Below, you’ll find a comprehensive bibliography of all the sources we utilized in this episode.

Christov-Moore, L., Schoeller, F., Lynch, C., Sacchet, M., & Reggente, N. (2024). Self-transcendence accompanies aesthetic chills. PLOS Mental Health, 1(5), e0000125.

Christov-Moore, L., Schoeller, F., Von Guttenberg, M., Durinski, T., Walder, M., Jain, F. A., Iacoboni, M., & Reggente, N. (2026). Using chills-inducing music to augment self-transcendence, emotional breakthrough, and psychological insight during mindfulness and loving kindness meditation. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1589132.

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.

Monroy, M., Uğurlu, Ö., Zerwas, F., Corona, R., Keltner, D., Eagle, J., & Amster, M. (2023). The influences of daily experiences of awe on stress, somatic health, and well-being: A longitudinal study during COVID-19. Scientific Reports, 13, 9336.

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.

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.

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.

Zhao, C., Noordewier, M. K., & van Elk, M. (2026). Effects of awe on self-transcendence: A registered report study. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 122, 104839.

00:00 Intro

Welcome back to Pause Here, where we delve into the art and science of breathing to improve our daily lives.

I’m your host, Sarah, here to guide you through the science and simplicity of breathing, meditation, and relaxation techniques that can transform your day, your health, and even your sleep.

And today, we’re exploring something that is slightly difficult to schedule into a calendar.

Awe.

That feeling when you look up at a sky absolutely littered with stars and, for a second, your brain seems to forget what it was worrying about.

Or when a piece of music swells in exactly the right way and every hair on your arms stands on end.

Or when you stand beside the ocean, watch a storm roll in, walk beneath enormous trees, hear an extraordinary voice, or discover some ridiculous fact about the universe that makes your brain quietly sit down for a moment.

Awe is one of those emotions we tend to treat as a bonus feature of being alive.

Lovely when it happens.

Not exactly essential.

But science is beginning to suggest that awe may be doing rather more behind the scenes than simply making us say…

“Wow.”

01:40 Episode Overview

So today, we’re going to explore what awe actually is, why psychologists are so fascinated by it, and why feeling very small for a moment can, strangely enough, be very good for us.

We’ll look at what awe seems to do to our sense of self.
Why it may alter our perception of time.
How it can influence connection and generosity.
Why music can give us literal chills.

Why awe doesn’t necessarily have to involve climbing a mountain, witnessing the northern lights, or casually whale watching before breakfast.

And we’ll look at how we might invite a little more wonder into our everyday life.

02:25 What Actually Is Awe?

Psychologists proposed a really useful scientific way of thinking about awe back in 2003.
They suggested that awe usually involves two main ingredients.
The first is something called vastness.
And that can be physical vastness.
A mountain range.
The ocean.
A thunderstorm.
A cathedral.
A night sky.
Something that seems enormous compared with us.

But vastness doesn’t necessarily mean physically large.
It can also be conceptual.
An idea can feel vast.
Human history can feel vast.
Extraordinary skill can feel vast.
So can courage.
Or kindness.
Or discovering something about the world that suddenly makes everything feel much bigger than it did five minutes ago.

And then there’s the second part.
Something psychologists call a need for accommodation.
Which sounds slightly like your brain is trying to book a hotel.
But what it really means is this: You experience something that doesn’t quite fit into your current understanding of the world.
And your brain has to stretch a little.
Your mental framework needs adjusting.
You have to make space for something you didn’t fully understand before.

So awe seems to live somewhere in the combination of:
“This is enormous…”
and
“I’m not quite sure how to fit this into my brain.”

And I love that, because it means awe isn’t simply another word for something being pretty.
A sunset can be beautiful without necessarily being awe-inspiring.
But every so often, you get one where the entire sky looks almost impossible.
The colours don’t seem real.
Everything goes strangely quiet.
And you pause.
That pause matters.
Because awe interrupts us.

For a few seconds, it can break through the constant stream of plans, worries, internal commentary, emails, notifications, shopping lists and replayed conversations that tend to set up camp inside our heads.

Something outside of us suddenly becomes more interesting than all the noise inside us.
And that brings us to one of the most fascinating ideas in the psychology of awe.
The small self.

05:15 The Small Self

Now, the phrase “small self” sounds slightly gloomy.
It’s not suggesting that you should walk around thinking:
“I am insignificant. Nothing matters.”
That is not the vibe.

What researchers mean is that awe can temporarily reduce the amount of attention we are placing on ourselves.

