Awe is a mindset tool: how wonder shrinks worry

The Short Version

Four conversations, from four different corners of psychology and neuroscience, arrive at the same practical idea: awe, the feeling of standing near something vast, is one of the quickest ways to make a worry feel smaller. On The Mel Robbins Podcast, Harvard-MIT researcher Dr. Jeff Karp describes an "awe anchor," a photo, memory, sound or video that reliably moves you, which he uses before high-stakes moments or when overwhelmed [1]. Stanford's Jamil Zaki argues that awe, and especially the everyday "moral beauty" of other people's kindness, is exactly what cynicism blinds us to, and that noticing it makes us both more accurate and more hopeful about people [2]. Caltech's Ralph Adolphs places awe among the largely human emotions that depend on stepping outside the here and now, and describes how gratitude and awe grew for him after a frightening illness [3]. And Michigan's Ethan Kross lists nature and awe among his go-to "emotional shifters," because awe shrinks the sense of self and, with it, the size of our problems [4]. None of them claims awe is a cure-all, and Kross warns that no single tool works for everyone, but together they make a strong case that seeking small, regular moments of wonder is a cheap and dependable way to regain perspective [4].

Table of contents

What They Said

Jeff Karp on The Mel Robbins Podcast: the awe anchor

The most explicit awe as a tool framing comes from the episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast featuring Dr. Jeff Karp, a Harvard-MIT researcher whose work, the summary notes, has led to more than 170 published studies, 100+ patents, and 13 biotech startups [1]. The episode is built around six life ignition tools, and awe is Tool #1 [1].

Karp's starting diagnosis is what he calls the "algorithmic life": living on autopilot, doing what's expected, repeating the same patterns, measuring success by external benchmarks [1]. Over time, he argues, this shrinks your sense of possibility, and your brain follows suit [1]. If you feel exhausted, uninspired or stuck in indecision, the episode says, it's not because you're broken. It's because your system needs a reboot [1]. Awe is presented as one of the fastest ways to reconnect to your brain's full capacity [1].

According to the summary, awe triggers three things: the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms you down; the default mode network, which activates introspection and imagination; and dopamine, associated with focus + pleasure [1]. The practical method is simple [1]:

• Identify a personal awe anchor: a photo, memory, sound, or video that reliably moves you.
• Use it before high-stakes situations or moments of overwhelm.
• Let the feeling flood your body— not just your brain.

The line that sums up his view is: "Awe opens the door to creative possibility because it reminds us how small we are—and how big life is." [1] In other words, the smallness is the point. The anchor works by resetting scale: your problem stays the same size, but you see it against something much larger.

Karp's other tools reinforce the same move from narrow to wide. Tool #2 replaces "How do I fix this?" and "Why am I like this?" with "What fascinates me about this?", because Curiosity interrupts rumination and invites play [1]. Tool #3 recommends micro-pauses of 60 to 90 seconds to Reset after overwhelm, Interrupt negative spirals, and Create space for insight, since "Pausing is how you reclaim ownership of your mind in a distracted world." [1] Tool #5, Proximity to Possibility, tells listeners to spend time in unfamiliar spaces, naming art galleries, nature, maker labs, because "Innovation isn't just about thinking outside the box. It's about getting outside your normal inputs." [1] He also offers a short version of the theme: "Creativity dies in certainty. But it thrives in curiosity." [1] The episode ties all of this to neuroplasticity, self-directed neurobiology and embodiment, the idea that change happens faster when it's felt, not just thought [1]. That explains the instruction to feel awe in the body, not just think about it. The closing advice sums it up: Try an awe anchor, and remember what it feels like to wonder again [1].

Jamil Zaki on Huberman Lab: awe, moral beauty and the cost of cynicism

Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychology professor, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory and author of Hope for Cynics, comes at awe from a different direction: as something cynicism takes away from us [2]. His conversation with Andrew Huberman is mainly about cynicism, which he defines as a theory that people are, at their core, selfish, greedy and dishonest, and which he shows can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that damages health, relationships, creativity and even intelligence [2].

