The Awe Walk: What Feeling Small Does to Your Mind

There is a specific kind of tiredness that comes from spending all day inside your own head. The problems repeat, the plans loop, the inner narrator never stops commentating. Most of us reach for another screen to drown it out, and the screen makes the narrator louder. What a growing body of research suggests instead is almost embarrassingly simple: go outside, look at something enormous, and let yourself feel small for fifteen minutes.

Psychologists have a name for the emotion behind this: awe. In the last two decades they have put it under the lab light, and the result is one of the rare findings in this space that is both spiritually familiar and empirically solid. Awe reliably quiets the self, opens attention, and nudges people toward generosity. One study went further than questionnaires. It prescribed wonder as a weekly walk, then measured it in the grins of the participants’ own selfies.

What Awe Actually Is

Start with the definition, because awe is not the same thing as happiness or relaxation. The researchers who formalized the field describe awe as the emotion you feel when you encounter something vast that exceeds your current mental categories, something your existing knowledge cannot easily file away. The night sky qualifies. So does the ocean, a cathedral, a canyon, thunder, an eclipse, a piece of music that swells past what you expected, or a newborn’s hand wrapped around your finger.

That word vast is doing important work. Vastness can be physical, but it does not have to be. Time can be vast: standing in a forest that was old before your grandparents were born. Ideas can be vast: grasping for a moment how many humans have lived and died before you. The second part of the definition is subtler. Awe involves what researchers call the need for accommodation, the feeling that your mental model has to grow to contain what you are seeing. For the fuller picture of how scientists map this emotion, the overview of the science of awe from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is the clearest short summary available.

This is why awe feels different from pleasure. Pleasure confirms your model of the world. Awe interrupts it.

The Experiment That Prescribed Wonder

The most quoted study in this literature is worth knowing in detail, because it is charming as well as rigorous. In 2020, researchers at UC San Francisco recruited older adults, a group for whom low mood and social isolation are common risks, and asked half of them to take a simple walk once a week. The other half took the same kind of walk with one addition: they were asked to cultivate awe, to look for things that filled them with wonder, to notice the vastness of what they saw.

Each week, participants reported their emotions and took a selfie before and after the walk. The people who had been hunting for wonder showed steadily increasing joy, gratitude, and compassion toward others, and steadily decreasing everyday distress, over the eight weeks. The control walkers did not show the same pattern. But the detail that made the study famous is the selfies. Independent judges, who knew nothing about the experiment, coded the photos over time. As the weeks passed, the awe walkers’ smiles grew wider and their faces took up less and less of the frame. Without being told to, they had stopped centering themselves in their own pictures. The paper’s title says it perfectly: big smile, small self. You can read the awe walk study on PubMed and see the design for yourself.

One honest note before we go further. Both groups walked, and walking alone is good for mood. The claim here is narrower and more interesting: adding an awe intention to a walk changed what the walk did to the emotional life of the walker.

Why Nature Resets Attention

Awe is not the only gift of a walk outdoors, and the cognitive science here is older and deeper than the awe research. In a widely cited 2008 experiment, researchers at the University of Michigan sent students on a walking route through an arboretum and, on separate days, down a busy urban street. After the nature walk, performance on a demanding working memory task improved by roughly a fifth. The urban walk produced no such boost.

The explanation offered by the researchers is called attention restoration theory, and it distinguishes two kinds of attention. Directed attention is the effortful kind you use to ignore notifications, hold a conversation in a noisy room, and force yourself through a boring task. It fatigues like a muscle. Soft fascination is the effortless capture of attention by gentle, moving stimuli: leaves flickering, water running, clouds reorganizing. Nature is dense with soft fascination and nearly empty of the demands that drain directed attention, so a walk through green space lets the effortful system recharge while the mind stays quietly engaged.

This is also why the practice pairs so naturally with formal training. In an earlier article we looked at meditation as attention training rather than relaxation, and the two approaches strengthen the same muscle from different directions. Sitting practice teaches you to notice when attention has wandered and return it. An awe walk gives attention something worth returning to.

