Fifty-seven years ago this week, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon and delivered the most famous sentence ever spoken while standing on dust. Since then around 600 people have followed him into space, and nearly all of them have come home saying the same faintly embarrassing thing: the best bit was looking out of the window. Not the rockets. Not the weightlessness. The view. This happens so reliably that it has a name, the overview effect, coined by the writer Frank White in 1987. Apollo 14’s Edgar Mitchell said looking back at Earth gave him “an instant global consciousness”, and made him want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that.” Which, considering it takes three days each way, is quite the commitment to making a point. What the astronauts were experiencing was a colossal dose of awe: the feeling you get in the presence of something vast that your brain can’t quite file anywhere. Awe makes you feel small, and your worries obligingly shrink with you. Psychologists call this the “small self”, and it’s the only known form of feeling insignificant that people pay good money for. Nobody ever came back from the Grand Canyon complaining that it made them feel unimportant. For decades, this seemed like a lovely perk reserved for people with test-pilot reflexes and a tolerance for freeze-dried lasagne. Then the scientists got involved, and it turned out awe is less like a moonshot and more like a vitamin. In 2012, researchers at Stanford and Minnesota managed something no productivity app has ever achieved: they made people feel they had more time. Across three experiments published in Psychological Science, people nudged into feeling awe felt less rushed than everyone else. They became less impatient, more willing to give up their time to help others, and when offered the choice, they picked experiences over stuff. Awe, in other words, is the closest thing psychology has found to a time machine, only cheaper and with fewer paradoxes. Given that every person you know describes themselves as “mad busy”, this seems worth knowing. But the study that really should be famous came out of UCSF and Berkeley in 2020, and the dose involved is almost insultingly small. Researchers asked older adults to take one fifteen-minute walk a week for eight weeks. Half the group received a single extra instruction: look for small moments of awe along the way. Light through leaves. A big sky. A building older than your grandparents. One sentence. That was the entire intervention. And it worked. The awe walkers reported significantly more joy, more gratitude and less daily stress than the ordinary walkers, who presumably just got their steps in and thought about emails. Then came the detail that makes the whole thing sing. Participants took a selfie on every walk, and over the eight weeks, the awe group’s photos visibly changed. Week by week, they made themselves smaller in the frame and gave more of it to the world around them, and their smiles grew measurably wider. The small self, caught on camera. This week’s one key takeaway You don’t need a rocket, a retreat or a sabbatical. Awe works at ground level, in fifteen-minute doses, and the only equipment required is looking up on purpose. How to get more awe this week Take one awe walk a week. Somewhere new, phone in your pocket. Novelty is what does the work, because familiarity switches awe off. Go big when you feel small. Swamped? Five minutes of the vast stuff, a nature documentary, a cathedral ceiling, tonight’s sky, and time feels roomier. Be a tourist at home. A new route to work revives streets your brain has stopped noticing. Awe for the price of a slightly earlier alarm. Share it. Awe makes people more generous with their time, so it’s contagious in the best way. Send someone the thing that stopped you mid-scroll. Want to go deeper? The science of feeling better runs right through The Happy Course, built with Meik Wiking and the Happiness Research Institute, and our Mental Fitness & Wellbeing course. And as it’s our tenth birthday, use code 4224 at checkout for a little something off.