The link to awe comes when Huberman suggests that cynics apply almost physics-like rules to people. Zaki agrees that we all use theories to make sense of things: "we use theories to provide explanatory simplicity to a vast and overwhelmingly complex world" [2]. Cynicism does that too, "but of course in simplifying, we lose a lot of the detail" [2]. Then he adds: "We lose a lot of the wonder that maybe we experienced earlier in life." [2]

He goes on to name "another aspect of what we lose to cynicism, which is the ability to witness the beauty of human action and human kindness" [2]. Here he draws on his friend Dacher Keltner's research, describing awe as "this emotion of experiencing something vast and it also experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness" [2]. Zaki admits that his own first image of awe is Carl Sagan's pale blue dot [2]. But Keltner's research, which catalogued what most commonly produces awe in a large representative sample, found that the most common source is moral beauty: everyday acts of kindness, compassion and connection [2]. Moral beauty is everywhere if you are open to it, Zaki says, and a cynical worldview can blind people to it, which he calls a tragic form of simplicity [2]. Huberman adds that the brain can shift its aperture between the tiny, like watching the ants in his yard, and the vast [2].

This changes what an "awe practice" can look like. You don't need a telescope image or a mountain. By Keltner's findings, as Zaki reports them, the most common trigger is a stranger's kindness or a friend's compassion, which you only notice if you are looking for it [2].

Zaki's wider argument explains why this matters for worry. Humans have a negativity bias: we weigh threats and losses more heavily and remember people's worst qualities [2]. In his lab, observers shared gossip about selfish players three times more often than about generous ones, and people reading that gossip vastly underestimated how generous the original players were [2]. He calls social media, in at least some ways, "a cynicism factory," noting that the average person scrolls about 300 feet of feed a day [2]. His conclusion: "The average person underestimates the average person." [2] We are all, he says, looking through soot-colored glasses [2].

His practical tools line up closely with an awe practice. The first is to be skeptical of your cynicism: when suspicion arises, ask "Defend your inference. Defend your hypothesis," and notice how often the evidence is thin [2]. The second is a reciprocity mindset: trust tends to earn trustworthiness [2]. The third, social savoring, is the closest to awe. With his kids, Zaki runs savoring classes, slowly enjoying ice cream or a sunset. He realized the positive moments he shared were all sensory, while the stories he told about people were negative, like the driver who cut them off [2]. He now shares positive gossip about people, and that in turn changed what he notices [2]. Huberman draws a useful line here: savoring is appreciating good things as they happen, while gratitude looks back [2]. Zaki also grants that "life is not all metal," echoing Huberman's contrast between the Nature Is Metal account and Joel Sartore's Photo Ark [2].

Zaki is candid that this doesn't come naturally to him. He calls his own factory settings suspicious and says, "I myself struggle with cynicism and have for my entire life" [2]. His recommended mindset is "hopeful skepticism": curious and scientific, while knowing that our defaults skew too negative [2]. Looking for moral beauty doesn't mean switching off your judgment. It means correcting a known bias.

Ralph Adolphs on Huberman Lab: awe as a regulated, uniquely human state

Ralph Adolphs, a Caltech professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology, gives the most scientific account of emotion among the four, and awe appears in it in two ways: as part of what makes human emotional life distinctive, and as something that grew for him through hard experience [3].

Adolphs defines emotions by what they do. They are flexible control states that sit between rigid reflexes and fully deliberate planning, with features including priority (they can take over behavior), valence, scalability and persistence over time [3]. He argues that the ability to monitor and regulate our own emotions is probably uniquely human, and that most emotional difficulties are about regulation rather than the emotions themselves [3]. That framing matters here: if worry is a problem of regulation, then any reliable way to shift your state, awe included, belongs in the regulation toolkit.