The Small Self Is Not a Put-Down

Here is where the research gets spiritually interesting. Awe consistently produces what psychologists call the small self, the sensation of being a tiny part of something immense. That sounds like it should feel deflating, but the opposite happens. In a series of experiments published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, participants who experienced awe, whether through a memory induction, a tall eucalyptus grove, or a stunning natural scene, reported a smaller sense of their own significance and simultaneously behaved more generously. They shared more in economic games, helped others more often, and reported lower entitlement.

The researchers traced the mechanism directly: awe shrinks the self, and the shrunken self makes room for other people. Ego is expensive. Much of our daily emotional budget goes into defending, promoting, and repairing it, and awe suspends those costs for a while. The spiritual traditions have taught a version of this for millennia under names like humility and self-emptying. The difference is that we can now watch it happen in a lab, in photographs, and in the willingness of a stranger to share a lottery ticket with someone they will never meet. The details are in the research on awe and prosocial behavior if you want the full experimental arc.

The Evidence Keeps Piling Up

The awe walk study is no longer an orphan result. A 2025 study examining nature experience and psychological wellbeing found that wondering awe acts as the bridge: time in nature lifts wellbeing, and awe is a key part of why. Other teams have linked awe to lower markers of inflammation, calmer autonomic nervous system activity, and increased patience.

It is worth being honest about the state of the field. This research is young, many studies involve modest sample sizes, and effect sizes are moderate rather than miraculous. Much of the awe walk evidence comes from older adults, so nobody can promise identical results for every age group. Awe is a support for a healthy mind, not a treatment for a clinical one, and it does not replace therapy, medication, or medical care. What makes it remarkable is not its power to cure but its power to cost nothing. There is no product to buy, no app to subscribe to, no guru to follow. The medicine is in the sky.

How to Take an Awe Walk

The protocol from the research translates into a simple weekly practice.

Leave the headphones at home. Silence is part of the mechanism, because sound in open spaces is one of the fastest routes to the sensation of vastness. If music is non-negotiable for you, choose one instrumental piece and let it frame the walk rather than fill it.

Slow down by a third. Awe requires looking, and looking requires time. The frantic pace you use to cross a car park is the exact opposite of the pace this practice needs.

Look up and look out. The horizon is where most people’s eyes never go, and it is where vastness lives. Deliberately shift your gaze: canopy, skyline, cloud structure, the way light lands on distant rooftops. In a built environment, tall architecture, big skies, weather, animals, and water all count. Awe does not require wilderness.

Try the size shift. Pick one thing, a tree, a tower, a stretch of sea, and imagine zooming out until the thing is small, then zooming back in until a single leaf or brick fills your attention. That movement between scales is the core feeling of awe, and you can practice it deliberately.

One photograph, then pocket the phone. The selfie finding does not require you to take pictures, but if you enjoy it, take a single photo early, notice where you placed yourself in the frame, and let the rest of the walk go uncaptured. The point of the practice is to stop being the center of the picture.

Walk alone, or in silence with someone. Eight weeks is the research rhythm, fifteen minutes at a time. Mark it in the calendar like any other appointment, because a practice you intend to do weekly and never schedule is a practice that does not exist.

Afterward, take ten seconds to notice what changed. Most people report the same signature: the thing they were worried about feels slightly smaller and farther away, and their breathing is slower than they expected.

Why This Fits the Spiritual Path

There is a reason nearly every contemplative tradition sends its practitioners outside and points them at things bigger than themselves. Deserts, mountains, rivers, and night skies are not decorations for the spiritual life. They are instruments. The small self that awe produces is the same territory the mystics describe when they talk about ego death in gentler weather, and the science now gives us a clean, repeatable, no-cost way to visit that territory weekly.

This site has always been about returning to the planet rather than escaping it. An awe walk is that philosophy in its plainest clothes: shoes on, door open, eyes up. You do not need to believe anything in particular for it to work, which makes it one of the few practices on this site that survives total skepticism. Start this week. Fifteen minutes, one vast thing, and let the universe do the rest.