What Is Awe? The Emotion You Can Train Yourself to Feel Again

Awe is the self-transcendent emotion you feel when something so vast it doesn’t fit your current picture of the world forces your mind to expand to make room for it — a mountain range, a night sky, a piece of music, a moral act larger than you expected of anyone. Researchers define it precisely: awe arises from perceived vastness plus a need for accommodation, the felt demand to update your mental model. Its signature effect is the small self — for a moment your private worries shrink against something larger, and the constant inner narration goes quiet. That quieting is why awe feels like relief, and it is also why, once you understand the mechanism, you can deliberately make it happen more often.

Most explanations of awe stop at the definition, or they admire it — a beautiful essay about wonder, a TED talk that leaves you moved but no closer to feeling it yourself. This is the part nobody teaches: awe is not a lightning strike you wait for. It is a predictable response to a particular kind of attention, and that attention can be practised. The Stoics worked out how two thousand years before anyone measured it.

Is awe an emotion — and what makes it different?

Awe is a genuine emotion, not just a strong reaction. What separates it from excitement or surprise is the combination researchers point to: something vast (in size, in number, in beauty, in complexity, or in moral stature) that your existing mental categories can’t quite hold, so your mind has to stretch. That stretch — the need for accommodation — is the feeling. You are momentarily reorganising your sense of how big the world is and how small your place in it.

This is what sets awe apart from its neighbours. Wonder is awe’s gentler cousin — curiosity at something new, without the scale that overwhelms. Fear shares awe’s vastness but adds threat; in fact awe was probably built on top of an older fear response, which is why a thunderstorm can tip from one to the other. Gratitude turns you toward a giver; awe turns you toward something that has no giver at all. The common thread in awe is that you get smaller — and unlike fear, that smallness feels good.

What does awe feel like — and what counts as an example?

From the inside, awe is a loosening. The chest opens, time seems to slow, the urge to talk falls away. People describe goosebumps, a dropped jaw, a sense of being part of something rather than apart from it. Crucially, the self-referential chatter — the running commentary about your day, your worries, your to-do list — briefly stops. You are not thinking about yourself, because for a moment there is something more interesting than yourself to attend to.

The triggers are more varied than the postcard version suggests. Researchers who catalogued the sources of awe found that the most common one is not nature at all but other people — witnessing courage, kindness, or skill beyond what you expected, what they call moral beauty. The rest of the list runs through nature, collective movement (a crowd moving as one), music, visual art, big ideas, spirituality, and the encounter with life and death. Awe is not rare because the world stopped being vast. It is rare because we stopped looking up.

The “small self”: what awe actually does to you

Here is the mechanism that makes awe useful rather than merely pleasant. When you feel awe, your attention turns outward toward the vast thing, and your usual self-focus drops away. Psychologists call the result the small self — not a diminished self, but a self briefly relieved of its own importance. Your problems don’t get solved; they get resized. The argument that felt enormous this morning is still there, but it has stopped filling the whole frame.

This is also why awe humbles without crushing. Crushing humiliation makes you smaller and worse — it adds shame. Awe makes you smaller and lighter, because the smallness isn’t a verdict on you; it’s just an accurate sense of scale. You are a small thing inside an enormous and astonishing world, and noticing that is one of the more reliable ways to feel better that does not involve fixing anything. It is also, quietly, one of the routes to a durable sense of meaning and purpose — the kind that comes from feeling part of something larger rather than from optimising yourself.

Why you rarely feel awe anymore

If you’ve thought I used to feel this more, you’re probably right, and there are two honest reasons. The first has some research behind it: awe tends to track novelty, and as we age the world becomes more familiar — fewer first encounters, more things we’ve already filed away. The mountain you’ve seen a hundred times stops demanding accommodation because your mind already has a slot for it.

The second reason is harder to prove but easy to recognise. A scrolling feed delivers a thousand small, pre-digested stimuli an hour, each one resolved before it can become vast. Vastness needs time and stillness to register — you cannot accommodate something enormous in the four seconds before the next clip. This is observation more than established science, but it fits the mechanism: awe is built from sustained attention to something larger than you, and sustained attention is exactly what an optimised feed is designed to prevent. The capacity for awe doesn’t disappear. It gets starved.

