Look for awe and scale
Seek vast or intricate natural sights that produce a felt sense of awe.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Seek vast or intricate natural sights that produce a felt sense of awe.
- Why it works: Awe — the response to something vast that exceeds your current frame — has been shown to shrink the felt size of the self and personal worries, shifting attention outward. Nature is the most reliable everyday source of awe, which is part of why it eases the self-focused rumination that feeds stress and low mood.
- Evidence: Backed by observational / correlational evidence.
- Avoid: Documenting the view for social media instead of being absorbed in it — capturing awe through a screen blunts the perspective shift it can produce.
Why it works
Awe — the response to something vast that exceeds your current frame — has been shown to shrink the felt size of the self and personal worries, shifting attention outward. Nature is the most reliable everyday source of awe, which is part of why it eases the self-focused rumination that feeds stress and low mood.
How to do it
- 1Position yourself near something expansive or intricate: a big sky, old trees, moving water.
- 2Pause and let the scale register rather than photographing and moving on.
- 3Notice how your immediate worries feel proportionally smaller afterward.
What the evidence says
ObservationalExperimental studies find that inducing awe increases prosocial feeling, reduces self-focus, and can expand perceived time availability — with nature a common awe elicitor.
Honest caveat: Awe research is mostly lab-induced and short-term; how much a walk in the woods reliably produces durable awe varies a lot by person and place.
- — Piff et al. (2015), "Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Common mistake
Documenting the view for social media instead of being absorbed in it — capturing awe through a screen blunts the perspective shift it can produce.
IX Coach can prompt an awe-and-perspective practice when you’re caught in self-focused worry, pairing it with a brief reframe of the problem you arrived with.
Practice this with IX Coach →