Some night in the last year, you probably stood somewhere and felt your problems go quiet. Maybe it was a sky with more stars than you knew existed. Maybe it was a mountain, a choir, or a newborn's hand closing around your finger. For a few seconds your inbox, your resentments, and your running commentary about your own failures all stopped. Then you went back inside and picked them up again, as if nothing had happened.

That pause was not a coincidence, and it wasn't just pleasant scenery. Researchers have been studying that moment for about two decades, and they've found it does something unusual to the mind. It makes the self smaller. That turns out to be a feature, not a loss.

What awe actually is

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed a definition that most of the field still builds on. Awe, they argued, arises when you encounter something vast and it challenges your existing understanding of the world. Vastness doesn't have to mean physical size. It can be a moral act so generous it rearranges what you thought people were capable of, a piece of music, or a mathematical proof. The second part matters just as much. Awe happens when your mental map can't quite hold what you're seeing, so your mind has to stretch to make room.

That explains why awe feels so different from happiness. Joy confirms the world you already have. Awe interrupts it. People often describe it with a slightly strange mix: a lifted chest, goosebumps, an exhale, sometimes a little fear at the edges.

The small self

The most useful idea in this research is what's called the small self. When you're in awe, attention swings outward, away from your own concerns and toward the thing in front of you. Researchers describe a diminished sense of self-importance, a feeling of being one part of something larger.

This is the opposite of what most of us do on an ordinary Tuesday. Much of our distress comes from self-focus: replaying what we said, forecasting how we'll be judged, narrating our own shortcomings. Clinicians have long linked heavy self-focused attention, especially the repetitive kind, to low mood and anxiety. Awe interrupts it without any effort at all. You can't ruminate very well while you're staring up at a redwood.

Importantly, the small self isn't the same as feeling worthless. Shame says I am less than others. Awe says I am part of something much bigger than my worries. One shrinks you in a way that hurts. The other shrinks the problem's claim on you.

What the research found

The findings here are modest in scale but striking, and worth stating carefully.

In a 2015 set of studies led by Paul Piff with Keltner and colleagues, some participants spent about a minute looking up at towering eucalyptus trees, while others looked at a plain building. Afterward, an experimenter "accidentally" dropped a handful of pens. The people who had been looking at the trees helped pick them up more. The authors linked this to the small self: when you feel less central, other people loom a little larger.

A 2012 paper by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found that awe changed people's sense of time. Participants who experienced awe reported feeling they had more time available and were more willing to give some of it away. Awe seems to widen the present moment, which eases the hurried, scarcity-driven feeling many of us carry.

There's also a body-level finding. In 2015, Jennifer Stellar and colleagues measured inflammatory markers and reported that, among several positive emotions, awe was the strongest predictor of lower levels of interleukin-6, a cytokine involved in inflammation. That's a correlation, not a cure. But it hints that awe is more than a mood.

Then came the study I find the most charming. Virginia Sturm, Keltner, and colleagues asked older adults to take a short "awe walk" once a week for eight weeks, fifteen minutes, with instructions to approach the walk with fresh eyes and look for things that felt vast or surprising. A comparison group took ordinary walks. Over time, the awe-walk group reported more everyday positive emotion and, in the selfies they took, tended to show more smiling and to occupy less of the frame, with more of the surroundings visible. A literal small self. It was a modest sample and a short trial, so treat it as promising rather than settled. Still, the intervention cost nothing.

Why we starve ourselves of it

If awe is this useful, why does it feel so rare? Partly because modern life shrinks our field of view. Screens are built for the narrow and the personal: our feed, our notifications, our face in a camera. We tend to treat awe as a luxury reserved for vacations, when the research suggests it's available in small doses nearly anywhere.

People tend to feel awe in a handful of reliable places: nature, music, art, collective moments like a crowd singing together, acts of moral beauty, and big ideas. You don't need the Grand Canyon. A thunderstorm watched from a window counts. So does a stranger doing something quietly brave.

There's also a habit of mind that blocks it. We rush past a striking thing because we're thinking about the next thing. Awe requires a few seconds of letting yourself be a little bewildered, and many of us have trained that tolerance out of ourselves.

Your next moves

None of these requires travel or equipment. Try them this week.

  • Take one fifteen-minute awe walk. Pick a route you know and walk it with one rule: look for something that feels vast, intricate, or surprising. A huge old tree, the way light hits a building, clouds moving fast. Stop when something earns it. Leave your podcast at home.
  • Look up for sixty seconds today. Find the tallest tree, building, or open sky near you and look at it, without photographing it. That's roughly the dose used in the eucalyptus study, so you're not being ridiculous.
  • Play one piece of music that gives you chills, start to finish. Don't multitask. Headphones on, eyes closed or on the window. If you don't know what gives you chills, spend ten minutes finding out.
  • Seek out a small act of moral beauty. Read a story about someone doing something selfless, or recall one you witnessed. Elevation, the warm feeling of watching goodness, sits close to awe and works through a similar widening.
  • Write down what happened in your body. After any of the above, spend two minutes noting where you felt it: chest, throat, skin, breath. Then note what happened to your worries. Did they shrink, go quiet, or stay the same size? Seeing your own pattern makes it easier to repeat on purpose.

One caution

Awe isn't a replacement for dealing with what's hurting you. A starry sky won't resolve a hard conversation or a grief. What it can do is loosen the grip long enough for you to see your situation with a bit more room around it. Think of it as changing the lens for a moment, not fixing the problem. And if low mood or anxiety is persistent, that deserves real support from a professional, not just a walk.

Keeping the moments you'd otherwise lose

Here is the part most people miss. Awe is fleeting, and it fades from memory quickly because it doesn't come attached to a task. You feel the stillness, then the day closes over it. A line or two written down the same evening, what you saw and how your chest felt, turns a vanishing moment into something you can notice the pattern of later. That's the small, private habit we built Pulse around: a place where feelings, including the quiet, expansive ones, stay with you rather than being performed for anyone. If you'd like somewhere to keep them, you can find it at pulse.lumenlabs.works. And if you never do, go look at the sky anyway.