Sources of awe in your life

Dacher Keltner’s research at Berkeley made the case that awe is the emotion most reliably associated with a reduction in self-focused rumination. The mechanism is small-self: when something bigger than you is in front of you, the recursive worry loop quiets because the central character has been displaced. For depressed clients stuck in their own head, awe is a more useful target than gratitude or kindness.

This is the worksheet for clients who haven’t found traction with the standard positive-psychology interventions. The gratitude journal felt forced. The acts of kindness felt performative. The savouring exercises felt artificial. Awe is structurally different. It’s not about reframing what you have. It’s about turning your attention toward what dwarfs you, which is a much smaller cognitive ask and produces a more reliable shift.

Use it as part of behavioural activation work for moderate depression, with grief clients who need to widen the field of attention beyond the loss, with chronic illness clients whose world has shrunk to managing symptoms, and with clients in late-stage transitions where their identity is being reconstructed.

The clinical insight comes from the categories the client can and can’t fill in. Most clients have a strong category and a weak one. The strong one is where you assign repeated practice. The weak one is the conversation in session. A client who can’t think of three awe-evoking things in any category is reporting something significant. That’s not a failure of the worksheet. It’s a marker for severe anhedonia or chronic disconnection from anything bigger than the self, and it tells you what the next phase of treatment needs to address before behavioural activation will land.

A second pattern: clients who default to one category (always nature, never the arts, or vice versa) are giving you their access route. Build the next phase of work around the access route they already have.

In my-cbt, this is one of the bundled system worksheets. Assign it once from the case file with a personal message in your voice that names why awe is being added to the work for this specific client. Submissions save in the case file alongside the activity log if you’re running both, and reading them together gives you a sense of which awe sources actually shifted the client’s mood.