Step outside on a clear night in rural Ireland and the sky is just there. No app to open, no announcement, no preamble. The road has gone quiet. There is often a fox roaming around close by. And the sky overhead has more stars in it than anywhere I have stood in a city.<\/p>\n
I am not a stargazer. I do not know my constellations beyond Orion and the Plough. I have never owned a telescope, and most nights I step back inside after a minute and forget about it. But the moment of looking up \u2014 the few seconds before the head goes back down \u2014 has started to feel like something more than a moment.<\/p>\n
Psychologists, it turns out, have been studying that moment for a while.<\/p>\n
What is actually happening when you look up<\/p>\n
The technical word for what the night sky tends to provoke is awe. In a 2003 paper\u00a0 title<\/a> title \u201cApproaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion\u201d, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposed that two ingredients show up in instances of awe: a perception of vastness, and what they called \u201ca need for accommodation\u201d \u2014 an experience your existing mental model cannot quite contain.<\/p>\n I think , the cosmos is the textbook example. You look up; the model breaks; you stand there for a second longer than usual.<\/p>\n Awe makes the self go quiet<\/p>\n The most interesting finding from the awe research, for my money, is what it does to the size of the self. In a series of five studies on awe and prosocial behavior published in 2015, Paul Piff<\/a> and colleagues at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley suggested that participants prompted to feel awe became more generous, more ethical, and behaved as though they were less the center of the universe. Piff describes the mechanism as \u201ca reduced sense of self importance relative to something larger and more powerful that they felt connected to.\u201d<\/p>\n Piff\u2019s team also found you do not need a grand vista for this to happen. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to climb a huge mountain and take in a grand view to feel it,\u201d as noted by the Greater Good Science Center<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A clear sky overhead is, perhaps, a fairly cheap dose of the same medicine.<\/p>\n The night-sky-and-wellbeing link, measured<\/p>\n In February 2024 a team at the University of Derby published a new psychological measure<\/a> called the Night Sky Connectedness Index, designed to score how connected a person feels to the night sky. When they tested it across a general-population sample, BBC Sky at Night Magazine reports<\/a>, \u201cpeople with a greater connection to the night sky had better mental health and felt happier.\u201d<\/p>\n Happier people may simply notice the sky more, or noticing the sky may help. But it is one more dot in a line of research suggesting the relationship is not nothing.<\/p>\n Looking up may quiet the noise<\/p>\n Mampho Ledimo, a psychology and sociology student working on the Astronomy for Mental Health<\/a> project, described to BBC Sky at Night Magazine what awe seems to do for the inner monologue. \u201cThinking about the scale of the Universe, how old the Universe is, how old the Earth is\u2026 to some extent this can [help us] get rid of the idea that we have control over every single aspect of our lives,\u201d she said<\/a>. \u201cIt allows you to say, \u2018you know what? I don\u2019t have control over everything. I can only control the small things that I have influence over\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n