When did something last stop you in your tracks?
Not a notification. Not a headline that made your stomach drop. I mean the other kind of stopping: the sky going a color you didn't have a name for, a stranger's voice cracking on a high note, a tree you've walked past for years suddenly looking enormous. If you have to search for the answer, you're not unusual. You're just busy. And somewhere along the way you may have started treating awe as something that happens on vacation, in cathedrals, at the edge of canyons, rather than something that is available on a Tuesday between the pharmacy and the parking lot.
Psychologists have been taking that assumption apart for two decades. What they've found is more interesting than "nature is nice." Awe seems to change how you see yourself, and that may be why it's so hard to feel when your own concerns fill the whole frame.
What awe actually is
The psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, in a widely cited 2003 paper, described awe as arising when two things come together: you perceive something vast, and it doesn't fit the mental categories you already have, so your mind has to stretch to take it in. Psychologists call that second part a need for accommodation.
Vastness doesn't have to mean physical size. It can be a piece of music that holds more than you expected, a moral act that is braver than you thought people were, or an idea that rearranges what you believed. The common thread is a brief moment where your usual way of making sense of things isn't enough, and you're left a little open.
That openness is the part worth noticing. Most of daily life runs on prediction. You know the route, the faces, the script. Your brain, efficient as ever, files it all under "already understood" and stops looking closely. Awe is what happens when the filing system fails.
The small self, and why it feels good
One of the more consistent findings in awe research is something often called the small self: in awe, people report feeling less preoccupied with themselves and more connected to something larger. This isn't the shrinking feeling of low self-worth. It's closer to relief, the sense that your problems are real but not the whole of the world.
There is evidence beyond self-report. In a 2015 paper by Paul Piff and colleagues, people who spent about a minute looking up at tall eucalyptus trees reported more awe than those who looked at a building, and afterward behaved more helpfully in a staged situation where an experimenter dropped a handful of pens. The result suggests awe nudges attention outward. It's one study, and it should be read as a suggestive piece of a larger picture, not a guarantee. But it fits with a broader pattern: awe tends to soften the grip of self-focus.
There's also a finding about time. In research by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker published in 2012, people who felt awe reported feeling they had more time available and were more willing to give some of it away. Awe seems to pull you into the present so fully that the clock loosens its hold.
The awe walk
Here's the study that makes this practical. In 2020, a team including Virginia Sturm and Dacher Keltner published results from an experiment with older adults in the journal Emotion. Participants were asked to take a weekly walk of about fifteen minutes over eight weeks. One group got a simple instruction: walk. The other group was given an "awe" frame. They were asked to approach the walk with a sense of wonder, to look for things that felt vast or surprising, and to try to see the familiar route with fresh eyes.
The awe-walk group reported experiencing more awe over time, and more positive emotions like joy and gratitude in their daily lives. They also took selfies during the walks, and, in analyses of those photos, the awe walkers gradually shrank themselves in the frame, showing more of the surroundings and smiling more. Without being told to, they made themselves smaller in the picture.
The study was modest in size, and I'd be wary of anyone who claims it proves a cure for anything. But the design is the useful part. Nothing about the route changed. The only variable was the instruction to look.
Why you don't feel it by default
If awe is so accessible, why does it feel rare? A few honest reasons.
You're looking for confirmation, not surprise. Familiar spaces get compressed into labels: the street, the office, the kitchen. Awe requires you to un-label, even briefly.
You're carrying a to-do list. Self-focus and awe compete for the same attention. Rumination fills the frame, leaving no space for vastness to arrive.
You treat wonder as a peak, not a practice. If awe only counts when it's overwhelming, you'll dismiss the smaller versions: the way light moves across a wall at 4 p.m., or a toddler's total absorption in a puddle. Those are the same emotion at lower volume.
Your next moves
You don't need a trip. Try these this week.
- Take one fifteen-minute awe walk today. Pick a route you already know. Before you leave, tell yourself you're going to look for things that are bigger, older, or more intricate than you normally notice. Phone in your pocket, notifications off.
- Look up. Within the first two minutes, find something tall: a tree, a building's upper floors, the sky. Stand and look at it for a full minute, the way the eucalyptus study participants did. It will feel awkward at first. Stay with it anyway.
- Hunt for one thing that doesn't fit your categories. A texture, a sound, a pattern in bark or cloud or brickwork you can't immediately name. Let yourself not know what it is.
- Name the feeling in a sentence. When something lands, even slightly, write one line afterward: "The light through the leaves looked like it was moving on purpose." Specific beats poetic. The point is to catch it before it evaporates.
- Repeat weekly, not daily. The study design was weekly. A ritual that stays a little rare is less likely to flatten into routine, and the repetition of attention is what builds the skill.
What you keep afterward
Here's the quiet payoff. Awe moments are some of the most memorable parts of a life, but only if something holds onto them. Left alone, they slip away within hours, overwritten by the next errand and the next worry. A day can contain a genuinely astonishing minute and still end up filed as "nothing much happened."
That's the gap Lore was built for. It's a place to write down the day as a story, and the small, strange, enormous moments are exactly what tends to get lost when you don't. A line about the sky at 4 p.m. isn't much on its own, but months from now it may be the thing that reminds you your ordinary days weren't ordinary at all. If you'd like a place to keep them, you can take a look at Lore at https://lore.lumenlabs.works. But take the walk first. The sky is already doing its part.