Awe Practice

What is actually happening

The clearest current account of awe comes from work by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who proposed that almost every clear instance of awe involves two ingredients. Something perceived as vast. And a small failure of the mind to immediately absorb it. The world hands you something slightly bigger than the box you had ready for it. The box has to widen. That widening is what we feel.

This explains why awe can arise from such different sources. A sky. A symphony. A piece of mathematics. A feather floating in the breeze. A person dying with grace. The content varies. The cognitive shape is similar.

Why it changes how you feel

When this shift happens, several things tend to move together. Attention broadens. The internal monologue quietens for a moment. The self feels smaller in proportion to the surroundings. Researchers have a name for this last part, the "small self", and it turns out to be one of the more interesting findings in the field. A smaller sense of self in this context is not a loss of confidence. It is a healthier sense of proportion. The problems that felt very large a moment ago are still there. They are just no longer the entire landscape.

In Virginia Sturm's awe walk study, older adults who took short weekly walks while deliberately looking for sources of wonder started, over eight weeks, to take photographs of themselves in which they appeared smaller in the frame, with more of the world visible behind them. Their smiles also grew broader. The researchers had not expected the small self to show up literally on camera. It did anyway.

Why the body cares

There is a growing body of work suggesting that awe has measurable effects in the body itself. The most cited finding is from Jennifer Stellar and colleagues, who found that of all the positive emotions they measured, awe was the strongest predictor of lower levels of inflammatory markers in healthy young adults. Other studies have found shifts in heart rate, respiration, and even subjective time perception during moments of awe. People in awe consistently report that time feels more abundant. The science here is still early, and the effects are moderate rather than dramatic, but the direction is clear. The meaning-making system and the body are not separate. When something genuinely moves you, the body knows.

Why it changes how you relate to other people

Awe is also reliably linked to what psychologists call prosocial behaviour, gratitude, generosity, willingness to help. Several studies have found that people who have just experienced awe behave more cooperatively, give more, and report feeling more connected to others. The current explanation is that when the self gets smaller, the boundary between self and other softens. You see yourself for a moment as part of a wider weave. Behaviour follows.

The simple thing first

You do not need a protocol to experience awe. Most people experience it spontaneously, in moments they did not plan. Sky. Music. A piece of news that surprises them in a good way. The seasons. A child noticing something for the first time. The most honest first instruction is to start paying attention to when this is already happening to you. If you look back over the last week, there are probably at least one or two moments. The practice begins with noticing them.

The awe walk

The most studied intentional version is the awe walk. It came out of work by Sturm and Keltner at UCSF and Berkeley, and the format is unusually light for something that produces measurable effects.

It looks like this. You go for a walk of about fifteen minutes. You leave your phone behind, or you switch it off. You walk somewhere that feels either new or quietly familiar, with some sense of openness or scale, although a busy street will do. As you walk, you intentionally let your attention move outward rather than inward. You look up. You notice details, the bark of a tree, the way light moves on a window, the rhythm of footsteps around you, the shape of clouds. You stay open to being surprised by something small.

That is the whole protocol. You do not need to feel anything in particular. You do not need to perform wonder. You simply move with your attention opened outward rather than turned inward. In the original eight-week study, this was done once a week. Effects accumulated gently over time.

A few variations worth knowing

Some people find that returning to the same familiar route, but with this opened attention, produces more awe than seeking out novelty. The Romantic poet's daffodil principle. Other people find that travelling to somewhere genuinely new is what they need. Both work. Listening to a piece of music with eyes closed and nothing else to do is its own version of the practice. Looking carefully at a great work of art. Spending an evening looking at the night sky away from city lights. Sitting beside the sea. Watching a film that touches a question larger than the plot. Reading poetry slowly. These are all doorways. None is the doorway.

The everyday version

The version most worth practising is the smallest one. Pausing for five seconds before walking through a door to actually see what is in front of you. Looking up at the sky on the way to the kitchen. Noticing the moment a piece of music begins to move you and not reaching immediately for your phone. Watching a child or animal absorbed in something, and letting yourself be absorbed in their absorption. These will not feel like a practice. They are.

What practitioners and researchers tend to advise

A few patterns appear consistently in the writing of people who have studied this for years. Move slowly enough to actually see. Leave the phone. Stay open to the smaller doorways. Do not chase the dramatic experiences, because chasing tends to close the very attention awe requires. Track your moments of awe, perhaps briefly in writing, perhaps just in memory. Over time, you will find you have more of them. The practice is less about producing awe and more about removing the small habits that keep walking past it.