On awe itself, Adolphs sees it as largely uniquely human, because it depends on the ability to step outside the here and now through perspective-taking and mental time travel [3]. The conversation turns to awe when Huberman recalls Dacher Keltner's definition: "it's when we bring our attention from a small spatial scale to a large spatial scale. Right. Or from large to small." [3] Keltner later added, Huberman says, that the same holds for time: "when we live our life day to day, we start to feel kind of lost in time. Yeah. And awe becomes less common." [3] Huberman applies this to Adolphs's 100-mile ultramarathons: "when perhaps we run a hundred mile race across 30 hours, we realize how much can happen in 30 hours." [3] You might expect everyday life to feel trivial afterwards, but "it seems the opposite is true," because "we realize that time is this very elastic thing, at least in our minds." [3]

Adolphs's ultrarunning gives this a mental dimension. He describes the sport's mantra of "relentless forward momentum," and says "the sort of psychological equivalent is just relentless optimism, like optimism in the face of adversity." [3] In his experience, if you refuse to quit when everything seems hopeless, the low point levels out about half the time [3]. And he describes regulation over longer time scales: once you have "the cognitive knowledge that you felt terrible then better again," you start "to integrate over longer periods of time." [3] That is the same widening of time scale that Keltner's definition of awe describes.

The most personal thread comes at the end, when Huberman asks about Adolphs's recent illness. The diagnosis first brought "fear, sadness, worry, you know, all these negative emotions," which he regulated together with his wife: "interpersonal emotion regulation between me and my wife, us talking about it. So that's like a huge part of the process." [3] Then something changed: "you're getting more other emotions like awe, gratitude, acceptance, all of these emotions we were talking about before that I think are largely uniquely human that really make you appreciate and be just grateful for what you have." [3] He describes the arc as moving from "regulating the sort of, you know, immediate stressors" to "having more gratitude in awe in everyday life." [3] The experience also gave him "this metacognitive perspective on your your lifeline," including "how to allocate your time to things that are worthwhile." [3] He ends with a reframe of mortality from neuroscience: "rather than thinking of death as we normally do as the world loses you, the neuroscience perspective is the inverse, which is you lose the world." His conclusion: "So live it up." [3]

Adolphs also offers regulation principles that shape how awe might best be used. His main principle is that the earlier you intervene, the better, and the earliest intervention of all is situational avoidance, structuring your environment so you don't end up in the triggering situation [3]. He calls cognitive reappraisal a double-edged sword: repeatedly telling yourself you don't want to feel sad can make you sadder [3]. And he notes that both the specific strategy and how automatic your control becomes can be trained [3]. His ice-bath story shows this. After weeks of cold exposure, a driver honked at him while he was parking, and the usual anger spike didn't come: "Well, after the ice bath, it's flat." [3] He is careful to add, "There's an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study." [3] Stillness is part of this too: his lab starts each Monday meeting with three to five minutes of silence, which newcomers find stressful at first but which he says is completely trainable [3].

Huberman adds a warning about the opposite of awe. Media and advertising compete for emotional priority, he says, because "It captures your attention," and "we underestimate the extent to which all day long we are bombarded with these signals." [3] Adolphs, for his part, has no social media accounts at all [3].

Ethan Kross on Huberman Lab: nature and awe to quiet chatter

Ethan Kross, a University of Michigan psychology professor, director of its Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory and author of Chatter and Shift, connects awe most directly to worry [4]. His subject is "chatter: the inner voice stuck in a loop over the same negative material without progress, such as asking why something happened or calling yourself an idiot [4]. I think of chatter as a dark side of the inner voice, he says [4]. Chatter soaks up attention, leaving less for problem-solving and creativity, and Kross calls it a transdiagnostic process: filled with sad thoughts it pushes toward depression, with fears toward anxiety, with traumatic memories toward trauma [4]. Yet experiencing it doesn't mean you have a disorder: welcome to the human condition." [4]

Among his "emotional shifters," nature and awe form a group of their own [4]. Walking in nature, he explains, is cognitively restorative because gentle, interesting surroundings capture attention softly and let it recover [4]. Nature also produces awe, the feeling of being near something vast, which shrinks the sense of self and, with it, our problems [4]. He finds awe outside nature too, in images from new space telescopes and the rover on Mars [4]. This is the clearest statement in any of the sources of how wonder shrinks worry: awe makes the self smaller, and the problem that felt huge shrinks with it [4].