Awe and flow: two ways to lose yourself

Awe is often confused with flow, and the difference is worth getting right, because they are opposite routes to the same relief. In flow, you lose yourself in an activity — the task absorbs you so completely that self-consciousness vanishes; the climber on the rock face, the writer who looks up and finds three hours gone. Awe loses you against something — you become small in the presence of something vast, and the self quiets not through absorption but through scale.

Both shut off the anxious inner narrator, which is why both feel restorative. But you reach them differently: flow needs a challenge matched to your skill, while awe needs only that you stop and attend to something larger than yourself. The full mechanics of the absorbed kind of self-loss are worth understanding in their own right if you want the complete picture of how flow quiets the self through total task-absorption — awe is its standing-still twin.

How to cultivate awe deliberately — without psychedelics

The honest version first: you cannot summon awe on command. The need-for-accommodation response can’t be forced any more than you can force yourself to be surprised. What you can do is make awe far more likely — reliably enough that it stops being an accident. This is the real answer to the question that sends so many people toward psychedelics. A drug produces the state more dependably; a practice builds the capacity a drug doesn’t, and you can use it on a Tuesday morning without consequences.

Start with the simplest lever, which researchers have actually tested: the awe walk. Walk somewhere with a wide view or natural detail, and deliberately shift your attention outward — to the scale of the sky, the age of a tree, the intricacy of something small. The instruction that makes it work is to approach what you see as if for the first time, looking for the vast or the unexpected rather than narrating your own thoughts. It is less a route than a way of paying attention, and it can be done in fifteen minutes.

Then there is the older, more deliberate version — and here an ancient practice maps onto the modern science with uncanny precision.

The View from Above: the original deliberate awe practice

Long before anyone measured the small self, the Stoics were running something that looks remarkably like a deliberate awe protocol. They called it, in effect, the view from above: the practice of mentally rising until the earth and your life on it appear at their true cosmic scale. It is not a single thinker’s trick but a whole tradition. In Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, the narrator is carried up among the stars and looks back to find his entire empire shrunk to nothing — “our whole empire no larger than if we touched the earth, as it were, at a single point.” That is the small self, written down in the first century BC.

Marcus Aurelius ran the same exercise inwards, against time rather than space. In the Meditations he reminds himself that “the cause of the universe is as it were a strong torrent, it carrieth all away” — fame, grievance, the urgent business of the day, all swept along and gone. Picture your troubles from high enough, or far enough into the flow of time, and they resize themselves. This is the deliberate version of what the awe walk stumbles into: you are not waiting for a vast thing to appear, you are climbing to where everything looks vast.

The cause of the universe is as it were a strong torrent, it carrieth all away.

But the tradition is honest about a risk the postcard version of awe hides, and you should be too. The view from above does not always land on wonder. Seneca, looking from the same height, sees impermanence — the seven wonders of the world “levelled with the ground,” nothing lasting forever. The cosmic zoom can produce awe or a bleak vertigo of insignificance; which one you get is not fully in your control. That is exactly why the Stoic aim was never “feel awe.” It was equanimity — a steadiness that holds whether the view delivers wonder or only perspective. Awe is the lovely possible result. The durable gain is that your troubles, seen from high enough, stop running your day. You can read more on how Marcus turned this cosmic framing into a working theory of who you actually are beneath the roles you play — the same view, pointed at the question of self.

What does awe mean in the Bible?

Because the word carries an older religious sense, it’s worth a line: in biblical usage, awe is closer to reverent fear — the fitting human response to the holy, awe and dread fused together (“the fear of the Lord”). That is the ancestor of the modern emotion, which kept the vastness and the smallness but shed most of the dread. The psychological awe described here and the scriptural one are relatives, not the same word — one points at God, the other at anything large enough to make you forget yourself.

Awe is not a gift the lucky are born with or a state you can only chemically unlock. It is the predictable result of turning your full attention to something larger than you — and the people who searched hardest for a steady mind, centuries before the science, left the instructions. Look up more often, and for longer than the feed will let you. The world is still vast. You just have to climb to where you can see it.