MindsKeep Blog

The Mountain That Changed Everything

It was 5:47 in the morning when the sun cleared the ridgeline. I had been hiking for three hours in the dark, headlamp bobbing, boots finding the trail by memory and instinct. Then the light came — not gradually, but all at once, as if someone had turned on a lamp behind the mountains. The valley below filled with gold. Clouds caught fire. And I stood there, on a narrow ridge at 3,200 meters, and felt something I had no word for.

It was not happiness. Happiness felt too small, too personal. It was not wonder, exactly — wonder implies curiosity, and I was not curious. I was undone. The usual chatter in my head — the to-do list, the replayed conversation, the low hum of anxiety — simply stopped. In its place was a single, overwhelming thought: I am so small, and everything is so vast, and that is exactly right.

I did not know it then, but what I was feeling had a name. Psychologists call it awe. And over the past two decades, researchers have discovered that this fleeting, hard-to-describe emotion does something remarkable: it rewires your sense of self, makes you more generous, and may even improve your physical health. The catch? Awe fades fast. Unless you write it down.

What Awe Actually Is

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a landmark paper that did something no one had done before: they defined awe rigorously. Previous thinkers — from Edmund Burke in the 18th century to Abraham Maslow in the 20th — had written about awe, but always vaguely, as if the emotion itself resisted definition. Keltner and Haidt gave it two pillars [1].

The first pillar is perceived vastness. Awe arises when you encounter something that transcends your current frame of reference — a mountain range, a starry sky, a piece of music that seems to come from somewhere beyond the musicians, an idea so large it rearranges how you think. Vastness does not require physical size. A single sentence from a book can feel vast if it changes how you understand your life.

The second pillar is need for accommodation. This is the disorienting, thrilling moment when your existing mental frameworks cannot contain what you are experiencing. You do not have a category for it. Your brain must stretch, adjust, accommodate the new reality. This is why awe often comes with goosebumps, widened eyes, and a moment of speechlessness — your brain is literally updating its model of the world.

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. It is not merely an emotion — it is a cognitive event, a moment when the mind recognizes that its existing frameworks are insufficient.

Dacher Keltner & Jonathan Haidt, "Approaching Awe" (2003) [1]

Keltner and Haidt also noted that awe has a "shadow side" — it can be terrifying. Standing at the edge of a cliff in a storm, watching a wildfire approach, hearing about a tragedy so large it defies comprehension — these also produce awe, but of a darker kind. The awe that benefits us most is the kind that feels safe enough to let in: a sunset from a stable ridge, a symphony in a concert hall, a scientific revelation at a desk. The vastness is real, but the body knows it is not in danger.

The Small Self: How Awe Shrinks the Ego

The most striking effect of awe is what researchers call "the small self." When you feel awe, your sense of being a separate, important, self-contained individual diminishes. You feel smaller — but not in a bad way. You feel smaller in the way that a drop of water feels small when it realizes it is part of an ocean.

In a 2018 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Keltner and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments to test whether awe genuinely reduces the self and increases prosocial behavior. In one study, participants stood in a grove of towering 200-foot eucalyptus trees for one minute. A control group stood in front of a tall building. The tree group reported significantly higher levels of awe and significantly lower levels of self-importance. They were also more likely to help an experimenter who "accidentally" dropped a handful of pens [2].

In another experiment from the same paper, participants watched either a video of awe-inspiring nature (waterfalls, canyons, herds of animals) or a neutral video of people constructing a building. The awe group subsequently gave more of their study compensation to a stranger in an economic game. The effect was not huge — awe did not turn selfish people into saints — but it was reliable, and it was mediated by the small self: the more participants felt diminished by the experience, the more generous they became [2].

Why "Small" Feels Good

We live in a culture that tells us the opposite of small is good. Be big. Be important. Be influential. Stand out. But the research on awe suggests that the relentless pursuit of self-importance is exhausting and isolating. When you feel small in the presence of something vast, the pressure to be exceptional lifts. You do not need to be the main character. You are part of something, and that is enough.

This is not humility as self-abasement. It is humility as accurate perspective. Awe does not tell you that you are worthless. It tells you that you are one node in a network so large and intricate that your individual worries, while real, are not the center of the universe. And that, paradoxically, is a relief.

Awe in the Brain: What Neuroscience Shows

What happens in the brain during an awe experience? Neuroscientists are still mapping this territory, but early findings are striking. A 2021 study using fMRI found that awe experiences activate the default mode network — the brain system associated with self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and narrative identity — but in an unusual pattern. Instead of the network chattering about your to-do list and your social comparisons, it appears to enter a state of "self-transcendence," where the boundary between self and other softens [3].

