Why the Ocean Creates Emotional Perspective

silhouette of woman sitting by the seashore during sunset. Photo: Unsplash.

Many people notice a quiet shift after some time by the sea. It is not exactly feeling calm. It is more that the thing pressing on you is now measured against a horizon. I want to be careful here, because this is a topic where it is easy to promise too much. The research is real, and it is also specific and modest.

What do researchers mean by awe?

In 2003, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a paper called "Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion" in Cognition & Emotion. They proposed that awe has two parts that appear together. The first is perceived vastness, the sense of something much larger than you. The second is a need for accommodation: the experience does not fit neatly into the boxes your mind already has, so your mind has to stretch a little to take it in.

They also noted that vastness does not have to be physical. It can be a view, like a canyon, or an idea, like thinking about eternity. They also described several flavours of awe, linked to beauty, threat, ability, virtue and the supernatural. What joins them is the same pair: something vast, and something that does not quite fit.

The ocean offers both unusually well. The horizon is vastness in its simplest form. Everything moving unseen below the surface is the part that does not fit neatly in your head. You do not need a storm or a whale for this. A quiet, empty horizon at dawn can be enough.

Awe and the small self

The most consistent finding in this field is that awe temporarily shrinks how much people focus on themselves, often called the small self effect. In a 2015 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Paul Piff and colleagues reported five studies with a total of 2,078 participants. Awe reduced the emphasis on the individual self and increased generosity, ethical decision-making and prosocial values. The researchers found that the feeling of a small self explained part of this effect.

The best-known study in that paper took place outdoors. Participants who looked up at a grove of towering eucalyptus trees later helped a researcher pick up more dropped pens than people who looked up at a tall building. A small act, but a measurable one.

That may sound abstract, so think about it in daily life. When the self is a little smaller, a worry loses some of its grip. It does not disappear, and the bill is still due on Monday. But the voice that says everything depends on you gets quieter for a while.

An awe walk, and what it did not change

A later trial tested awe in daily life. In the awe walk study by Virginia Sturm and colleagues, published in Emotion in 2020 under the title "Big Smile, Small Self", 60 healthy older adults took a weekly 15-minute outdoor walk for eight weeks. Half were randomly asked to notice awe-inspiring details along the way. Everyone took photos of themselves during the walks.

Compared with the control group, the awe walk group felt more awe and showed an increasingly small self in their photos: over time, they took up less of the frame and included more of the landscape, and their smiles became more intense. They also reported more joy and prosocial positive emotions, and a greater drop in daily distress over the weeks.

It is worth saying exactly what the study did not find. The authors described the benefits as modest, and scores for anxiety, depression and life satisfaction did not change from the start of the study in either group. So the effect was real but specific. It is not a clinical treatment, and nobody should read it as a replacement for professional care when someone is struggling.

Time, patience and the present moment

A separate strand of research explains why awe feels like perspective and not just relaxation. In 2012, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker published "Awe Expands People's Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being" in Psychological Science. In one of their experiments, students watched a short advert. One version showed awe-inspiring images such as waterfalls, whales and space exploration. The other showed happy people at a colourful parade.

Across their experiments, people who felt awe judged that they had more time available, felt less impatient, were less materialistic and more willing to volunteer their time to help others, and reported greater life satisfaction. The authors traced this to awe pulling people more fully into the present moment.

This is a different story from “the beach relaxes you”. Standing in front of something vast and only partly understandable makes the self feel smaller and the present moment feel larger. For those of us who spend most days in a hurry, that is a rare mix. It is also not the same mechanism as the sensory calm described in our piece on why being near the ocean feels calming, which is more about attention and breath.

Why the ocean creates emotional perspective, and where the evidence is thin

I should be honest about the limits. Most awe research uses a mix of triggers, such as nature scenes, night skies, tall trees and videos, not the ocean alone. I do not know of a study showing that open water beats a mountain range as a source of awe.

Some research does look at the coast directly, and the results are mixed. A survey of 687 Flemish adults during the COVID-19 lockdown, by researchers from Ghent University and the Flanders Marine Institute, found that having access to the coast was linked with better well-being. But awe itself was not significantly linked with how often people visited the coast, although awe was linked with less boredom. A small qualitative study with eight young people living on the Belgian coast found that they described it as a safe haven, with awe among the emotions they felt there.

So what can fairly be said is modest: the sea is an unusually accessible, everyday source of both vastness and the “I cannot take all this in” quality that defines awe. Whether it creates more awe than other wild places is still an open question. Our article on the science of blue mind looks at the wider research on water and well-being.

The ethical layer: letting go of control

Ocean conditions are hard to predict. Currents shift and wildlife appears, or does not, on its own schedule. That unpredictability is a small version of the “does not fit my categories” experience that Keltner and Haidt describe. It is also why we never promise sightings, and why a good operator works around the animal’s behaviour, never chasing, baiting or crowding wildlife, always with vetted local guides who know the area. Our article on why wildlife encounters can never be guaranteed goes into that.

There is another honest point. If awe helps us feel part of something bigger, it should also make us more careful with that bigger thing. Travelling to the sea has an environmental cost, from flights to boat fuel. Coming home with more perspective is a good reason to travel less often, stay longer, and treat the places we visit gently.

The awe researchers do not test, and I cannot claim, that a trip will change anyone’s life. Perspective builds quietly, through repeated time somewhere vast enough to remind you that you are not the centre of it. Some people notice it on the first morning. Others need a full trip, and some do not feel it at all, which is fine.

Keeping the feeling afterwards

The awe walk study suggests something simple: you can practise noticing. On a coast, that might mean a few minutes looking at the horizon without your phone, or writing down what you noticed. A plain notebook in a roll-top dry bag survives spray on a boat. A refillable bottle and a few other practical things from a tropical travel kit make long days easier, so your attention can stay on the horizon and not on your thirst.

If this made you curious to feel some of it yourself, you can explore our upcoming retreats. The hosted ones keep the group to six guests at most, with unhurried days.

Questions people ask

What is awe, according to psychologists?

Keltner and Haidt (2003) describe awe as arising from perceived vastness together with a need for accommodation, meaning an experience that does not fit your existing mental categories.

Does awe make people less focused on themselves?

Yes, in the research reviewed here. Piff and colleagues found across five studies with 2,078 participants that awe reduced self-focus and increased generosity and prosocial values.

Does the ocean treat anxiety or depression?

There is no evidence for that in the studies cited here. In the awe walk trial, anxiety, depression and life satisfaction scores did not change over eight weeks. The ocean is not a treatment; talk to a professional if you are struggling.

Is the ocean better than a mountain for awe?

No study I know of says so. The research uses many triggers, and a Belgian coastal survey found awe was not significantly linked with how often people visited the coast. The sea is simply an easy, everyday source of vastness.

Why does awe make time feel slower?

Rudd, Vohs and Aaker (2012) found that people who felt awe judged they had more time available and felt less impatient, which the authors linked to awe bringing people into the present moment.

How is this different from the calm of the ocean?

Calm is mostly about attention, breath and sensory input. Awe is about scale and self-focus. Both are real and they can happen on the same morning.

Wildlife encounters are never guaranteed and never forced. Ocean Calling works only with vetted, ethical local operators, and every animal is free to approach, or not, entirely on its own terms.

Sources & further reading

Further reading on Ocean Calling: More from the journal · Mindfulness and the present moment in the ocean · Why ocean experiences can feel grounding · See the retreats · Ocean Atlas