Kross uses this himself. His first line of defense against chatter is distancing: talking to himself by his own name and "you, and temporal distancing, or mental time travel [4]. When he wakes at 2 a.m. with chatter, which happens every four to six weeks, he asks himself how he will feel about it tomorrow morning [4]. That turns the volume down on it, which for me is often all I have to do to get back to bed. [4] It is flexible: You can, you can ask yourself if you're struggling with a problem, how you're going to feel about it tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now. And it's another way of broadening your perspective. [4] If those tools aren't enough, he takes a walk in a safe natural setting and calls members of his chatter advisory board" [4]. His WOOP plan (Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, Plan) spells this out as if-then steps: if chatter strikes, use distanced self-talk and mental time travel; if that fails, go to nature and call his advisors [4].

Kross also argues that shifting emotions can be easier than people assume. "All of our sensory modalities are powerful tools for, I would argue relatively effortlessly shifting our emotions," he says, "And I think that's really important because people often think that regulating our emotions is hard work." [4] Some tools, like expressive writing, do take effort, but many shifters are quick and cheap [4]. Music is his example of an underused one: in one study about 95 percent of people said they listen to music to feel good, yet only 10 to 30 percent reported using it the last time they felt anxious, angry or sad [4]. Awe from nature or a space photo is in the same low-effort group.

Places matter too. Kross describes a man who regained his footing after discovering infidelity by sleeping in his childhood bedroom, an example of places acting as emotional anchors [4]. This comes close to Karp's awe anchor: a specific, repeatable source that reliably shifts your state [1][4].

He also adds a reason to think past any single tool. "Different tools, work for different people in different situations," he says, and "I don't want to presume that the tools that work for me are going to work for everyone." [4] His COVID-era studies found people used three or four tools a day, and which tools worked varied widely [4]. "Individual tools are not the name of the game," he says, because "we are often doing multiple things to manage our emotions" [4]. What makes him effective, he says, is timing: "I am exceptionally strategic in utilizing those tools the moment I detect the chatter brewing." [4]

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Where they agree

Awe works by changing scale. Every source describes awe as a shift in size or perspective. Karp says awe "reminds us how small we are—and how big life is" [1]. Zaki, via Keltner, describes "experiencing ourselves as small and a part of that vastness" [2]. Huberman, citing Keltner in the Adolphs conversation, describes moving attention "from a small spatial scale to a large spatial scale," and adds that it applies to time as well [3]. Kross says awe shrinks the sense of self and, with it, our problems [4]. The mechanism is described the same way four times.

Awe counters a narrowing mental habit. Each expert pairs awe with a specific mental trap. For Karp it is the autopilot "algorithmic life" and the rumination that curiosity interrupts [1]. For Zaki it is cynicism, a simplifying theory that costs us "a lot of the wonder" [2]. For Adolphs it is being "lost in time" in day-to-day life, where "awe becomes less common" [3]. For Kross it is chatter, the looping inner voice [4]. The shared view is that worry and cynicism narrow attention, and awe widens it again.

It is cheap and close at hand. None of the four ties awe to expensive trips or rare experiences. Karp's anchor is a photo, memory, sound, or video [1]. Zaki's most common source of awe is everyday moral beauty [2]. Kross finds it in a walk among trees or a space telescope image [4]. Adolphs describes having "more gratitude in awe in everyday life" [3].

It works best alongside other tools. Karp pairs the awe anchor with curiosity, micro-pauses and reframing [1]. Zaki pairs moral beauty with savoring, skepticism about cynicism and encounter counting [2]. Adolphs sets awe beside gratitude, acceptance, stillness and interpersonal regulation [3]. Kross puts nature and awe after distanced self-talk and mental time travel, next to calling friends [4].

Where they differ

What produces awe. Karp's examples lean toward the personal and sensory, whatever reliably moves you [1], and his line about how small we are suggests vastness. Zaki highlights a result that challenges the vastness image: his own go-to is the pale blue dot, but Keltner's large sample found moral beauty, people's kindness, to be the most common source [2]. Kross emphasizes nature and space imagery [4]. Huberman's version of Keltner adds time as another source, as in a 30-hour race [3]. These views fit together rather than conflict, but they point to different practices: looking at the sky, looking at people, or looking at a long span of time.