Imagine your mind has been stuck on selfie mode all day.
What do I need to do?
What did they think of me?
Why did I send that text with three exclamation marks?
Should I have used one?
Have I now established myself as a three-exclamation-mark person?
Am I okay with that?

Awe turns the camera around.
Suddenly, there’s a much bigger world in the frame.

In a series of studies published in 2015, researchers found that experiences of awe were associated with this reduced sense of self-importance.

But here’s where it gets especially interesting. People experiencing awe also became more likely to behave in ways that benefited other people.

Across several experiments, awe was linked with things like greater generosity, helping behaviour and more ethical decision-making.

One of those experiments was beautifully simple.
Participants were brought to a grove of towering eucalyptus trees.
Some people spent time looking up at those enormous trees.
Others looked at a nearby building.
And the people who had been looking up at the trees subsequently showed more helpful behaviour.

Apparently one scientifically supported strategy for gaining perspective may simply be:
Go stand near an extremely large tree.

There’s something very intuitive about this.

If you’ve ever stood beside the ocean or looked across a mountainous landscape, you might recognise the feeling.

Your problems don’t disappear.
Awe is not a delete button.
The deadline still exists.
The awkward conversation may still need to happen.
Your inbox has absolutely not vanished into another dimension.

But somehow… the scale changes.
Whatever you were thinking about stops filling the entire frame.

And I think that’s quite important.
Because feeling small in this context isn’t the same thing as feeling insignificant.
It’s more like remembering:
“I’m part of something much bigger than this one problem.”
And perhaps that is one of the reasons awe can feel so refreshing.

Not because we stop mattering.
But because, briefly, everything doesn’t have to revolve around us.

08:13 Different types of Awe

Now, when we imagine awe, we tend to imagine pleasant things.
A glorious mountain.
A symphony orchestra.
A waterfall.

But awe has another side.
Sometimes it contains fear.
Think about standing beneath a huge thunderstorm.
Looking over the edge of a canyon.
Watching enormous waves.
Seeing a volcanic eruption.
Or staring at one of those deep-space photographs and suddenly remembering that Earth is a microscopic dot floating in an almost incomprehensibly enormous universe.

There can be beauty there.
But there can also be power.
Uncertainty.
Even fear.

Researchers sometimes distinguish between more positive forms of awe and more threatening forms of awe.

Both can create that feeling of being small.
Both can disrupt our normal way of seeing things.
But positive awe seems especially connected with feelings of social connection and self-transcendence.
Threatening awe may carry more fear and a reduced sense of control.
But I think that mixed quality is part of what makes awe so unusual.

It isn’t just happiness.
It often sits right on the border between pleasure and mystery.
It says:
“This is incredible.”
And also:
“I do not entirely understand this.”

Which is quite an unusual experience for a brain that spends most of the day desperately trying to label, predict and organise everything.
Wonder begins where certainty gets a little less bossy.

10:06 Awe and Time

Here is one of my favourite parts of the research I dove into this past week. Awe may actually change the way we experience time.

In a series of experiments, researchers found that people who experienced awe reported feeling less impatient. They also reported feeling as though they had more time available to them. They became more willing to volunteer their time to others. And they showed a greater preference for experiences rather than material things.

Now, to be clear… Awe does not secretly add forty-seven minutes to your afternoon. If it did, I suspect someone would already be charging a monthly subscription for it.

What seems to change is our subjective sense of time. And that matters because one of the biggest pressures in modern life isn’t simply that we have things to do. It’s that we often feel rushed.

Those are not exactly the same thing.
You can have a busy day and still experience spaciousness.
And you can have practically nothing on your calendar and somehow feel chased by time.

Awe seems to pull attention into the present.

When something genuinely astonishing captures your attention, you aren’t usually simultaneously thinking: “Did I remember to buy toothpaste?”
You’re there.
And there’s a lovely crossover here with mindfulness.
In mindfulness, we deliberately practise bringing ourselves into the present moment.
Awe sometimes does the job for us.
The view.
The music.
The experience.
It grabs your attention and says:
Look at this.
Be here.

And I think that’s really useful, particularly for people who find more traditional meditation difficult. Presence doesn’t always have to begin with sitting perfectly still and trying very hard not to think.

Sometimes presence begins with simply…
looking up.

12:18 Effects on the Brain and Body

So what is actually happening when we experience awe?
This is still an evolving area of research.
And this is where we have to resist turning awe into some magical biological reset button. Because once science finds one interesting health association, wellness culture has a remarkable ability to turn it into:

“LOOK AT A MOUNTAIN AND CURE EVERYTHING.”

That is not what the research says.
What researchers are finding is more subtle.
Awe appears to involve shifts in attention and self-processing.
Our attention seems to move outward.
The usual emphasis on ourselves can soften.
And we may experience stronger feelings of connection to the environment or to other people.

