Here's the strange detail that got me: in a 2020 study out of UCSF, researchers asked people to take a weekly fifteen-minute walk and snap a selfie along the way. Over eight weeks, the people in the awe group literally shrank in their own photos. More sky, more trees, less face. And as they got smaller in the frame, their smiles got measurably wider.
That's the whole pitch, honestly. Awe, the feeling you get in front of something vast you can't quite wrap your head around, turns out to be one of the cheapest, fastest, most evidence-backed mood interventions psychology has tested. It's free. It takes minutes. And it works by doing the exact opposite of what your phone does: it points your attention outward instead of inward. Berkeley's Dacher Keltner, who's spent decades studying the emotion, defines it as what happens when we're in the presence of something bigger than the self that we don't immediately understand: nature, art, music, a crowd doing something together. You don't need a canyon. You need a slightly different way of walking around. Here are six ways in.
1. Take a fifteen-minute awe walk
This is the actual intervention from the UCSF study, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Virginia Sturm and her team told one group of walkers to tap into their sense of childlike wonder and look for things that surprised them; the control group just walked. After eight weeks, the awe walkers reported more positive emotions and less distress in their daily lives than the regular walkers. Same legs, same fifteen minutes, same route options. The only variable was where the attention went. The study was done with older adults, but the instruction costs nothing to try at 24: walk somewhere and actively hunt for something you haven't noticed before.
2. Point the camera out, not at yourself
Back to the shrinking selfie. The researchers noticed that as the weeks went on, the awe group's photos showed an increasing focus on the surroundings rather than the self, and that shift ran in parallel with the bigger smiles. The paper is literally titled "Big Smile, Small Self." I love this as a practical hack because it hijacks a habit you already have. You're going to take photos anyway. Try a week where the camera points at the weird cloud, the fire escape shadow, the dog in the sweater, and see what it does to the way you move through a day. It's a tiny act of aiming your attention, and aiming your attention is most of the game.
3. Go stand under something vast
Vastness is the active ingredient. In a 2015 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Paul Piff and colleagues ran five studies with over 2,000 people and found that awe reliably shrank people's sense of their individual selves. The best experiment is the last one: participants stood for one minute in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees, looking up. Then an experimenter walked by and "accidentally" dropped a box of pens. The people who'd been looking at trees picked up more pens than the control group, and scored lower on entitlement. One minute. Trees. Find the tallest thing near you (a cathedral ceiling, a bridge, an old oak) and give it sixty seconds of your full attention.
4. Use it to shrink the problem, not to solve it
The mechanism in Piff's studies is what he calls the small self: awe diminishes the emphasis on the individual self, and that shrinkage is what drove the increases in generosity and ethical decision-making. Which makes awe a genuinely useful tool for a specific situation: the spiral. When you've been circling the same worry for three hours, the worry isn't usually the problem anymore. The zoom level is. You're at maximum magnification on your own life, and awe is the only emotion whose whole job is to pull the camera back. It won't answer the question you're chewing on. But it changes the size of the question relative to everything else, which is often what feeling hopelessly behind actually needs.
5. Reach for it when you feel time-starved
This is the counterintuitive one. In a 2012 Psychological Science paper, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found across three experiments that people who felt awe felt they had more time available and were less impatient than people feeling other emotions, including plain happiness. In one study, the awe group watched a commercial full of waterfalls, whales, and space; the control group got a cheerful confetti parade, so it wasn't just good vibes doing the work. The awe-struck participants were also more willing to volunteer their time, more likely to choose experiences over stuff, and reported higher life satisfaction. All of it, apparently, because awe yanks you into the present moment, and the present is where time stops feeling scarce. The day you're most convinced you can't spare fifteen minutes for a walk is precisely the day the walk pays best.
6. Stop saving it for vacations
The quiet lesson across all this research is that nobody flew anyone to Iceland. The interventions were a neighborhood walk, a grove of trees, a sixty-second commercial. Keltner's list of triggers includes nature, art, music, and collective acts: a ceremony, a concert, a stadium doing the same chant. The researchers behind the awe-walk study point out that novelty helps, and a street you've never taken counts, urban or not. A song played loud with your eyes closed counts. The night sky from a parking lot counts. Awe is a daily-dose emotion that we've mentally filed under "someday, somewhere expensive," and the filing error is the problem. I've also found awe is worth narrating afterward, because it evaporates fast — it's half the reason we built Joice around talking instead of typing. Saying "the light on the river tonight was unreal" out loud, to something that listens, pins the moment down before your inbox erases it.
One more thing about those selfies. Nobody in the study set out to get smaller. They were just told to look for things that surprised them, and the shrinking happened on its own, week by week, as a side effect of where they pointed their eyes. That's the deal awe offers: you don't have to work on yourself. You have to look at literally anything else, on purpose, for fifteen minutes. Your move this week is one walk, one tall thing, or one loud song. Then notice what size you are afterward.