to awe.
- Music: A melody that gives you chills or a song that seems to express the inexpressible can lift you out of yourself instantly.
- Art and architecture: A painting, a cathedral, a film, or a poem that captures something true can stop you in your tracks.
- Moral beauty: Keltner found this is the most common source of all—witnessing acts of courage, kindness, and human goodness moves us deeply.
- The night sky: Looking up at the stars reliably triggers the vastness that defines awe, connecting us to something ancient and immense.
A Simple Awe Practice You Can Start Today
Because awe responds to attention, you can deliberately cultivate more of it. Researchers have studied a technique called the “awe walk”—an ordinary stroll taken with one small shift in mindset. In one study, older adults who took weekly awe walks reported greater joy and less daily distress than those who simply walked. Here is how to begin your own practice:
- Walk with fresh eyes: Take a 15-minute walk and approach it as if you’ve never seen this place before. Notice texture, light, scale, and detail.
- Look up and out: Tilt your attention toward the vast—tall trees, wide skies, distant horizons, the architecture overhead.
- Slow down and zoom in: Pause at the small wonders too—the veins of a leaf, the pattern of frost, a child’s laughter.
- Let yourself feel small: Instead of resisting it, lean into the sense that you are one tiny, lucky part of an enormous, mysterious world.
- Name it: When wonder arrives, silently acknowledge it. Naming the feeling helps you notice it more often.
You can also seek awe on purpose: stargaze on a clear night, listen to a piece of music with your eyes closed, revisit a great work of art, or simply pay closer attention to the small acts of kindness happening all around you.
The Quiet Power of Wonder
We live in a world that constantly pulls our attention inward—toward our screens, our schedules, our worries. Awe does the opposite. It draws us outward and upward, reminding us that we are part of something vast, beautiful, and ongoing. The science is clear that this shift is not just pleasant but genuinely healing for both mind and body. And the most hopeful truth of all is that awe was never meant to be reserved for grand occasions. It is woven into ordinary days, into the sky above your street and the goodness in the people around you. The wonder is already there, waiting. All you have to do is look up, slow down, and let yourself be amazed.
