How to Experience Awe: 6 Ways to Feel More Wonder

Think about the last time you felt it. A sky full of stars. It was a piece of music that hit somewhere deep and unexpected. A stranger stopping to help someone they did not know, and something catching in your chest in response. If you’ve ever wondered how to experience awe more often, you’re not alone.

That feeling is awe. And most of us are living with far less of it than we could be.

In a life full of notifications and hurried routines, we have largely forgotten how to pause for wonder. But science has spent two decades studying what happens when we do, and the findings are striking. Awe is not just a pleasant emotion to stumble across. It is one of the most powerful tools we have for feeling healthier, kinder, and more fully alive.

Here is what it is, why it matters, and six simple ways to feel more of it.

What Awe Actually is (and Why We’ve Forgotten It)

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that exceeds your normal understanding of the world. That is how UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the world’s leading researchers on the subject, defines it.

Vast does not have to mean the Grand Canyon. It can be physical, like standing at the edge of the ocean, but it can also be deeply human, like witnessing an act of extraordinary courage or kindness. A baby’s hand. A redwood tree. A choir is in full voice. Any of these can stop us in our tracks.

What surprises most people is how often awe is actually available. Keltner’s research, gathered from tens of thousands of accounts across 26 countries, found that people report feeling awe two to three times a week on average. The problem is that awe is common. It is that our hurried, screen-filled lives train us to rush past it without stopping to really feel it.

Why is Awe Good for You

For a long time, awe was considered a pleasant but minor emotion, a sprinkle of wonder on an otherwise ordinary day. Research has made it clear that this view was wrong. Awe turns out to be something closer to a necessity.

A 2023 study published in Scientific Reports tracked 269 adults over 22 days and found that on days when people experienced more awe, they reported roughly 20 percent less stress, fewer physical symptoms, and greater overall well-being. A parallel study of 145 healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic found the same pattern.

The physical effects go further. A 2015 study of 94 undergraduates found that those who reported more frequent awe had significantly lower levels of interleukin-6, a marker of inflammation in the body. Awe was the strongest predictor among all positive emotions studied.

Awe also does something unusual to our sense of time. In a 2012 study published in Psychological Science, people who had just experienced awe reported feeling that time had expanded, leaving them less impatient, more generous, and more satisfied with their lives.

Brain scans offer one explanation for why. Awe reduces activity in the brain’s default mode network, the system linked to self-focused rumination and mental chatter. It moves us from thinking about ourselves to feeling part of something larger, a shift researchers call the “small self effect.” Studies consistently demonstrate that people who experience awe become more generous, more humble, and more connected to others.

6 Ways to Experience More Awe

1. Look for everyday moral beauty

Here is the finding that surprises people most: the single most common source of awe in everyday life, across cultures and continents, is not nature or music or grand architecture. It is other people’s goodness. Keltner calls this moral beauty, and it describes the awe we feel when we witness someone else’s courage, kindness, generosity, or strength.

A stranger helping someone who has fallen. A friend who stays when they could leave. A neighbor quietly caring for someone else’s child. These moments are everywhere, and they are consistently more awe-inducing than most people expect.

Spend one week actively noticing them, however small, and write one down each evening. You are not looking for grand gestures. You are training your attention toward beauty that was already there.

2. Step into nature’s vastness

Nature has been a reliable source of awe for as long as humans have been human, and researchers consistently rank it among the most powerful triggers. Time in nature is linked to lower blood pressure, reduced cortisol, and the small self-shift that makes us feel connected rather than isolated.

The important thing to know is that you do not need a mountain. A city park, a river walk, ten minutes sitting under a large tree, or a wide open sky watched from a backyard can all deliver the same essential ingredient: a moment of scale that reminds you the world is bigger than your inbox. If possible, leave your phone behind and take five minutes to look at something bigger than you.

3. Let music move you

Music is one of the most reliably accessible sources of awe and one of the most underused. The particular feeling it can produce, sometimes called frisson, is a physical sign that something transcendent is happening, as it creates a shiver or chill that travels through the body. Shared listening, whether at a concert, a church service, or a living room playlist with someone you love, deepens the effect.

The key is to actually listen, not to have music on in the background while doing seventeen other things. Awe requires attention, and attention is what we give music the least. Choose one piece that has moved you before, sit with it in full, and let it have you completely.

4. Seek out collective moments

There is something that happens when people move, sing, or experience something together; it simply does not happen alone. Researchers call it collective effervescence, and it describes the electricity of shared experience.

It is why a concert feels different from listening at home, why joining in a hymn or a chant can produce a feeling that is genuinely difficult to explain, and why a crowd’s energy changes what an event does to you.

Shared awe shifts the brain’s focus from individual concerns to collective belonging. Seek out one shared experience this month, a concert, a worship service, a community event, or a class, and notice the difference between experiencing it alone and as part of a crowd.

5. Slow down for art and design

Art and architecture have always been deliberate attempts to produce awe, and they often succeed. The challenge is that we tend to move through them quickly, checking off the room rather than actually stopping.

A museum, a cathedral, a beautifully designed building, and a piece of pottery made entirely by hand: these objects carry the effort and vision of another human being, and when we give them real attention, they can make us pause.

Brain research indicates that awe reduces activity in the self-focus network. Standing in front of something vast or intricate enough, we forget to be preoccupied with ourselves for a moment. Visit one place this month with the explicit intention of experiencing it rather than getting through it, and spend at least five minutes with a single thing.

6. Practice the awe walk

Researchers at UC San Francisco studied what happens when you take a regular walk but add one specific ingredient: intentional attention to novelty and wonder, moving through your surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. People who took these awe walks reported significantly greater joy and less distress than those on ordinary walks, and their photos showed them looking outward rather than inward.

The awe walk is not a longer walk or a better route. It is the same walk with different eyes. Leave your earbuds behind, move slightly more slowly than usual, and look for one thing you have genuinely never noticed before. A detail on a building, the way light falls on something ordinary, a plant growing through a crack. Treat it as a small discovery.

Wonder Is Closer Than You Think

Awe was never really gone. It was present in the morning sky you drove past on your way to work, in the song you nearly skipped, and in the neighbor who quietly assisted someone without making a story of it. We stopped noticing it, not because it disappeared, but because we got very skilled at staying busy.

The world is still astonishing. Science just gives us permission to take that seriously, to treat wonder not as a luxury but as something close to a necessity. Look up a little more often. The rest tends to follow.

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