Why feeling small can sometimes make life feel larger
Psychology in the Wild: What happens when an encounter with the world becomes larger than our capacity to understand or explain it?
In the mountains, after dark
I remember standing in the mountains in the middle of the night, surrounded by an immense darkness. The mountains were barely distinguishable from the sky, and the silence seemed almost physical.
There was something frightening about their scale, their indifference to my presence, and the awareness that I was a very small part of something enormous.
Yet I also felt strangely free.
Nothing about the mountains needed me to understand them. They existed beyond my concerns, relationships, responsibilities and the endless activity of my mind.
I have often wondered why experiences like this can be so deeply moving. Why does recognising our insignificance sometimes bring relief rather than despair?
The psychology of the sublime
In The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives (2021), Anastasios Gaitanidis and Polona Curk explore how encounters with something beyond our ordinary understanding can disturb and expand our psychological experience.
The sublime is different from beauty. Beauty may invite admiration, while the sublime can unsettle us. It confronts us with something we cannot easily contain within familiar explanations.
We might encounter it in nature, music, art, intimacy or even in moments of profound uncertainty. What these experiences share is the temporary disruption of our usual sense of ourselves and the world.
Contemporary psychology offers several related perspectives.
Jiang and colleagues (2024) describe how awe can shift us towards a broader, less self-centred perspective, without necessarily diminishing our sense of personal worth.
Monroy and Keltner (2023) connect awe with meaning, social connectedness and psychological well-being.
More unexpectedly, Yin and colleagues (2024) found that experiences of awe can foster more positive attitudes towards solitude.
Perhaps this helps explain why being alone in an enormous landscape can feel less lonely than being surrounded by people.
Beyond awe: uncertainty, wonder and self-transcendence
Although related, these experiences are not interchangeable.
Awe arises when something challenges our usual frame of reference. Self-transcendence involves a temporary movement beyond our habitual preoccupation with ourselves. The sublime adds an important tension: what moves us may also frighten us.
The mountains, for example, may evoke wonder precisely because they remind us of our vulnerability. We are confronted with something that exists independently of us, beyond our influence and perhaps beyond our understanding.
This can be both liberating and unsettling.
Much of our psychological life involves attempts to create predictability. We construct narratives about ourselves, seek explanations for other people's behaviour and try to anticipate what might happen next.
These efforts are often necessary. Yet they can also narrow our experience when uncertainty becomes something we must immediately eliminate.
The sublime offers a different possibility: encountering something we cannot fully understand without needing to reduce it to something familiar.
Not every overwhelming experience is transformative, however. Sometimes uncertainty evokes fear, helplessness or disorientation rather than wonder. Our capacity to experience the sublime depends partly on whether we feel sufficiently safe to remain open to it.
The sublime in everyday relationships
We do not need to travel into the mountains to encounter something beyond our understanding.
Another person's inner world can be just as unfamiliar.
Even in our closest relationships, we never completely know what another person feels, remembers, desires or fears. There is always something that remains outside our knowledge.
This separateness can provoke anxiety. We may try to restore certainty by interpreting, questioning or defining the other person.
But there is another possibility.
We might recognise that intimacy does not require complete knowledge. Indeed, part of what makes another person interesting is their capacity to surprise us, to be different from our expectations and to reveal aspects of themselves that we had not previously imagined.
In this sense, the sublime invites us to consider whether closeness can coexist with mystery.
Perhaps mature intimacy involves not only understanding another person, but also respecting what we cannot fully understand about them.
What happens in therapy?
Many people enter psychotherapy hoping to feel more in control of their internal world. They want to understand why they feel anxious, why relationships become difficult or why certain experiences remain painful.
These are important questions, and developing psychological understanding can be profoundly helpful.
But therapy is not only about making the unknown familiar.
Sometimes meaningful therapeutic work involves developing the capacity to remain with an experience before deciding what it means.
In mentalization-based therapy, we cultivate curiosity about mental states while recognising that neither our own mind nor another person's mind can ever be known with complete certainty.
We might explore what happens when a person encounters uncertainty. Does it evoke curiosity, fear, helplessness or an urgent need to find an explanation? What makes uncertainty tolerable in one situation and overwhelming in another?
Therapy can also help us notice how our attention becomes organised around familiar worries, responsibilities or expectations.
Experiences of awe, creativity, music, nature and meaningful connection may offer opportunities to step outside these repetitive patterns, even briefly.
This does not mean that seeking extraordinary experiences replaces psychotherapy, or that feeling overwhelmed is inherently beneficial.
Rather, therapeutic work may help us develop enough emotional security and flexibility to encounter unfamiliar experiences without immediately needing to defend against them.
The aim is not to become comfortable with everything unknown, but to become less imprisoned by the need to know everything.
The freedom of being small
When I return in my mind to those mountains at night, I remember how little I mattered to the landscape, and how unexpectedly comforting that felt.
Perhaps we spend so much of our lives trying to establish who we are, what we mean to others and how to secure our place in the world that we forget another possibility.
We can belong to something without needing to control it.
The mountains offered no answers. They did not make my difficulties disappear or provide any particular wisdom about how I should live.
But for a moment, they made my questions feel less urgent.
And perhaps that is one of the gifts of the sublime: not that it resolves our uncertainties, but that it changes our relationship with them.
Sometimes we discover a greater sense of freedom not by becoming larger, more certain or more powerful, but by recognising that we are part of something immeasurably greater than ourselves.
References
- Gaitanidis, A., & Curk, P. (Eds.). (2021). The Sublime in Everyday Life: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives. Routledge.
- Jiang, T., et al. (2024). The unique nature and psychosocial implications of awe. Nature Reviews Psychology, 3, 475–488.
- Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309–320.
- Yin, Y., et al. (2024). Awe fosters positive attitudes toward solitude. Nature Mental Health, 2, 717–727.