When the psychologist Jennifer Stellar started looking, in the early 2010s, at whether positive emotions might leave a footprint in the body, awe was not the headline candidate. Joy, love, contentment, gratitude, pride, all of these had been studied for years and were obvious places to start. Awe was added partly because Stellar's collaborators at Berkeley were curious about it. What came out of the work surprised them. Of all the positive emotions they measured, the one most strongly linked with lower markers of bodily inflammation was awe. That finding does not say everything. It is one study, it needs replication, and the relationship probably runs in both directions. But it changed the shape of how awe is now taken seriously in the research community.

The wider literature is small but consistent in its themes. Most of the careful work has happened in the last twenty years, largely through Keltner's lab at Berkeley and a growing number of collaborators. The findings are interesting and reasonably consistent, but they describe modest effects rather than dramatic ones.

What awe does well

The most replicated finding is on the self. People in states of awe describe themselves as feeling smaller, in a healthier sense, with a wider field of view. This shows up in word choice, in drawings, in the framing of selfies, in willingness to help others. The "small self" effect is robust enough that it has become a defining feature of the emotion in the literature.

The second consistent finding is on prosocial behaviour. People who have just experienced awe tend to be more generous, more cooperative, more willing to help a stranger. Time perception also shifts. People in awe report that time feels more abundant, and they make decisions as if they had more of it.

There is also early but interesting work on the body, beyond the Stellar finding above. Other studies have looked at heart rate and respiration during moments of awe, at how time perception subjectively expands, and at how awe-prone people seem to recover from stress slightly faster. This is a single line of work that needs more replication, and the direction of cause and effect is not fully settled, but it points toward the older observation that meaningful experiences seem to support the body, not only the mind.

The awe walk studies are perhaps the most accessible piece of evidence. Virginia Sturm's work with older adults showed that a fifteen-minute walk with attention opened outward, done once a week for eight weeks, produced measurable increases in everyday positive emotions and decreases in distress. This is a small intervention. The effects are not enormous. But it is a useful demonstration that something gentle, repeatable, and almost free can shift how a week feels.

A few things worth knowing

Awe is not always pleasant. Some people experience it with an edge of fear, particularly in the presence of something genuinely overwhelming, very large, very dark, very strange. This is normal and recognised in the research as the threat-tinged variant of awe. Most everyday awe is closer to the warm end of the spectrum, but the wider emotion does not require positive valence to qualify.

The research is largely Western. There are interesting and not fully resolved questions about how the experience of awe varies across cultures, and about whether the protocols that have been studied in mostly American samples translate cleanly to other contexts. The honest position is that the broad mechanism, the felt sense of vastness and the small self, appears to be cross-cultural, but the specific triggers and the way the emotion is integrated socially vary widely.

Awe is also not a treatment. It is not an antidepressant. It is not a substitute for the harder work some people need. What the evidence suggests is more modest and more useful. A regular gentle dose of wonder appears to support wellbeing, social connection, and a healthier sense of proportion. That is worth a great deal, and it asks very little.

Awe practice is one of the lower-risk practices in the library. Most people can take an awe walk this afternoon with no preparation and no risk of harm. The cautions below are gentle and apply mainly to a small set of contexts.

Essential guidance

For most people, no special precautions are needed. A walk, an evening looking at the sky, a slow listen to a piece of music, a few minutes paying attention to a tree. There is nothing here that requires guidance, training, or supervision.

Intense experiences of awe can occasionally bring up unexpected emotion. Grief is the most common one. Standing somewhere vast and still can sometimes let surface what the busier parts of life have been keeping at bay. This is not a malfunction. It is the practice working in a way you did not expect. If it happens, allow it, breathe, and consider letting someone you trust know afterwards if it feels significant. People recovering from significant loss may want to introduce awe practice gently rather than seeking out dramatic experiences early on.

For people with a history of dissociation, depersonalisation, or certain mental health conditions, very intense awe experiences may temporarily destabilise the sense of self. The small self effect is healthy in most contexts, but for someone whose grip on a stable self is already fragile, a strong awe experience, particularly in altered states or extreme environments, can feel more disorienting than restorative. If this applies to you, lean toward the gentler doorways, ordinary nature, music at moderate volume, art viewed at your own pace, and approach more intense practices like high-altitude or wilderness immersion with care.

Forcing the emotion tends to backfire. The research on awe is consistent on this point. The more you chase the feeling, the more it tends to evade you. The practice works through attention and availability, not through effort. If a walk does not produce awe, the walk is still a walk. The next one might land differently.

Awe is not a substitute for treatment. If you are dealing with depression, anxiety disorders, or significant unprocessed trauma, awe practice can be a real support alongside appropriate care, but should not replace it.