The Awe Response

Awe is the feeling of standing small before something vast, and the science says it quiets the self, widens time, and makes us measurably kinder. Part of the series: The Nature Effect.

Everyone has felt it, and it is almost impossible to talk yourself into. You come around a bend and the canyon simply opens beneath you. You look up on a dark night, far from any city, and the sky is suddenly, shockingly full. You stand under trees so old and so tall that the top is a rumor. Something happens in the body before a single thought forms: a catch in the breath, a prickle along the arms, an involuntary quieting, and then, often, a single unhelpful word. Wow.

That response has a name, and in the last two decades it has gone from a poet’s word to a serious subject of science. It is awe, and it may be one of the most quietly powerful things the natural world does to us.

The emotion of vastness

The psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt gave awe its working definition: the emotion we feel in the presence of something vast that exceeds our current understanding of the world. Two things have to be true at once. There must be vastness, of size, or beauty, or age, or complexity, something bigger than the frame you carry around. And that vastness has to strain the frame, to force the mind to stretch and rearrange itself in order to take it in. Nature is the most reliable source of it we have. Mountains, oceans, canyons, storms, old forests, the night sky: these are the machinery of awe, and they have been prompting it for as long as there have been people to look up.

The small self

The strangest and best documented effect of awe is what it does to the sense of self. In the presence of the vast, the self and its endless concerns seem to shrink. Researchers call it, plainly, the small self, and it is the opposite of what you might fear. Being made to feel small in this way does not diminish people. It frees them.

In a landmark set of studies, the psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues showed that awe reliably produces this shrinking of the self, and that the shrinking makes people behave better. Across several experiments, people moved to awe became more generous, more ethical, and more helpful. In the most memorable of them, participants were simply asked to stand for a minute in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees, looking up. Afterward, compared with people who had spent the minute facing an ordinary building, they were more likely to help a stranger who stumbled, and they reported feeling less entitled and self important. A minute of looking up at trees, and people were kinder.

You can hear, in that, an echo of an earlier piece in this series. The self referential chatter of the mind, the loop that runs in the default mode network, is exactly what awe seems to interrupt. For a moment, standing before something enormous, you stop being the harried center of your own story and become, instead, a small part of something much larger. It is a relief, and the research suggests it is good for you.

What else it does

The effects ripple outward from there. Awe appears to expand our sense of time: people who have just felt it report feeling less rushed, as though the clock had loosened, and they make more patient and more generous choices. It tracks, over the long run, with higher life satisfaction and lower daily stress. There is even evidence, still early, that positive emotions in the awe family are associated with lower levels of the body’s inflammatory markers, a possible thread running between wonder and physical health.

And it is beginning to be used on purpose. Researchers have tested the awe walk, a simple practice of walking outdoors with the deliberate intention of noticing the vast and the wondrous, and found that older adults who took such walks felt more everyday joy and compassion, and even smiled more broadly in photographs, than those who simply walked. A recent review by Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner went further, laying out awe as a genuine pathway to mental and physical health. The wonder you feel at the rim of a canyon is not only a peak experience. It may be a form of care.

Where the science is still honest

As everywhere in this series, the honest scope matters. The mechanism is genuinely debated: while many studies point to the small self, a 2024 study found that awe’s effect on kindness ran instead through a quieter, calmer sense of ego rather than self diminishment as such, so the exact path is not settled. Much of the research relies on awe induced by videos and images in a lab, which are pale stand ins for actually standing beneath the trees, and the samples have skewed heavily Western. Researchers themselves are calling for more study of real awe, felt in real places, among more of the world’s people. The phenomenon is robust. The full explanation is still being written.

Why the vast places are worth saving

Here is where wonder becomes an argument.

Awe does something no lecture can. It takes a person locked inside their own concerns and, in an instant, without persuasion, makes them feel part of something vast and shared, more generous, less entitled, more aware of the whole. That is not a minor mood. It is very close to the exact shift of heart that caring for the living world requires, and it arrives for free, the moment someone stands in the presence of the genuinely grand.

Which means the great wild places are not only storehouses of carbon and habitat and water. They are among the last dependable sources of human awe: the old growth forest, the undammed canyon, the living reef, the ocean at full scale, and the dark night sky that most of humanity, drowned now in artificial light, can no longer even see. Lose them, and we lose more than scenery. We lose one of the surest ways our species has ever had to be shaken out of its smallness and reminded that it belongs to something larger. Protecting vastness protects a wellspring of human kindness.

And there is the intimate version, the one this whole pillar has been circling. In the moment of awe, the border between you and the world briefly dissolves. You feel, directly and without words, that you are not standing apart from nature and observing it, but are a small living part of an immense living whole. That feeling is the thesis of this entire site, delivered not as an idea but as an experience. It is worth seeking out, and the places that give it are worth protecting.

So find something too big for you. A mountain, a shoreline, a stand of ancient trees, a sky with no city in it. Stand there. Let yourself feel small. It turns out to be one of the best things you can do, for yourself and for everyone else.

The research behind this page