The emerging research on awe, the emotion at the heart of spiritual experience, and why it may be one of the most beneficial feelings we can cultivate.
Stand at the rim of a vast canyon, or under a sky thick with stars far from any city, or in the presence of music or a cathedral or a newborn child, and you feel something that is hard to name but unmistakable when it comes: a quiet expansion, a sense of smallness that is somehow a relief rather than a threat, a feeling of being in the presence of something far larger than yourself. That feeling is awe, and until recently science had almost nothing to say about it. Over the past two decades, a growing body of research has begun to take awe seriously, and what it is finding suggests that this most spiritual of emotions may also be one of the most quietly powerful tools we have for living well.
The psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt offered an influential definition: awe is the emotion we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. It has two key ingredients. The first is vastness, an encounter with something far larger than ourselves, whether physically vast like a mountain range, or conceptually vast like a profound idea or an act of great moral beauty. The second is a need for accommodation, the sense that this vastness does not fit into our existing mental frameworks, and so it stretches them. Awe is, in a sense, the feeling of our mental map being redrawn to make room for something bigger. It sits at the heart of religious and spiritual experience across all cultures, but it is also available in a forest, a laboratory, or a concert hall.
The research is still young, but some of its findings are striking. In studies by Paul Piff and colleagues (2015), awe tended to produce what researchers call the small self, a gentle diminishment of our usual self-focus and self-importance. And this shift appears to show up in how people behave afterwards. In those studies, people induced to feel awe, whether by standing among towering trees or watching footage of natural wonders, afterwards behaved more generously and reported feeling more connected to others. In experiments by Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker (2012), awe seemed to expand people's sense of time, leaving them feeling less rushed. Many people also describe feeling more at ease and less weighed down by stress after moments of awe. And for many people, it shifts attention away from the petty, grasping concerns of the ego and toward the larger world and the people in it. In short, many people find that awe leaves them, however briefly, kinder, calmer, and more connected, the very qualities every wisdom tradition has tried to cultivate.
One of the most practical findings is that awe does not require a grand expedition to a distant natural wonder. Researchers have found that everyday awe, the kind available in ordinary life, is both common and beneficial. A practice as simple as the awe walk, where you take a stroll with the deliberate intention of attending to the vast, beautiful, or surprising things around you, has been shown in studies of older adults to increase positive emotion and prosocial feeling over time. The night sky, a piece of music, the intricacy of a single leaf, the scale of history, the kindness of a stranger, all are doorways to awe if we slow down enough to walk through them. We are surrounded by the vast and the wondrous; we have simply trained ourselves not to look.
Worn down by a stressful, screen-bound life, Lena was advised by a friend to try a simple experiment: once a day, to find one thing genuinely worthy of wonder and give it her full attention for a few minutes. At first it felt forced. But she persisted, lingering over the colour of the evening sky, the architecture of a spider's web, a moving passage of music, the sheer improbability of her own existence. Slowly something shifted. The constant low hum of her self-focused worry grew quieter. She felt, by her own account, less like the anxious centre of a small, threatening world and more like a grateful part of an enormous and astonishing one. Nothing in her circumstances had changed. Her relationship to the vastness around her had.
Awe is not a rare gift reserved for mountaintops and cathedrals, but an experience available to anyone willing to look for it. You can cultivate it deliberately: spend time in nature, seek out great art and music, contemplate the scale of the cosmos or the intricacy of the very small, allow yourself to be moved by moral beauty and human goodness. Many people find that such moments quiet the grasping self and widen the heart. In a culture that keeps our attention trapped on small screens and smaller worries, the deliberate cultivation of wonder may be one of the most nourishing and quietly spiritual things we can do.
SpirAI is a self-reflection app. Nothing here predicts the future or replaces medical or psychological care.
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