Other research has found that awe reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex's self-referential processing areas — the parts of the brain that maintain your sense of being a distinct, continuous "I." At the same time, it increases activity in regions associated with perceptual processing and emotional arousal. Your brain, in other words, stops narrating your life and starts experiencing it directly [4].

This may explain why awe feels so hard to describe in the moment. The language centers — which are part of the self-referential system — are temporarily dialed down. You are in the experience, not about it. The words come later, if they come at all. And this is exactly where journaling becomes essential.

Why Writing About Awe Makes It Last

Awe is fleeting. The mountain sunrise lasts minutes. The symphony ends. The conversation that rearranged your thinking moves on to the weather. And within hours — sometimes minutes — the small self starts to re-inflate. The to-do list returns. The social comparisons creep back. The vastness fades into a nice memory, and then into a story you tell, and then into something you vaguely remember feeling once.

But here is what the research on expressive writing and narrative identity suggests: when you write about an awe experience while it is still fresh, you reactivate the neural patterns of the experience itself. You are not just recording a memory — you are re-living it, and in re-living it, you strengthen the pathways that produced the small self in the first place.

Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams has spent decades studying what he calls "narrative identity" — the stories we construct about our own lives. He has found that people who integrate transcendent experiences into their life stories — who can say, "That moment on the mountain changed how I see myself" — report higher levels of well-being, meaning, and generativity (the sense of contributing to something beyond yourself) [5].

The act of writing does two things simultaneously. First, it preserves the awe experience in a form you can return to. A journal entry is a time machine — reading it months later can re-trigger the small self, even if the original feeling has long faded. Second, it integrates the experience into your ongoing narrative. When you write "I stood on that ridge and felt myself dissolve into the landscape," you are not just describing a moment. You are deciding who you are going to be because of it.

The stories we construct about our own lives are not mere reflections of who we are. They are the very medium through which identity is formed. To write about a transcendent experience is to give it a permanent place in the architecture of the self.

Dan P. McAdams, on narrative identity [5]

The Awe Journal: A 15-Minute Practice

You do not need to climb a mountain at dawn to experience awe. But you do need to pay attention, and you do need to capture the experience before it slips away. The following practice combines the science of awe with the science of expressive writing. It takes fifteen minutes and can be done anywhere.

The key to this practice is frequency, not intensity. You do not need a mountain every day. Awe is available in the ordinary — in the way your coffee smells in the morning, in the architecture of a building you walk past, in the fact that you exist at all. The practice trains you to notice these moments, and the writing ensures they do not vanish.

Finding Awe in Everyday Life

One of the most encouraging findings from awe research is that awe does not require rare or dramatic experiences. In a 2022 study, researchers found that people who were instructed to look for awe in their daily lives — rather than waiting for it to happen — reported significantly more awe experiences over a two-week period, and those experiences were associated with increased well-being and decreased symptoms of depression [6].

The researchers called this "awe priming" — simply deciding that you are going to look for awe makes you more likely to find it. It is the same principle as a gratitude journal, but instead of looking for things you are thankful for, you are looking for things that make you feel small in the best way.

Here are some everyday places where awe often hides, if you are looking for it:

• The night sky. Even from a city, looking up at a few visible stars and remembering that each one is a sun, possibly with planets, possibly with someone looking back — this is awe, available every clear night.
• Music. Put on a piece of music you love — not as background, but as the main event. Close your eyes. Let the sound fill the room. The fact that vibrations in the air can rearrange your emotional state is, when you stop to think about it, astonishing.
• Other people's expertise. Watch someone do something they have spent ten thousand hours mastering — a chef, a musician, an athlete, a carpenter. The depth of human skill, accumulated over a lifetime, is genuinely vast.
• Nature in miniature. You do not need a mountain. A single leaf, held up to the light, reveals a network of veins so intricate it makes the best human engineering look crude. A patch of moss, viewed closely, is a forest.
• Time. Stand somewhere where people have stood for centuries — an old building, a bridge, a path. Imagine all the people who have stood where you are standing, all their lives, all their joys and sorrows. The river of human experience is vast, and you are briefly floating on it.

The point is not that you should force awe where it does not exist. The point is that awe exists in far more places than we usually notice, and the simple act of looking for it — and then writing about it when you find it — can gradually reshape how you experience your own life.

When I came down from that mountain, the feeling did not last. By the time I reached the trailhead, I was thinking about lunch. By the time I got home, I was checking my email. But I wrote about it that night — the light, the silence, the way my smallness felt not like a loss but like a homecoming. And years later, when I read those words, I can still feel it. The mountain is still there, in the writing. And so, for a moment, is the version of me that stood on it.