How strong the evidence is. The sources differ in how carefully they speak. The Robbins episode summary states awe's effects firmly (parasympathetic calm, default mode network activation, dopamine) but cites no specific study for them [1]. Adolphs, by contrast, labels even his own striking ice-bath result "an experiment of one" and says "I'm not claiming this as a published study" [3]. He is also skeptical of popular simplifications, calling the "fear center" view of the amygdala overly simplistic, and noting that the popular bodily maps of emotion study measured people's concepts of emotion rather than actual physiology [3]. His caution doesn't contradict Karp's claims, but readers should treat the specific neurochemistry in [1] as the episode's framing rather than something the other sources confirm.

Tool or outcome. For Karp and Kross, awe is something you reach for on purpose, before a big meeting or when chatter strikes [1][4]. For Adolphs, the awe he describes after his illness came at the end of a process, after first regulating fear and sadness with his wife's help [3]. For Zaki, awe of moral beauty depends on first loosening cynicism, which otherwise blinds you to it [2]. So there are two views. In one, you trigger awe to change your state. In the other, awe shows up once you stop filtering it out. Both can be true, but they suggest different first steps: pull up an anchor, or clean the "soot-colored glasses" [2].

How reliable it is. Karp says the anchor reliably moves you and calls awe one of the "fastest ways" to reconnect [1]. Kross is the counterweight: tools that work vary widely between people, and "individual tools are not the name of the game" [4]. The fair reading is that awe is a dependable option for many people, not a guarantee for everyone.

Why It Works

The sources give several explanations, some neurological, some cognitive and some social.

Scale shifts shrink the self. The central mechanism, stated by Kross, is that the feeling of being near something vast shrinks the sense of self, and problems shrink with it [4]. Keltner's definition, as reported in two episodes, says the same: awe means feeling "small and a part of that vastness" [2], a move of attention across spatial and even time scales [3]. Worry centers on the self. Awe moves the self out of the center.

Awe needs perspective-taking and mental time travel. Adolphs explains why awe feels so human: it depends on the ability to step outside the here and now [3]. The same abilities power Kross's temporal distancing, asking how you will feel "tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now," which he calls "another way of broadening your perspective" [4]. Awe and distancing seem to draw on the same mental skill.

Soft attention lets the mind recover. Kross explains that nature is cognitively restorative because gentle, interesting surroundings capture attention softly and let it recover [4]. Chatter drains attention; nature and awe hold attention without draining it, and chatter loses its fuel [4]. Kross also describes flow as something like the opposite of chatter, absorbing attention so completely that chatter has no room [4], which suggests that anything that takes up attention in a pleasant way leaves less room for rumination.

Nervous system calm. The Robbins episode says awe activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms you down, along with the default mode network and dopamine [1]. Adolphs gives a related, if indirect, example of trained calm: repeated ice baths lowered his heart rate and breathing and, in his "experiment of one," flattened a later anger response, suggesting regulation can become "smooth and effortless to some extent" [3]. He notes that both the strategy and how automatic it becomes can be trained [3], which supports the idea that a regularly practiced awe anchor might become easier to use over time.

Correcting a biased picture of the world. Zaki's explanation is about accuracy. Negativity bias, gossip that overweights selfishness, and social media that amplifies outrage all make other people look worse than they are [2]. Noticing moral beauty adds back the good data those filters remove. The hopeful picture, he argues, is the accurate one [2]. When his lab shared real data with Stanford students, for example that 95 percent wanted to help struggling friends, students became more willing to take social risks and more socially integrated six months later [2]. Seeing the good in people is not naive, he argues; it corrects a measurable error.

Emotion competes for priority. Adolphs's definition of emotion includes priority, the capacity to interrupt and take over behavior [3]. Huberman notes that media is "incentivized to get you to prioritize an emotion to the point where it takes over behavior" [3]. Awe is one way to choose which emotion gets priority, instead of letting a feed or a honking driver choose for you [3].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies to looping, everyday worry. Kross's chatter, the 2 a.m. spiral, the replay of a mistake, is exactly what awe and nature target [4]. Karp's awe anchor is aimed at moments of overwhelm and the moments before high-stakes situations [1].

It applies to cynicism and mistrust. Zaki shows that a cynical worldview hides everyday moral beauty [2]. For anyone whose worry is about people, their motives and the state of the world, looking for moral beauty is a specific counterweight [2].

