I’m standing atop the Klein Matterhorn, staring out at the Alps, their moonscape peaks forming a jagged, terrifying, glorious white horizon.
I am small. But the emotions are huge. The joy: I get to be a part of all this today. The fear: It could kill me. More than kill me, it could consume me.
That’s what I always used to feel when training in Zermatt, Switzerland.
I was lucky. As a former U.S. Ski Team athlete, I was regularly able to experience such magnificent scenescapes – and feel the tactile insanity of it, too, the rise and fall of helicopters or trams taking us up the mountains, the slicing, frigid air at the summit, and the lurking on-edge feeling that you, tiny human, really aren’t meant to be standing where you are standing.
“Awe puts things in perspective,” said Craig Anderson, PhD, postdoctoral scholar at Washington University at St. Louis, and researcher of emotions and behavior. “It’s about feeling connected with people and part of the larger collective – and that makes it okay to feel small.”
Our modern world is at odds with awe. We tend to shrink into our daily lives, our problems, our devices, and the real-time emotional reactions to those things, especially anger.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
‘In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear’
That’s how New York University ethical leadership professor Jonathan Haidt, PhD, and psychology professor Dacher Keltner, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley, defined awe in a seminal report from 2003.
The feeling is composed of two elements: perceived vastness (sensing something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (our need to process and understand that vastness). The researchers also wrote that awe could “change the course of life in profound and permanent ways.”
“There’s a correlation between people who are happier and those who report more feelings of awe,” said David Yaden, PhD, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and coauthor of “The Varieties of Spiritual Experience.” “It’s unclear, though, which way the causality runs. Is it that having more awe experiences makes people happier? Or that happy people have more awe. But there is a correlation.”
One aspect about awe that’s clear: When people experience it, they report feeling more connected. And that sense of connection can lead to prosocial behavior – such as serving others and engaging with one’s community.
“Feelings of isolation are quite difficult, and we’re social creatures, so when we feel connected, we can benefit from it,” Dr. Yaden said.
A 2022 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed that awe “awakens self-transcendence, which in turn invigorates pursuit of the authentic self.”
While these effects can be seen as one individual’s benefits, the researchers posited that they also lead to prosocial behaviors. Another study conducted by the same scientists showed that awe led to greater-good behavior during the pandemic, to the tune of an increased willingness to donate blood. In this study, researchers also cited a correlation between feelings of awe and increased empathy.