If these pictures make you experience awe, I have great news for you. It is associated with lower stress and inflammation levels, and a higher sense of meaning and connection.

According to researchers who study the emotion, awe has two fundamental components. It is a response to encountering something more vast, complex, or mind-blowing than we had conceived of either physically or conceptually.

And the experience also induces a change in how we see the world, producing “little earthquakes in the mind.”

To understand the concept, it helps to know how the brain responds to what we perceive as mundane.

Over the course of our lives, our brains learn and encode what normal is and predict what we think should happen next, based on our internal understanding of the world.

“That prediction of what happens next guides our behavior. It is crucial for being able to function in this incredibly complicated world,” said Michelle “Lani” Shiota, an associate professor of social psychology at Arizona State University. “But it does narrow our perspective, it narrows our vision. And it simply doesn’t account for everything.”

Research found that experiencing something extraordinary may make us (and our worries) feel small. And not in a bad way.

“You know, by adulthood, we move through the world pretty immersed in our own concerns, our own minutiae of the day-to-day, our own responsibilities, and it can be hard to keep a sense of perspective about how that fits into the grand scheme of things,” Shiota explained.

Experiencing more awe is associated with living healthier and more meaningful lives. A 2021 study discovered that feeling more awe is correlated with reporting feeling lowered levels of daily stress. Interestingly, people who feel more awe also tend to have lower levels of inflammatory cytokines.

Positive experiences of awe have also been linked to increased feelings of well-being, life satisfaction, and a sense of meaning.

Emerging research suggests that experiencing awe may make us more curious, creative and compassionate people.

In turn, recent studies have found that awe-prone people may be more prone to being curious, and people who experience more awe also tend to be more creative.

Awe leads people to feel more connected with others and identify with more universal categories such as “a person” or “inhabitant of earth,” as opposed to more individualistic, limited ones.

In different studies, when researchers induced awe in participants in laboratories, such as by showing panoramic clips of places on Earth, people behaved more prosocially, being more likely to help out, donate more money and volunteer more time for noble causes.

By transforming our sense of self and meaning, and enhancing our relationship with others and the wider world, awe has the power to improve our mental and physical health.

So if these pictures speak to you, keep scrolling!