Think about the last time the emotion of “awe” swept over you. Perhaps you were standing in a museum in front of a piece of artwork you’ve always loved but never saw in person. Or, if you’re a nature lover, you made it to the top of a hiking trail, overlooking fantastic scenery. You could also feel awe if you’re boating out on the open waters, and someone points to a great white shark that's just poked its fin above the surface. Any of these experiences, and many more, could engender a unique but difficult to describe sense of wonder.

Being in awe, as rare as this might seem, could be an important contributor to your sense of well-being. You might even feel as though you can sense those pleasure-driven neurotransmitters as they overwhelm your brain’s emotion sensors.

As powerful as these feelings may seem to be, psychology as a field is very much behind in providing scientific insights into where awe comes from and, importantly, what benefits it can provide. Yet, imagine how useful this knowledge could be. A dose of awe might be just what some people might need to overcome feelings of being in the doldrums, burned out, or frustrated with the direction of their life.

Awe, Self-Smallness, and Meaning in Life

According to Peking University’s Wenying Yuan and colleagues (2023), “people feel awe when they encounter something physically or mentally grand that requires them to adjust their mental structures to make sense of the stimulus” (p. 1). The “hedonistic” (feel-good) side of this emotion combines, in other words, with a need to change the way you understand experiences. You may always have felt that your favorite Van Gogh painting was beautiful, but when you see it in person, you may discover something new that you could only see in the actual canvas itself (such as the unique pattern of brush strokes). Similarly, when you hear a piece of music in person that you've only heard in recordings, new notes or song lyrics may now pop out, causing you to rethink the music’s actual meaning.

Awe can also have a paradoxical effect of making you feel worse than you did before encountering the emotion. A sense of “self-smallness” may strike you, leading you to doubt whether you could ever accomplish anything as worthwhile in your own life as the awe-inspiring piece in question clearly represents. If you’re out in nature, you could also feel that you are small and insignificant compared to the world’s vast wonders.

Because awe could have these opposing effects, prior research on the topic, Yuan and her coauthors note, hasn’t clearly come down on the side of whether it’s beneficial or not. One key player in the equation is the sense of “meaning in life.” By “opening your mind to the big picture,” awe could help you see your life in a new way, but if self-smallness takes over, that awe-inducing experience will cause you to question everything you ever thought about yourself.

Testing the Pros and Cons of Awe

Taking these opposing possibilities into account, the Peking University research team embarked on a series of six studies on samples totaling 1,115 participants, examining how awe could have an indirect effect on meaning in life via the route of sense of authenticity. The link between awe and authenticity was based on the reasoning that awe should facilitate the desire to understand yourself as you truly are.

Awe, the authors note, is a “self-transcendent feeling” that shifts attention away from the trivial aspects of your sense of self to discovering who you really are. If you’re overwhelmed by awe, this suggests, you feel that your true self has become penetrated. The piece of art or music that transformed your understanding now also helps you gain insight into something you didn’t know about yourself before.

Authenticity is more than a motivational process, however. The personality dimension of authenticity describes a tendency to act in ways that are consistent with your own values and beliefs. Oddly enough, though, people high in this quality may be less affected by awe because they’re already on a path to honest self-discovery. As a result, the potential links between awe and meaning in life may be less apparent for those whose personality includes a strong dose of personal honesty and integrity.

The series of studies intended to tease out these potential sets of linkages, began with simple tests of the correlations between the experience of awe in daily life with sense of meaning in life through the routes of authentic self-pursuit, self-smallness, and overall happiness. The authors also included “threat-based awe,” which is what you might feel when you see that shark fin in nearby waters.

Ultimately, the pattern of findings across the increasingly sophisticated tests of their model conferred support onto the general framework in which awe promotes the search for authenticity in people who are low in this trait to begin with. Authenticity, in turn, has a favorable effect on meaning in life that outweighs other contributors including happiness and self-smallness. The authors conducted a final check on their data through a meta-analysis (statistical compilation of effects) and confirmed that these effects were not due to a correlational fluke.

Indeed, in one of the studies, the authors induced a sense of awe in participants by having them describe an experience of “authentic self-actualization” (vs. doing the laundry in the control condition). This manipulation resulted in the participants in the experimental group reporting a higher sense of meaning in life, supporting the role of authentic self-discovery as a component of awe. In another manipulation, the authors compared nature-induced awe with nature-induced amusement, just to control for the possibility that any experience with nature can increase sense of meaning in life.

Finding Your Awe

The Peking U. study’s rigorous controls suggest that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages of exposing yourself to experiences that stimulate awe. While it’s true that you could feel small or inadequate in the face of great achievements or the grandeur of nature, the findings make it clear that you’ll more likely feel that you’ve gained a path to your own inner desires, qualities, and sense of purpose. In that moment, you know something about yourself that you didn’t know before.

The brush strokes or lyrics in the piece of art that you newly discover, then, may help you understand why you were attracted to them in the first place. Now you realize why the yellows of Van Gogh’s sunflowers always struck you as so powerful, or give you a new connection to how he may have experienced the world himself when he was painting it. The lyrics of the song, ones that you thought you knew by heart, all of a sudden change when you hear them sung in real life rather than on a recording.

One key feature of awe that the authors don’t necessarily address is its unprompted nature. You can recall an experience in which you felt awe, but you can’t force it upon yourself. If anything, it may be this impromptu aspect that makes awe that much more overwhelming, as it happens truly in the moment.

To sum up, allowing yourself to feel awe and understanding what it can do for you when it happens can provide a new and unique route to self-insight and growth. Fulfillment isn’t necessarily a paved pathway in front of you, but one that unfolds with every new and amazing step of the way.