Maybe We're Looking in the Wrong Direction: Why Getting Out of Your Own Head Might Be the Answer
- Jan 9
- 7 min read
When Did We Stop Looking Up?
I was driving home last week when the sky stopped me. Not metaphorically—I actually pulled over. The sunset had turned the clouds this impossible shade of orange-pink, layered against deep purple. I sat there in my car, just staring, feeling that familiar tightness in my chest, my eyes welling up. Here's a picture of it:
Then I noticed: I'd driven this route dozens of times. How many sunsets had I missed because I was thinking about emails, deadlines, and whether I said the wrong thing in a meeting?
When did I stop noticing? When did we all stop looking up?
The Culture of Self-Surveillance
We live in an age of unprecedented self-focus. Every moment is an opportunity to evaluate ourselves: Am I attractive enough? Successful enough? Am I presenting myself well on social media? Does this photo make me look good? What do people think of me?
I study appearance-based discrimination: how people judge each other based on looks, and how those judgments affect mental health. In my previous work, I explored how we shifted from "thinspiration" to "fitspiration" and asked: have we really made progress? The answer, sadly, was no. The filters changed. The hashtags evolved. But the underlying problem remained: we're still obsessed with monitoring ourselves. Still comparing. Still trapped in our own heads.
But lately, I've been wondering if we've been asking the wrong question.
I see this contrast most clearly when I'm with my two-year-old nieces. They can be completely captivated by a butterfly, a puddle, or the way shadows move across the wall. They're not thinking about how they look or whether they're good enough. They're just experiencing the world with total presence.
Somewhere along the way to adulthood, most of us lose that. We learn to be self-conscious. School teaches us to be constantly evaluated. Social media teaches us to curate our image relentlessly. The world teaches us that everything is about self-improvement, self-presentation, and self-actualisation.
Maybe the problem isn't just what we're focusing on (thin vs fit, filtered vs authentic). Maybe it's that we're so focused on ourselves at all.
The Irony of Self-Improvement
Here's what struck me as I dug deeper into interventions for appearance anxiety and body image issues: we keep giving people more tools to think about themselves.
Build your self-esteem (focus on yourself more positively)
Practice self-compassion (be kinder to yourself)
Challenge your negative thoughts (about yourself)
Do self-care (for yourself)
Journal about your feelings (about yourself)
Even mindfulness, which is supposed to reduce self-focus, often gets packaged as yet another self-optimization tool. "Be mindful to be more productive." "Meditate to reduce your stress." Everything circles back to improving the self.
We're essentially telling people: "You're suffering because you're thinking about yourself wrong. Here, think about yourself differently."
But what if the problem isn't how we think about ourselves—it's that we can't stop thinking about ourselves at all?
Research backs this up. Self-focused rumination—the kind that social media and appearance pressures actively promote—is strongly linked to both anxiety and depression. It's not just correlated; it often precedes and predicts the onset of mental health problems (e.g., Aldao et al., 2010; Nolen-Hoeksema, 2000). The default mode network (DMN) in our brains, which activates when we think about ourselves, shows increased activity in people with depression and anxiety (Whitfield-Gabrieli & Ford, 2012).
We're trapped in a loop of self-concern, and every solution we're offered keeps us in the loop.
An Accidental Discovery
I didn't set out to study awe. I stumbled onto it because I kept noticing something about myself that I couldn't quite name.
That sunset that made me pull over? It wasn't the first time. Sometimes when I look up at the night sky (really look at it, not just glance), I feel this overwhelming sensation. My eyes well up. My skin prickles (scientific term: piloerection.) It's not sadness, exactly, but it feels too big to be just happiness either. Or when I'm at a conference and a researcher presents a finding that suddenly makes everything click into place, and I feel that same full-body response: chills running down my arms, hair standing on end. Or at a concert, when thousands of people are singing the same verse together, and you're simultaneously yourself and part of something so much larger.
I kept wondering: what is that feeling? Why does it happen? And why does it feel so different from other emotions—so much bigger than joy or excitement, but also somehow... quieter?
I started searching for answers, reading across emotion research, positive psychology, and neuroscience. The trail eventually led me to Dacher Keltner's book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. I started reading it on a Sunday afternoon. By evening, I had chills again—but this time from recognition. He was describing exactly what I'd been experiencing.