There are also some intriguing findings connecting positive emotions, particularly awe, with biological markers associated with inflammation. One 2015 study found that people who reported experiencing more awe also tended to show lower levels of certain pro-inflammatory cytokines.

That’s fascinating, but it’s important to understand what that study tells us.
It found an association.
It does not prove that standing on a hill watching a beautiful sunset directly reduces inflammation. And awe is certainly not a replacement for medical treatment.

But it does contribute to a much bigger and really interesting scientific question.
How deeply connected are our emotional lives and our physical bodies?
We already know chronic stress can influence the body in all sorts of measurable ways.
So, it makes sense that researchers are beginning to ask whether certain positive emotional experiences may matter too.

And awe is particularly interesting because it seems to involve several things at once.
Emotion.
Attention.
Perspective.
Connection.
It’s less like one switch being flipped and more like several systems briefly playing the same chord.

14:35 Everyday Awe

Now, at this point, awe may be sounding slightly inconvenient.

I shall simply schedule the northern lights for Tuesday, locate a humpback whale on Wednesday, and perhaps squeeze in a total solar eclipse before lunch on Friday.
Fortunately, that’s not necessary.
One of the most useful developments in awe research has been the study of everyday awe.
Because awe doesn’t only happen during monumental experiences.
People report feeling it in response to nature.
Music.
Art.
Extraordinary human skill.
Acts of courage.
Acts of kindness.
Collective experiences.
And moments of sudden understanding.

Sometimes awe is enormous.
But sometimes it’s surprisingly ordinary.
Light coming through leaves.
Clouds doing something spectacular for absolutely no reason.
Watching somebody play an instrument beautifully.
Seeing a child discover something for the first time.
Watching a flock of birds move as though they share one giant brain.
Learning one fact about space that makes you question everything for five minutes.
Watching somebody do something extraordinarily skilful.
Or just looking closely at a flower and realising that nature has been showing off again.

There’s actually a wonderful study involving something called an awe walk.
Researchers asked older adults to take a weekly fifteen-minute walk for eight weeks.
One group simply went walking.
The other group was encouraged to approach their walk with a sense of wonder.
They were asked to deliberately look for things around them that might inspire awe.
Over time, the people taking awe walks reported increases in positive emotions that were more focused on other people and the wider world.
They also showed reductions in daily distress.
But my favourite detail from the study involves the photographs.
Participants took photographs of themselves during the walks.
And over time, the people doing the awe walks began taking photographs where… they themselves occupied less of the picture.
There was more room for the world around them.
The small self.
Captured in selfie form.
And what I love about that study is that it makes awe feel accessible.
You don’t necessarily need different surroundings.
Sometimes you need a different quality of attention.

17:33 Finding Awe

And this is where we need to be slightly careful. Because the moment we discover something may be good for us, humans are very talented at immediately transforming it into another obligation.

Drink more water.
Exercise.
Meditate.
Sleep eight hours.
Eat vegetables.
Experience awe between 3:45 and 4 p.m.
Tick.

But awe probably does not respond terribly well to being strangled by productivity.
You cannot force wonder.
But you can create conditions in which you’re more likely to notice it.
So rather than treating these as tasks, think of them as little experiments.

Change your scale

Spend some time looking at something much larger than you.
The sky is excellent for this.
Usually free too.
Trees.
The ocean.
Architecture.
A huge landscape.
Even photographs of deep space.

But you can also go the other way.
Look at something extremely small.
The veins of a leaf.
The spiral of a shell.
A snowflake.
Sand.
The structure inside a piece of fruit.
Sometimes vastness doesn’t come from physical size.
Sometimes it comes from complexity.

Follow your goosebumps

Notice what music, films, performances, stories or ideas reliably give you chills.
Not because you need to analyse them until the magic disappears.
But because they may reveal something about what expands your attention beyond everyday concerns.

Look for human excellence

Awe isn’t just found in nature.
Watch someone do something incredibly well.
A dancer.
An athlete.
A musician.
An artist.
A surgeon.
A craftsperson.
A teacher.
Or look for what researchers sometimes call moral beauty.
Someone showing courage.
Generosity.
Compassion.
Helping when they didn’t have to.
Sometimes we are awed not by what humans can build… but by what humans can be.

Learn something that bends your brain slightly

Awe loves the edge of understanding.
Learn something about the ocean.
Space.
The body.
History.
Animals.
Music.
Anything that makes you stop and think:
“Wait a minute… what?”

