The Power of Awe: How Bigger Moments Can Calm the Mind and Widen Perspective
How nature, music, art and meaningful experiences can create calm, connection and a renewed sense of perspective.
Across 84 experimental studies involving 17,801 participants, researchers found that deliberately elicited awe reliably influenced people’s experience, judgement and behaviour compared with other positive emotions and control conditions.
Awe arrives when we encounter something that feels larger than our usual frame of reference. It might come from standing beneath an immense night sky, hearing a piece of music that stops conversation, watching waves break across a winter beach or stepping inside a building whose scale and beauty change how the space around us feels.
Psychologists have become increasingly interested in these moments because awe appears to change where attention is directed. Immediate personal concerns can occupy less of the mental landscape, our sense of connection with other people can increase, and everyday pressures can be experienced within a wider perspective.
The experience does not require a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Research suggests that awe can emerge through nature, art, music, collective experiences and deliberate attention to remarkable details within ordinary surroundings. For a life crowded with information, responsibility and constant mental activity, that widening of perspective can be a valuable form of psychological space.
Top Tips for Calming Your Mind
- Spend time somewhere visually expansive. Coastlines, hills, woodland, open skies and large natural landscapes frequently provide opportunities for awe.
- Listen properly to music. Give a favourite piece your full attention occasionally, without combining it with another task.
- Look more closely at familiar places. Architecture, trees, changing light and weather can become remarkable when attention slows down enough to notice them.
- Seek experiences with scale. Museums, galleries, live performance, historic buildings and astronomy can all create a sense of something extending beyond everyday concerns.
- Share the experience. Awe is often accompanied by greater feelings of connection, which can make shared experiences especially memorable.
- Leave some experiences undocumented. Giving full attention to what is happening can occasionally be more rewarding than immediately reaching for a phone.
- Create space for curiosity. Learning how something extraordinary works can deepen the experience considerably.
- Build awe into normal life. A regular walk, favourite viewpoint or piece of music can provide repeated opportunities to widen perspective.
When Attention Moves Beyond the Immediate
Much of everyday attention is necessarily personal. We think about what needs doing, what somebody said, what went wrong yesterday and what might need solving tomorrow. Awe introduces a different scale.
Early psychological work described awe as an emotional response to something perceived as vast that requires us to adjust our existing understanding. Vastness can be physical, as it is with mountains or an enormous sky, and it can also be conceptual. Exceptional human skill, an extraordinary scientific idea, a powerful piece of music or an act of remarkable generosity can create the same sense that our current mental framework has suddenly become too small.
That experience appears to reduce self-focused attention temporarily. Researchers sometimes describe this as the small self, a feeling of being part of something larger without any suggestion that the individual has become less valuable.
The practical effect can be a shift in perspective. The task waiting on Monday morning remains part of life, and it occupies a smaller proportion of the psychological horizon for a while.
Give Your Mind Something Bigger to Notice →
Perspective Can Change the Experience of Stress
Research during the COVID-19 pandemic offers an interesting example of how awe may interact with stress. Two groups of adults, including healthcare professionals, recorded their experiences across 22 days. On days when participants experienced more awe, they also tended to report lower stress, fewer physical symptoms and greater wellbeing. The study cannot establish that awe caused those changes, because daily life contains many interacting influences. It does support a wider pattern emerging within the research: people who experience awe more frequently often report a different relationship with immediate personal concerns.
That relationship is easy to recognise intuitively. Standing beneath a clear night sky can make the mind feel less crowded. A view across a valley can alter the scale of whatever you were thinking about ten minutes earlier. Music can absorb attention so completely that internal commentary quietens for the duration of the piece.
The original problem may still require action later. The mental state in which you return to it can feel different.
Nature Makes Awe Easy to Find
Nature appears repeatedly in awe research because it offers scale, complexity and sensory richness with very little instruction required.
One particularly appealing experiment involved adults taking weekly 15-minute outdoor walks for eight weeks. Half were encouraged to seek moments of awe by noticing the world around them with curiosity and a sense of wonder. The people taking these “awe walks” reported stronger experiences of awe and showed increases in several positive social emotions across the study.
The intervention itself was strikingly modest. Participants were already walking, and the significant change involved the quality of their attention.
A familiar park can therefore become more interesting when you notice the height of the trees, the movement of clouds or the changing colour of evening light. A regular coastal walk can feel different when attention settles on the scale and movement of the water. Looking upwards in a city can reveal architectural details that have disappeared into familiarity. Awe can emerge from learning to see more of what is already present.
Turn an Ordinary Walk Into a Wider View →
Music, Art and Human Skill Can Open the Same Door
The natural world has no monopoly on awe. Music can create it through complexity, emotional intensity or the experience of hearing many people produce something together. Architecture can change our perception through scale and form. Art can introduce ideas and images that expand the way we understand an experience.
Human achievement creates another route. Watching an exceptional athlete, musician, craftsperson or performer can produce a combination of admiration and wonder, particularly when we understand enough about the activity to appreciate how difficult the achievement actually is.
Knowledge can deepen awe for the same reason. Looking at the night sky becomes a different experience when you begin to understand the distances involved. An old tree acquires another dimension when you know how long it has occupied that particular piece of ground. Curiosity gives ordinary experience additional depth.
Awe Has a Social Dimension
Awe also appears to influence the way people relate to others. Across a series of experiments involving more than 2,000 participants, researchers found that awe was associated with greater generosity, helping behaviour and attention to collective interests. Later studies across different cultures have also linked the experience with a reduced emphasis on the individual self and a stronger sense of connection to larger groups.
This helps explain why some of our most memorable awe experiences are collective ones. A concert audience becomes temporarily united by the same sound. People watching an extraordinary sunset often fall quiet together. Sporting crowds experience moments when thousands of separate individuals appear absorbed by precisely the same event.
Shared attention can create connection without requiring conversation.
For a Better Life, this provides a useful reminder that wellbeing can come from experiences that draw us outward into the world and towards other people.
Create an Awe List
A quieter part of the week offers a good opportunity to identify where awe already appears in your life.
Write down five experiences that have genuinely stopped you in your tracks. They might involve mountains, surfing, live music, churches, forests, galleries, watching somebody perform at an extraordinary level or simply standing outside under a clear night sky.
Look for the common ingredients.
You may discover that nature creates the strongest response. Music may feature repeatedly. You may be drawn to craftsmanship, scale, history or human achievement.
Then make one of those ingredients easier to encounter.
A walk can take a slightly different route. A favourite album can receive half an hour of undivided attention. A gallery can become part of an afternoon rather than something reserved for holidays.
Looking at the stars can require little more than stepping outside.
The aim is to make space for experiences capable of enlarging attention.
A Wider View Can Change the Tone of the Week Ahead
Modern life provides endless opportunities to narrow attention onto the next message, deadline, problem or decision.
Awe gives the mind another scale to work with. It can draw attention towards something vast, intricate, beautiful or extraordinary, creating a temporary sense of distance from the concerns that usually dominate the foreground.
That distance can support calm, curiosity and connection, and it can remind us that a good life contains experiences that are valuable simply because they make us feel more fully present within it.
Before the coming week gathers pace, making room for one experience that enlarges the view can change the emotional tone you carry into it.