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Remember how quiet the world got in 2020. Streets empty, plans canceled, everyone stuck inside with their own thoughts. It turns out something small was still getting through the noise. A new study in Scientific Reports found that on days when people felt a jolt of awe, even in isolation, they reported feeling noticeably less lonely, and researchers found the same thing in two very different groups of adults.
Loneliness is more than a bad mood. Researchers describe it as the painful gap between the connection someone wants and what they actually have, and it has been linked to depression, inflammation, and heart disease. Healthcare workers felt this acutely during the pandemic. Surveys found 75 to 93 percent reported distress like stress or exhaustion in 2020, and 55 percent said they felt lonely, worn down by long shifts and reduced contact with others.
So what is awe, exactly? Psychologists call it a self-transcendent emotion, the kind that pulls focus off your own worries and onto something bigger, a sweeping landscape, a favorite song, or someone’s small act of kindness. Researchers had long suspected this outward pull might ease loneliness by making people feel part of something bigger than themselves, but solid evidence connecting awe directly to loneliness had been thin until now.
Tracking Awe One Day at a Time
To test the idea, researchers recruited participants in May 2020, right in the middle of the country’s lockdown. Healthcare workers came from Northern California medical centers and other institutions nationwide, while community adults were drawn largely through the NorthBay Healthcare system and public outreach. Every step followed protocols approved by NorthBay Healthcare’s Institutional Review Board, with informed consent gathered in line with the Declaration of Helsinki before anyone began.
Participants started with a baseline survey covering a shortened UCLA Loneliness Scale, their general tendency toward awe, basic demographics, and health status. Two days later came a 60-minute online orientation. Then the real work began: 22 straight days of short daily diary surveys through June 2020, giving researchers an unusually detailed, day-by-day window into how people’s emotions and loneliness shifted alongside whatever life happened to hand them.
Each night, participants answered simple prompts about how much awe, loneliness, and connectedness they had felt that day. The connectedness question focused specifically on nature, things like plants, natural sounds, or scenery, rather than social bonds with other people. Researchers also tracked other upbeat emotions like contentedness, pride, gratitude, amusement, compassion, and love, so they could isolate what awe alone was doing to loneliness on any given day.
What the Numbers Actually Showed
The final dataset included 171 healthcare workers contributing 3,412 daily reports, and 306 community members contributing 6,212 more, most of them women in midlife. The pattern held steady in both groups. On days when someone experienced more awe than their personal average, they reported significantly less loneliness that same day, even after accounting for age, gender, baseline traits, and other positive feelings they logged.
Awe did something else, too. On the days participants felt more of it, they also reported feeling more connected to nature and their surroundings, whether that meant noticing birdsong, sunlight, or a walk through a park. That link showed up among both healthcare workers and community adults, and it remained significant even after researchers controlled for baseline personality traits and other emotions people felt that day.
Digging deeper, researchers found that this connection to nature helped explain part of why awe eased loneliness. Statistically, awe predicted stronger feelings of connectedness, which in turn predicted less loneliness that day, a pattern significant in both samples. The mediation was only partial, though, meaning connectedness was one piece of the puzzle, not the whole answer, and the study could not settle which feeling came first.
What This Means Going Forward
The effect sizes were modest, though consistent across both groups. The study was also observational, conducted during one of the most isolating stretches in recent memory, so it is unclear whether the same pattern would hold outside a pandemic. The researchers did not test whether cultivating awe on purpose lowers loneliness over time, only that the two moved together day to day.
Still, the findings point somewhere hopeful. Awe may act as a kind of psychological buffer, something people can lean on when circumstances cut them off from others, as many healthcare workers were during those brutal early pandemic months. Even brief, ordinary moments of wonder seemed to matter on the days people needed them most, offering a small emotional foothold when bigger sources of connection were out of reach.
Researchers say the next step is testing whether awe can be intentionally cultivated to bring loneliness down over time, not just track alongside it. In the meantime, the takeaway is simple enough to try tonight: a walk under the stars, a favorite song, or noticing a stranger’s small act of generosity. None of it fixes isolation on its own, but this study suggests it might soften the edges.