A shared universe › Blog › Awe: looking at the sky and feeling small · Español
Looking at a sky full of stars does us good because it stirs awe, the emotion we feel before something so vast that we cannot quite take it in. Studies by the psychologist Dacher Keltner and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that awe makes the self take up less room and makes us more generous. A sky like that, a storm at sea, a piece of music that gives you goosebumps: there are moments when something is too much for us and leaves us without words.
In 2003, Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a paper that tried to bring some order to this emotion, which they called moral, spiritual and aesthetic. They described it as what we feel before something immense, so big that it does not fit into our usual way of understanding the world and forces us to make room for it.
It does not have to be beautiful: what overwhelms us also fills us with awe. Nor is it only nature that stirs it. A work of art can do it, or an idea that opens our mind, or something admirable another person does.
Keltner talks about a “small self”: for a while, we stop being the centre. In six studies published in 2017, with more than two thousand participants from individualistic and collectivist cultures, his team found that awe, whether in daily life, outdoors or in the laboratory, made people feel smaller, something that did not happen with other pleasant emotions. That feeling led them to feel more part of a group and to engage more with it.
It is not a sad kind of smallness. It is more like a rest from ourselves: what worries us is still there, but it stops filling everything.
In another paper, from 2015, Paul Piff, Keltner and their colleagues ran five studies with more than two thousand people. Those who feel awe more often were more generous, and stirring awe made people take more ethical decisions and share more. In one of the studies, carried out outdoors, people who spent a while among towering trees helped another person more and felt less entitled.
In both papers, part of the effect was explained by the “small self”. When we stop feeling like the centre, it becomes easier to notice other people.
A team of researchers, with Keltner among the authors, asked sixty older adults to take a fifteen-minute walk once a week for eight weeks. Half of them were told how to look for awe: to go somewhere new each time if they could, and to notice what was vast and what was new, with fresh eyes. The results are in this study, published in 2022.
Those who walked looking for awe appeared smaller and smaller in the photos they took of themselves, and with broader smiles. They reported more joy and more of the emotions that bring us closer to others, outside the walks as well, and their daily distress fell more than in the other group. Anxiety and depression, however, did not change in either group: awe gives a breather, but it is not a treatment.
You do not need to go far. It is enough to look slowly at what usually passes us by.
If you like to dwell on good things as they happen, savouring good moments has more ideas for not letting them slip away.
These studies are promising, but most are short, with small groups, and the effects they find are modest. Awe does not fix a bad patch or replace anyone. If your spirits have been low for a long time, what helps most is talking to your GP or to a psychologist.
Nor is there any need to force it. Some days the sky is there and stirs nothing, and that is fine.
Looking at the stars in A shared universe and thinking that behind each one there is a person with their own story is also a form of awe. And reading what others say to each other to keep one another company, even more so.
If something has left you without words, you can light a star with “What I’m grateful for” and tell it in a few lines, without saying who you are. It will shine for seven days and other people will be able to keep it company.