Awe: The Emotion That Makes You Feel Small in the Best Way

You’re standing at the edge of a canyon, and for a moment, you can’t find words for it. Not because the view is pretty, though it is, but because something about its scale refuses to fit into your ordinary categories. You feel very small. Strangely, you don’t mind.

Or you’re in a concert hall when a piece of music does something you weren’t prepared for, and your chest tightens with something that isn’t quite sadness and isn’t quite joy. Or you read a line in a book that feels impossibly true. Or you hold a newborn and feel the weight of what it means that life keeps making new life.

These experiences share a distinctive quality. They’re marked by a kind of smallness that isn’t diminishing, a sense of encountering something larger than your usual frame of reference. Psychologists have spent the last two decades studying this experience, and what they’ve found is striking.

What Defines Awe as an Emotion

Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed a working definition of awe in a 2003 paper that has anchored most subsequent research. They identified two core components: perceived vastness and a need for accommodation.

Vastness doesn’t require actual physical scale. It refers to anything that seems to exceed your ordinary frame of reference, whether in size, complexity, time, beauty, skill, or moral elevation. A vast ocean produces awe, but so can witnessing extraordinary virtuosity, encountering a profound idea, or watching someone perform an act of radical generosity. The common thread is that the thing encountered is bigger, in some significant sense, than what you had in mind before you encountered it.

The need for accommodation is the cognitive component. When you encounter something vast, your existing schemas, the mental frameworks you use to make sense of experience, don’t quite fit it. Awe is partly the experience of being caught in that gap: what you’re perceiving is real, but your mental categories aren’t yet adequate to contain it. You have to accommodate, in Piaget’s term: actually update your model of the world rather than just slotting the new information into an existing category.

This is what distinguishes awe from mere admiration or aesthetic appreciation. Admiration is comfortable. Awe has an edge of disorientation to it. That slight sense of being undone is part of the signature of the experience.

What Awe Does to the Self

One of the most consistent findings in awe research is what it does to the experience of the self. Keltner and his colleagues, including work published in the journal Psychological Science, have documented what they call the “small self,” the diminished sense of personal importance that accompanies awe.

This sounds like it should feel bad. It doesn’t. People in studies who are induced to experience awe consistently report higher positive affect than control groups, even though they’ve just been reminded how small they are relative to the world. The small self effect isn’t humiliation or defeat. It’s more like relief: the temporary loosening of the constant work of managing and maintaining one’s self-image.

The small self effect has measurable behavioral consequences. People who experience awe are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior, show more patience, make more ethical choices, and report stronger feelings of connectedness to others. The proposed mechanism is that awe attenuates the self-focus that normally dominates waking consciousness. When you’re less preoccupied with yourself and your own concerns, you have more cognitive and emotional resources available for others.

There’s also evidence that awe reduces the experience of time pressure. A series of studies found that people who experienced awe reported feeling they had more time available and were more willing to donate their time to others. The explanation offered by researchers was that awe slows the sense of time passing by expanding the moment, making it feel fuller and less rushed than ordinary experience.

Keltner’s Ongoing Work

Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, has been the most prominent researcher in this area for two decades. His work, culminating in his 2023 book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” has made several significant contributions.

One is expanding the taxonomy of awe triggers beyond the obvious ones like nature and art. Keltner and his colleagues documented awe responses to moral exemplars, individuals who demonstrate extraordinary virtue or courage. Many people describe feeling awe in the presence of someone who has suffered greatly and retained their compassion, or who has sacrificed significantly for others. This moral awe appears to trigger similar neural and behavioral responses to aesthetic or natural awe.

Another contribution is the documentation of everyday awe. Studies in which participants kept awe diaries found that most people encounter awe multiple times per week, often in mundane contexts: an unexpectedly profound conversation, a child saying something that reframes a familiar idea, the behavior of an animal, a piece of music heard in an ordinary context. Awe doesn’t require a trip to the Grand Canyon. It’s more available than people typically assume.

Awe and Mental Health

The mental health implications of awe are an emerging area, and the research is promising but still developing. The clearest findings concern curiosity and open-mindedness. Awe appears to increase epistemic openness, the willingness to revise your beliefs in response to new information, which is associated with better psychological flexibility.

There’s also evidence suggesting awe reduces inflammatory markers associated with chronic stress, though this research is preliminary and the mechanisms are not yet well understood. More robustly established is the relationship between awe and reduced rumination. Because awe reliably shifts attention outward and reduces self-focused processing, it may serve as a natural interruption of the ruminative loops associated with depression and anxiety.

For people experiencing existential distress, the small self effect may be particularly relevant. Existential anxiety often involves a hyperawareness of personal significance and mortality. Awe, by temporarily suspending self-importance without threatening the self, may offer a kind of relief from that preoccupation without requiring the person to resolve the underlying existential questions.

Encountering More Awe

The good news from awe research is that the conditions for awe can be cultivated. It doesn’t require extraordinary circumstances, though extraordinary circumstances certainly help. What it does seem to require is a particular quality of attention.

Novelty-seeking is one route. Awe requires encountering something that exceeds your existing schemas. Experiences that are entirely familiar don’t usually produce it. Deliberately seeking out new kinds of beauty, unfamiliar music, places you haven’t been, ideas from fields you don’t know, increases the probability of encountering something vast enough to trigger accommodation.

Slowing down is another. Awe is incompatible with hurrying. The cognitive work of accommodation takes a moment. If you’re moving quickly through an experience, cataloging it rather than receiving it, the conditions for awe are poor.

And attention to the natural world, even in small doses, reliably increases awe-frequency in diary studies. A regular walk with the deliberate intention to notice scale, pattern, or beauty, rather than to get somewhere or recover from something, tends to produce more awe than the same walk taken distractedly.

The ancient word for what Keltner is studying would have been wonder. That’s not an accident. Whatever you call it, the research suggests that the capacity to feel small and still feel whole is one of the quieter and more underestimated forms of human thriving.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please reach out to a qualified mental health provider or call 988.