Write from a small-self perspective after awe
After an awe experience, write briefly from the perspective of someone whose personal concerns feel appropriately small.
Key takeaways
- What it is: After an awe experience, write briefly from the perspective of someone whose personal concerns feel appropriately small.
- Why it works: Awe spontaneously produces the small-self effect — a temporary diminishment of the ego that reduces self-focused worry and increases prosocial orientation. Journaling immediately after an awe experience captures and extends this state by requiring language that explicitly frames personal problems within a larger context. The contrast between "my big problem" and the vastness just experienced is cognitively and emotionally reorganizing.
- Evidence: Plausible mechanism, limited direct outcome data.
- Avoid: Writing immediately about the awe experience itself (describing it) rather than writing from within the small-self state it produced — description is different from perspective shift.
Why it works
Awe spontaneously produces the small-self effect — a temporary diminishment of the ego that reduces self-focused worry and increases prosocial orientation. Journaling immediately after an awe experience captures and extends this state by requiring language that explicitly frames personal problems within a larger context. The contrast between "my big problem" and the vastness just experienced is cognitively and emotionally reorganizing.
How to do it
- 1Within 15 minutes of an awe-inducing experience, write for five minutes.
- 2Begin with: "In relation to what I just experienced, the things that have been worrying me feel..."
- 3Do not force positivity — honest observation of scale shift is the goal.
- 4Note any change in which concerns feel significant and which feel smaller than usual.
What the evidence says
MechanisticShiota et al. and others have documented the small-self effect experimentally — awe induction reliably reduces self-referential content in self-descriptions. The journaling extension is a practitioner application of this well-documented effect.
Honest caveat: The journaling application of the small-self effect is not separately trialed from awe induction itself; this combines a known effect with a standard journaling tool.
- — Piff et al. (2015), "Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Common mistake
Writing immediately about the awe experience itself (describing it) rather than writing from within the small-self state it produced — description is different from perspective shift.
IX Coach includes a post-awe journaling prompt in sessions after you’ve reported an awe experience, specifically designed to extend the small-self reorientation.
Practice this with IX Coach →