“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” writes Dacher Keltner in his book “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.”
This feeling is usually associated with observing the sublime in nature: grand mountains, trees, vast dunes, or the wide ocean horizon.
Sources of Awe
People can be awestruck by philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, music, visual design, epiphanies, personal realizations, impressive feats, and spirituality and religion. Even simply learning about other interesting people stimulates awe. Research suggests that when participants watch videos of inspiring people such as Mother Teresa, this can trigger awe.To determine the most common source of awe, Keltner conducted an experiment asking participants worldwide to write stories that caused them to feel awe.
Out of the 2,600 stories collected, the most common source of awe worldwide was moral beauty: exceptional virtue and character marked by purity and goodness of intention and action. This included witnessing other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or ability to overcome hardship—for instance, stories of individuals risking their lives to save strangers or acts of kindness performed during disasters.
Moral beauty also includes how people feel awestruck by the beginning—or end—of life. Many mothers note that giving birth is the most significant source of awe. Keltner writes about a mother from Japan who told him that she “was deeply moved by the realization and responsibility of becoming a parent, as well as the preciousness of life.”
“From now on I felt that I would desperately live just to protect this life,” she told Keltner, according to his book.
A mother from Russia expressed that she just “wanted to hug the entire world” after childbirth. Fathers also feel awe. A man from Indonesia wrote, “I just couldn’t believe what a beautiful and wonderful gift God has bestowed on my wife, and I just couldn’t stop smiling and feeling awe and grateful to God for giving us a son.”
A Language Everyone Speaks
A paper published in Nature found that across 12 diverse world regions, awe stimulates a unique facial response similar to universal expressions such as amusement, contentment, and pain.
How Awe Affects Health
Awe stimulates well-being in five ways. The first is through a shift in the immune system.However, the greatest predictor of reduced cytokine levels, up to three times more accurate than joy, was the feeling of awe.
These studies suggest that awe can benefit individuals when experiencing inflammation and during periods of acute and chronic stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Awe can also affect health through increased social integration, prosociality, a heightened sense of meaning, and a diminished sense of self.
Smaller ‘Me’
Professor Yang Bai of the University of California–Berkeley and her team conducted a study in Yosemite National Park. Over a few days, they approached more than 1,100 travelers from 42 countries. While looking at the expansive view of the Yosemite Valley, participants were asked to draw themselves on paper and write “me” next to their drawing.In the control condition, participants were asked to do the same at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a popular tourist destination but not one as awe-inspiring.
Those in Yosemite drew themselves up to 33 percent smaller, and the “me” was also smaller. According to the researchers, the size of the drawn self and how large one writes “me” are pretty good indicators of how self-focused the individual is.
Those who experienced awe also took less money for participating in the study and reported feeling less entitled and narcissistic, suggesting that awe can increase prosocial behavior, reduce egocentrism, and reduce focus on personal gain.
The researchers concluded that awe-inspiring experiences increase our motivation to make sense of the world, which may trigger belief in the supernatural.
This spiritual stimulation further increases mental and physical health.
“Everyday awe is a basic human need,” he notes.
We can reclaim this sense of awe by approaching life inquisitively—seeking the often-missed marvels of nature and the touching displays of human kindness that surround us.
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