There is a moment that happens to me, most mornings, in the first few minutes of being outside with Jesse. It might be the quality of the early light hitting the wall opposite. It might be a single robin singing as though he needs me to know that something important is about to happen. It might be Jesse lying on my feet and keeping my toes warm.
ISome days, it is simply the steam curling from my mug of tea into the cool air, or the realisation that wisps of cloud are doing something I have never quite seen them do before. Whatever the trigger, for just a beat — before I remember the email I owe someone, before the day organises itself around me — I stop. The chest opens. The shoulders drop. I feel, however briefly, the size of the thing I live inside
That feeling has a name. The scientific literature calls it awe, and over the past two decades it has gone from being a vague category — something we mostly associated with grand canyons and cathedrals — to being one of the most thoroughly researched and powerful wellbeing interventions ever studied. It is also, conveniently, free. And right now, in late May, it is on tap.
I have written before on the anti-inflammatory effects of awe, but the science has moved on considerably since then. Here are five of the most striking ways awe affects body and mind, with a practical seasonal prescription at the end.
What is awe?
The foundational definition comes from psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in a much-cited 2003 paper. Awe, they proposed, is the emotion we feel in the presence of something perceptually vast — vast in size, beauty, complexity, ability or virtue — that requires us to update our existing mental frameworks to accommodate it. It can come from nature, art, music, ideas, moral beauty, or a single person doing something extraordinary. What unites these experiences is the sense that the world is, for a moment, bigger than your model of it.
Dacher Keltner has since become the field’s most prolific researcher, and his 2023 book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder is a wonderful popular introduction. But the genuinely surprising part of the research is not the lyrical bit. It is the physiology.
1. Awe lowers inflammation in the body
In 2015, Jennifer Stellar and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study that surprised even the researchers. They measured levels of interleukin-6 — known as IL-6, a key signalling molecule that drives systemic inflammation — in participants alongside their reports of which positive emotions they had experienced that day. Of all the positive emotions assessed — amusement, joy, compassion, contentment, love, pride and awe — awe had the strongest inverse association with IL-6. The more often participants reported feeling awe in their daily lives, the lower their inflammation.
This matters, because chronic low-grade inflammation is now understood to underlie most of the major diseases of ageing, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, depression and dementia. To find that an emotional state is associated with reduced inflammation, on a measurable biochemical level, places awe squarely alongside diet, sleep and exercise as a lever on our long-term health.
2. Awe quiets the self-focused mind
One of the most important concepts to emerge from awe research is what Keltner calls the small self. In a state of awe, the ego shrinks — but not in a deflating way. It shrinks because something larger is suddenly visible. The constant self-referential noise of modern life — the ruminations, the worries, the small comparative anxieties — quiets, and what remains is a sense of belonging to something bigger.
This is measurable. People asked to recall an awe experience consistently describe themselves as physically smaller in the moment, and brain imaging has linked awe to reduced activity in the default mode network — the part of the brain most active when we are absorbed in self-referential thought. For anyone prone to anxiety, rumination, or the modern epidemic of always being slightly somewhere else in your head, awe is a remarkably effective intervention. It costs nothing and asks only that you look up.
3. Awe expands your perception of time
One of the most counter-intuitive findings in the awe literature is that awe makes us feel we have more time. Researchers have found that participants induced into a state of awe — by watching commercials featuring vast natural scenes, or recalling personal experiences of awe — subsequently reported feeling less rushed, less time-poor, and more willing to commit time to volunteering, helping a stranger, or trying something new. They were also more satisfied with their lives in that moment.
In a culture that has made busyness a kind of badge, the idea that the antidote might be a fifteen-minute walk under a tree is almost subversive. But the research keeps suggesting precisely this. Awe does not add hours to the day; it changes our relationship to the hours we have.
4. Awe makes us kinder, more generous, more patient
Paul Piff and colleagues at the University of California demonstrated, across five elegant studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2015, that awe reliably increases prosocial behaviour. People who had experienced awe — whether by recalling a memory of it, watching a video clip, or, in one striking experiment, simply standing in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees for a minute — went on to be more generous in economic games, more ethically discerning, and more helpful to strangers.
The mechanism, in Piff’s analysis, was the small self again. When our own concerns recede, others come into clearer view. This is presumably part of why moments of collective awe — at concerts, in cathedrals, watching a sunset together — have always seemed to strengthen social bonds. They literally do.
5. Awe lifts daily mood and emotional resilience
The most clinically interesting study in recent years came from Virginia Sturm and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco. They asked older adults to take a 15-minute outdoor walk once a week for eight weeks, with one instruction — to walk with a sense of openness and wonder, paying deliberate attention to whatever vast, beautiful, or unexpected things they encountered. A control group walked for the same length of time without the instruction.
The awe-walk group reported significantly more positive emotion, less daily distress, and greater feelings of compassion and gratitude than the control group. The effects deepened over the eight weeks. Their selfies, taken at the start and end of each walk, even looked different — they began to photograph themselves smaller in the frame, with more of the landscape around them. The small self, made literally visible.
Why late May is awe’s perfect season
Awe is everywhere, all the time, for those who know to look. But there are moments in the year when the available material is unusually generous, and mid-to-late May in Britain is one of them.
The hawthorn — or May, to give it its old country name — is in full bloom right now, hedgerows turned to lace. Cow parsley follows just behind, foaming along every lane. The bluebells in shadier woods are at the end of their reign and still ravishing in the right light. Swifts and swallows are back from sub-Saharan Africa, having flown thousands of miles to be here, which alone deserves a moment of wonder. The dawn chorus is at its annual peak — if you can bear an early alarm, around half-past four in the morning is one of the most extraordinary free experiences available in this country.
And the light. The long, golden, lingering light of late May evenings, which spills until almost nine o’clock and turns the most ordinary garden into a small cathedral. As I have written elsewhere about the wider benefits of time in nature, this is the season when stepping outside genuinely earns its reputation as medicine.
Your assignment this week
One walk. Fifteen minutes is enough. Outside, ideally somewhere with trees or sky or both, though a garden will do. The instruction is simply this: leave your phone in your pocket, walk a little more slowly than usual, and look for something that feels vast, beautiful, or impossibly intricate. The hawthorn blossom up close. The pattern of bark on an old tree. The way the light falls through new leaves. The geometry of a single cow parsley head, which under inspection turns out to be a small explosion of stars.
You do not need to feel anything in particular. The brain handles the rest.
I would be delighted to hear what you find.
With warmth,
Jayney xoxo
References & Further Reading
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297
Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018
Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033
Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Chow, T. E., Morris, N. A., Neuhaus, J., Kramer, J. H., Miller, B. L., Holley, S. R., & Keltner, D. (2022). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044–1058. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000876
Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Penguin Press.