It applies to life's larger shocks, but later in the process. Adolphs's illness story shows awe and gratitude growing after a frightening diagnosis, but only after the fear and sadness were regulated first, with his wife [3]. Awe was not the first response; it came later.

It applies to creative stuckness. For Karp, awe opens "the door to creative possibility" and is the first step out of the algorithmic life [1]. Zaki likewise ties cynicism to reduced creativity and a reduced capacity for awe [2].

It has limits. Kross is clear that no single tool works for everyone and that people typically combine three or four tools a day [4]. Awe may not be what works for you, or may work only together with other tools. Timing matters: Adolphs's principle that the earlier you intervene, the better [3] and Kross's habit of acting "the moment I detect the chatter brewing" [4] suggest awe works best on worry that is just starting, not a full-blown spiral.

It is not a substitute for dealing with problems. Kross supports flexible attention: focus on a problem when useful, step away when not, and return if it keeps resurfacing [4]. He distinguishes healthy distraction from avoidance through substances [4]. Awe gives you perspective; it doesn't remove the need to act. Zaki makes a parallel point about people: hopeful skepticism is not naive trust, leaps of faith should be "calculated," and real dangers and extremists exist, even if they are not the average [2].

It isn't treatment. Kross links chatter to depression, anxiety and trauma [4]. For persistent low mood, anxiety or trauma symptoms, awe practices can go alongside care, but it is worth getting a qualified mental health professional's advice rather than relying on self-help tools alone. The same applies to related tools mentioned in the sources, such as cold exposure; Huberman notes it is safe "unless you're doing it in a lake or you're doing hyperventilation first" [3].

What To Do With It

1. Build a personal awe anchor. Following Karp, pick one photo, memory, sound or video that reliably moves you, and keep it easy to reach. Use it before high-stakes moments or when you feel overwhelmed, and let the feeling register in your body, not just your head [1].

2. Look for moral beauty, not just grand views. Zaki reports that Keltner found everyday kindness, compassion and connection to be the most common source of awe [2]. Each day, look for one act of kindness by someone else and pay real attention to it.

3. Share good news about people. Copy Zaki's switch from complaining about the driver who cut you off to sharing positive gossip about people; he found it changed what he notices [2]. Savor good moments as they happen, not only in hindsight [2].

4. Put nature in your chatter plan. Use Kross's WOOP format to write a concrete if-then plan: if chatter strikes, first try distanced self-talk and asking how you'll feel tomorrow; if that fails, take a walk in a safe natural setting and call a trusted friend [4].

5. Keep a supply of vastness. When you can't get outside, Kross finds awe in images from new space telescopes and the Mars rover [4]; Zaki's go-to is the pale blue dot [2]. Save a few such images for quick use.

6. Widen your time frame as well as your view. Keltner, as Huberman relates, says awe applies to time too [3]. Ask Kross's question, how you'll feel about this "tomorrow, next week, 10 years from now" [4], and take on long efforts that show you how much can happen in a day or a month [3].

7. Act early. Adolphs's rule is that earlier intervention works better [3], and Kross acts "the moment I detect the chatter brewing" [4]. Reach for your anchor or a walk at the first sign of a loop.

8. Cut the inputs that crowd out wonder. Zaki calls social media, in some ways, "a cynicism factory" [2], and Huberman warns we are "bombarded with these signals" competing for our emotions [3]. Karp's advice to change "your normal inputs" [1] fits here: swap some scrolling for galleries, nature or unfamiliar places [1].

9. Practice stillness so awe has room. Take Karp's 60-to-90-second micro-pauses [1] or copy Adolphs's lab, which opens each week with three to five minutes of silence, a practice he says is completely trainable [3].

10. Treat awe as one tool among several. Try it for a few weeks alongside music, touch, writing and talking to friends, and keep what works for you, since Kross's research shows the best combination differs from person to person [4].

Sources

1. Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Power: 6 Tools to Boost Focus, Confidence, and Creativity · The Mel Robbins Podcast
2. Dr. Jamil Zaki: How to Cultivate a Positive, Growth-Oriented Mindset · Huberman Lab
3. Dr. Ralph Adolphs on the Neuroscience of Emotions and How to Regulate Them · Huberman Lab
4. How to Control Your Inner Voice & Increase Your Resilience · Huberman Lab