For example, some of the light reaching us from distant stars began travelling towards Earth long before humans existed. That is a perfectly respectable way to derail an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

And finally… leave some space

Awe needs attention.
And attention needs somewhere to land.
If every quiet moment is immediately filled by a screen, message, podcast, video or endless scroll… the world gets fewer opportunities to surprise us.

I do appreciate the irony of saying that while you are currently listening to a podcast.
But perhaps when this episode finishes… don’t immediately put something else on.
Give the next minute a chance to be interesting.

21:27 Summary

So what have we discovered today?
Awe tends to emerge when we encounter something that feels vast and stretches our normal understanding of the world.
It can create what psychologists call the small self.
Not by making us feel worthless or insignificant, but by reminding us that we’re part of a much larger picture.
Research suggests awe may shift our attention away from constant self-focus.
It has been linked with greater generosity and helping behaviour.
It may influence our subjective experience of time.
It can increase feelings of connection and self-transcendence.

But perhaps the most useful thing is this:
Awe does not have to be rare.
We don’t need to wait for the holidays.
The mountains.
The orchestra.
The perfect sunset.
The dramatic life event.

Sometimes…
we can simply practise noticing.
Because maybe the opposite of a busy mind isn’t always an empty mind.
Maybe sometimes it’s a mind so completely absorbed by something larger that, briefly…
there’s simply no room left for the usual noise.
And that might be one of the gentlest forms of pause we have.

Thanks for Pausing Here with me today.
If you’ve enjoyed our time together, try out the Pausing Point app for more mindful rests.
There you can explore breathing music, guided meditations, immersive soundscapes, mindful movement and different ways to step out of the noise for a while.
Why not share this episode with someone who could use a little more wonder in their playlist?
And don’t forget to follow us on your favourite podcast platforms so you never miss an episode.
If you want, you can also follow us on social media.
We’re @PausingPoint, where you can get updates and stay connected.

23:35 Next Time on Pause Here

Next time on Pause Here, we’re getting curious about curiosity itself.

Why does an unanswered question become so difficult to ignore? Why do our brains love novelty, surprises and the tantalising feeling of almost knowing something? And could approaching our everyday lives with a little more curiosity actually change the way we experience them?

From musical anticipation and memory to creativity, attention and the strange irresistible urge to Google something at 11:47 at night, we’re exploring what happens when the brain wants to know…

What happens next?

24:22 Guided Meditation

Before we finish, let’s take a few minutes to practise something very simple.
Not trying to manufacture awe.
Not chasing some enormous emotional experience.
Just making a little more room for wonder.
If it’s safe and comfortable to do so, allow your body to settle.

You can close your eyes…
or simply soften your gaze.
And begin by noticing your breath.
You don’t need to change it.
Just notice the quiet fact that your body is already breathing.
Air arriving.
Air leaving.
A rhythm you have carried through every ordinary and extraordinary moment of your life.

Take a slightly slower breath in.
And let the exhale soften.

Again…
breathing in.
And breathing out.

Now bring to mind a moment when you felt genuine wonder.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic.
Perhaps it was a night sky.
The ocean.
A forest.
A piece of music.
A view from somewhere high.
A moment of extraordinary kindness.
A voice.
A work of art.
The face of someone you love.
Or one of those strange, quiet moments when the world simply seemed…
bigger than usual.

Allow yourself to remember the details.
What could you see?
What could you hear?
What could you smell?
What did the air feel like?
And what happened in your body?
Perhaps your breathing changed.
Maybe you became very still.
Maybe there were goosebumps.
Warmth.
A lump in your throat.
A smile.
Or perhaps simply…
a sense of wow.

Take another slow breath in.
And as you breathe out…
imagine allowing the edges of your attention to widen.

Your breath is here.
Your body is here.
But there is also a whole world beyond you.
Rooms.
Trees.
Streets.
Clouds.
Oceans.
People.
Music.
Weather.
Birds.
Stars.
Lives unfolding everywhere at once.

You don’t have to hold all of it.
Just remember that you belong inside something larger.

For the next few breaths…
let yourself rest in that idea.
Breathing in…
making room.
Breathing out…
letting your own thoughts become a little less enormous.

Again.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.

One more slow breath in.
And a long…
easy…
breath out.

Then, when you’re ready, gently bring your attention back to the space around you.

And before you move on…
notice one thing you can see…
hear…
or feel…
that you might normally overlook.

Nothing spectacular is required.
Just notice.
And perhaps carry that attention with you into the rest of your day.

29:32 Outro

I’m Sarah, and you’ve been listening to Pause Here.
Until next time…
breathe deep and
keep looking up.
The world is remarkably good at surprising us.