Keltner defines awe as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world" (2023, p. 7). And here's what struck me: when we experience awe, our sense of self shrinks. He calls it the "vanishing self" - that moment when you're looking at stars or hearing incredible music or witnessing profound kindness, and suddenly you become less relevant. Your individual concerns, your anxieties about appearance, your self-focused worries, they all fade into the background (p. 31).
That's when everything clicked. The feeling I'd been chasing, that I couldn't name: it was the relief of temporarily forgetting about myself. And suddenly, all my research on appearance anxiety, on self-focused distress, on why people suffer, all made sense in a completely new way.
We're not anxious because we have low self-esteem. We're anxious because we can't get out of our own heads. And maybe, just maybe, the solution isn't to think better thoughts about ourselves. Maybe it's to experience moments where we temporarily stop thinking about ourselves altogether.
What Awe Actually Does
The research on awe is remarkable. When people experience awe, their brain activity literally changes. The default mode network (DMN)—that self-focused system associated with rumination—quiets down (Stellar et al., 2018). People become less reactive to threats to their ego, less focused on defending their self-image, and more open to new perspectives.
Studies show that even brief experiences of awe can reduce inflammatory markers in the body, increase prosocial behaviour, and enhance life satisfaction (Stellar et al., 2015). People who regularly experience awe are more open to new ideas, more curious, and more comfortable with life's mysteries (Keltner, 2023, p. 39-40).
But here's what excites me most: awe happens in everyday life, not just on mountaintops or at concerts. Keltner's research shows people experience awe 2-3 times per week on average (2023, p. 26).The beauty of this? It's accessible. Free. No therapy waitlist, no prescription required, no expensive wellness retreat. Just learning to notice these moments. Just remembering to look up.
We don't need to create more awe. We need to remember how to see it.
Why This Matters Now
We're suffering in ways that feel new. Lonely despite being hyper-connected. Anxious despite having access to endless self-help resources. Trapped in cycles of self-improvement that paradoxically keep us stuck.
Young adults today (yes, particularly Gen Z), but really anyone growing up in the age of social media and constant self-presentation, face unprecedented pressures. Every photo is an opportunity for judgment. Every post invites comparison. The result is constant self-monitoring, and research shows this self-focused rumination is a major risk factor for mental health problems (Aldao et al., 2010).
And yet awe offers something radically different. As astronaut Ed Gibson observed after seeing Earth from space:
"You see how diminutive your life and concerns are compared to other things in the universe...the result is that you enjoy the life that is before you...it allows you have inner peace" (as quoted in Keltner, 2023, p. 83).
Perhaps that's what we're missing. Not better ways to think about ourselves, but permission to forget about ourselves for a moment. To look at the stars and feel small. To hear music and be transported. To witness kindness and feel connected to something larger.
Maybe what we need isn't more self-focus, but experiences that remind us we're part of something infinitely bigger.
Where This Takes Me
This is where my research trajectory has now led me: toward exploring whether accessible awe experiences, such as nature videos, music, virtual reality environments, or simply teaching people to notice everyday moments of wonder, can provide relief from appearance anxiety. Whether these effects last. Whether this approach works differently from traditional self-focused interventions.
I'm genuinely excited about this direction in a way I haven't felt about research in a long time. Because this isn't about adding another self-help technique to an already overwhelming pile. It's about fundamentally rethinking what healing might look like.
This isn't about abandoning self-compassion or cognitive therapy; those tools matter and help many people. But I am curious whether we've been missing something fundamental. Whether in our rush to help people think better about themselves, we've forgotten to help them think about something other than themselves.
An Invitation
If you've made it this far, I want to ask you something: When was the last time you felt awe? When did you last experience something so vast, so beautiful, so mysterious that you forgot about yourself entirely?
Not "mindfulness" where you're watching your thoughts. Not "self-care" where you're attending to your needs. But genuine wonder—the kind where you're just there, present, experiencing something larger than your individual concerns?
For me, it was that sunset last week. I almost missed it because I was too busy being inside my own head.
Maybe healing begins there. Not in fixing ourselves, but in remembering there's a world beyond the self. Not in thinking better thoughts, but in experiencing moments where thought isn't necessary at all.
Maybe the answer was never about looking inward more skillfully. Maybe it was about remembering to look up.
Sunset @ Observatory Hill, Sydney (June 2025)
Look up - it's free.
with reticence & much love,
Jasmine
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