Awe Does More for Your Wellbeing Than Happiness, Research Shows

Recalling a beautiful sunset works better for your happiness than replaying your favourite memory. That statement sounds like it should be wrong. A 2025 study in Scientific Reports tested exactly this, and the result held up clearly across 342 participants.

What the Researchers Actually Did

Chen and colleagues at Honghe University in China assigned participants to one of three groups. The awe group was asked to recall and write about a recent experience that felt "deeply awe-inspiring," such as a panoramic natural view or a moment in nature that genuinely moved them. The pleasant group recalled something that made them feel happy, like watching a film with friends or receiving a gift they loved. The neutral group simply wrote about their routine morning from the previous day (Chen et al., 2025).

After the recall task, everyone completed scales measuring life satisfaction, resilience, and emotional balance. The finding was blunt: the awe group scored significantly higher on life satisfaction than both the pleasant and neutral groups. The pleasant group, meanwhile, showed no meaningful difference from the neutral group. Remembering something happy did essentially nothing for how satisfied participants felt with their lives. Remembering something awe-inspiring did a great deal.

Why Awe Outperforms Happiness

The explanation comes down to what type of emotion awe actually is. Most positive emotions, including happiness and joy, are self-oriented. They focus on something you gained, received, or achieved. Awe is different. It is self-transcendent, pointing your attention outward toward something larger than yourself: a vast landscape, a piece of music that defies expectation, the scale of a night sky. That outward focus has a specific psychological function. It loosens your fixation on your own problems, your status, your worries.

The researchers describe this as a shift in cognitive structure. When you experience awe, you're not just feeling good. Your brain reorganizes its frame of reference. Things that felt urgent tend to shrink. Your sense of time expands. The Chen et al. (2025) study found that this cognitive shift directly increases life satisfaction, and it also works through a second mechanism: it builds psychological resilience. People in the awe condition scored measurably higher on resilience than those in either comparison group. That resilience, in turn, was what improved their emotional balance.

The Physical Layer Nobody Talks About

The wellbeing effects appear to run deeper than mood. An earlier study published in Emotion (Stellar et al., 2015) found that awe was the single strongest predictor of lower pro-inflammatory cytokine levels out of all the positive emotions measured. These biological markers rise with chronic stress and connect to depression, cardiovascular disease, and faster biological aging. The mechanism isn't fully established, but the pattern aligns with the Chen et al. data: awe doesn't just lift your spirits. It appears to shift something in how the body is operating.

Why "Just Think of Something Happy" Misses the Point

The pleasant emotion condition in the study is worth sitting with. Those participants recalled something that made them happy. That's precisely what countless wellbeing interventions tell you to do: write three things you're grateful for, savour positive experiences, replay good memories. Their life satisfaction scores were statistically indistinguishable from participants who spent the same time writing about their morning routine.

Awe produced results that ordinary pleasantness couldn't. The likely reason is that awe requires a fundamentally different relationship with the experience. You're not extracting pleasure from a memory. You're being moved by something outside yourself. That movement is what reorganizes your perspective and, according to the research, what actually shifts how satisfied you feel with your life.

What You Can Actually Do

The practical application here is genuinely low-effort. The Chen et al. (2025) protocol worked by asking people to spend a few minutes recalling and writing about a time they felt awe. No guided meditation, no weekend retreat. Just a deliberate return to a moment when something larger than you demanded your full attention. Even that brief exercise was enough to shift life satisfaction scores in a significant and measurable way.

The second option is an "awe walk." A 2020 randomised controlled trial by Sturm and colleagues, published in Emotion, had participants take 15-minute outdoor walks for eight weeks with the explicit instruction to approach their surroundings with curiosity and a sense of smallness. The awe walk group showed significantly greater positive emotions and wellbeing compared to a control group that walked the same distance without that orientation. Same physical activity. Same duration. The difference was entirely in what they were paying attention to, and how.

What would happen if you treated the next ordinary moment outside as something worth looking at properly?

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References

Chen, Y., Hu, F., Xiao, Q., & Liu, Z. (2025). The shock of Awe experience to our soul is more directly on cognitive well-being than affective well-being. Scientific Reports, 15, 10619. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-95435-7

Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033

Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Hough, C. M., Rabinovici, G. D., Miller, B. L., & Keltner, D. (2020). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000876