It’s the most merciless environment you could possibly imagine.
Extreme radiation. Temperature differences of 275°F. Meteorite hazard. Zero oxygen. An infinitely dark vacuum. But the toughest part about space — as veteran astronaut Scott Kelly once said — is “being away from your loved ones, your friends, your family.”
Space is a breeding ground for loneliness. And considering that loneliness is as deadly as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the logical result should be that astronauts wither in space like plants without water.
And yet, they survive.
Not just that, they flourish. An overwhelming number of interviews by astronauts suggest that they return from space feeling anything but depressed and lonely. They feel transformed, ecstatic, and in awe.
How is that even possible?
Sure, astronauts undergo intense preparation. They form tight bonds with their teammates, wield state-of-the-art technology, and find fulfillment in their work. But there’s another important factor — if not the most important factor — for the well-being of astronauts. It transforms their lives, keeps them motivated, and shields them from loneliness.
It’s called the overview effect.
The Overview Effect And How It Transforms Astronauts
What is the overview effect? Psychologists have described the overview effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.”
But it’s so much more than that.
The overview effect is the sense of oneness astronauts feel when they marvel at Earth from space. It’s grasping the miraculous improbability of one’s existence. It’s seeing the world and its inhabitants unified and whole rather than wretched and divided. It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s connectedness.
Take a look for yourself:
Really try to imagine it for a moment. You’re on a space vessel, hundreds of thousands of miles away from your home, your family, your planet. And then, amid this depressingly dark void, you spot our majestic blue dot.
It’s hope.
It’s beauty.
It’s unity.
Paradoxical, isn’t it? In the universe’s endless proportions, Earth is a deeply lonely planet. But strangely, looking at it doesn’t make us feel lonely. It’s quite the opposite: we transcend into communion with the cosmos. As astronaut Sam Durrence said: “You’re removed from the Earth, but at the same time you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before.”
We were all born on this speckle of life within a dead universe. What a privilege.
Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”
From an orbital viewpoint, all borders, norms, and egos disappear. What remains is a sense of transcendence, oneness, and awe. Astronauts, the Dalai Lama writes in the Book of Joy, “never looked at their personal or national interests in quite the same way again. They saw the oneness of terrestrial life and the preciousness of our planetary home.”
This got me thinking: if the overview effect can protect astronauts from loneliness in a hostile environment like space, it might prove as a powerful antidote for loneliness on Earth.
And then it hit me: I’ve experienced the overview effect before.
The Overview Effect on Earth
I started the ascent. First, a soft incline, then my heels dug deeper into my soles. Soon I found myself at the bottom of a seemingly endless stairway, and my thoughts strayed to the previous weeks.
It must’ve been one of the loneliest periods of my life. A few months prior, I’d moved to Portugal by myself. My naivety: unrivaled. I had no family there, no social network, and no foundation for getting to know people. Heck, I didn’t even speak the language. And yet a few rituals kept me sane: day trips, artist dates, solo adventures. I’d pick a nearby city, get a train ticket, and, without any prior planning or expectation, I’d just go there. On this particular day, I found myself in Viana do Castelo, a coastal town in the far North of Portugal.
The longer I stared at the stairway, the more it stretched into the sky. Eventually, I sighed and took the first step. While I laboriously lifted one foot after the other, I listened to A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, hoping for spiritual guidance, looking for a route out of my mind’s lonely maze. Tolle said something about “aligning with the Whole” and that “nothing exists in isolation.”
I didn’t get it.
But then, unexpectedly, something shifted as I mounted the final step.
A majestic cathedral emerged on the hilltop. If giants lived on Earth, I thought, this is what their homes would look like. In the distance, the Atlantic Ocean sprawled as far as the horizon allowed. Below me, streets, cars, and houses had shrunk to the size of Lego bricks. And to my side, nature intertwined with concrete pathways. My existential loneliness? Gone. Forgotten. Everything was put into perspective by the striking view.
For a moment — ever so slightly — I became one with everything around me. A glimpse into the life of an astronaut.
How did the researchers describe the overview effect again?
A state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.
Interestingly, they didn’t write “precipitated by viewing Earth from outer space.” Instead, they chose a broader category: “precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.” This effectively means the overview effect isn’t bound to space. And looking back, it was exactly what I experienced on that hilltop. I felt in awe. I felt transcendent. Even days after this trip, I felt in a better mood. More compassionate. Driven to trust people, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to be kind.
The implications of this are extreme. We can replicate an astronaut’s sense of unity on Earth. We can put on our make-believe spacesuits, go on a mission, and marvel at the stunning vistas of our majestic blue dot.
In fact, David Yaden, the paper’s lead author, later commented on the research:
“We watch sunsets whenever we travel to beautiful places to get a little taste of [the overview effect]. These astronauts are having something more extreme. By studying the more-extreme version of a general phenomenon, you can often learn more about it.”
So, without a doubt, it is possible to feel the overview effect without going to space. But how exactly can the overview effect assuage our loneliness?
To find out, we must first understand a central paradox of loneliness.
How the Overview Effect Can Help Us Feel Less Lonely
One of the great paradoxes of loneliness is that we get selfish.
Rather than thinking about others, loneliness promotes a sense of Me, Myself, and I. Evolutionarily, this makes total sense. Long ago, in the savannah, loneliness meant detachment from your tribe. You were on your own. And unfortunately, this also made you an easy dinner for lions and other teeth-clenching predators. So, to survive, the best momentary response was to go into self-preservation mode. To forget about the tribe and just focus on yourself.
Of course, the overview effect couldn’t possibly be a useful remedy in a situation like this.
Or could it?
Well, somehow, it must’ve been coded into our evolutionary software that gaining the high ground feels soothing — even amidst distressing loneliness. Why? Because it signals safety. Climbing on a tree, rock, or hill allowed our ancestors to scan the entire proximity for hungry lions or tasty berries. Information like this meant survival for the lonely outcast. And not just that: this information was attractive to share with the rest of the tribe and, thus, a powerful incentive to reconnect.
Current research on awe — the overview effect’s primary emotion — supports this claim.
Studies on awe have found that it decreases feelings of loneliness — alongside stress, depression, and anxiety. Another series of studies even linked awe to generosity, ethicality, and prosocial behavior. It’s as if awe was the medicine designed to cure loneliness.
Isn’t this also why we’re driven to share pictures of awe-inspiring places with our friends, family, and social media followers? We want to tell our community that we have this great planet. That we should preserve it. That we should live in harmony.
Cosmically, it all falls into place now. When astronauts go to space, they fathom the fragility of our planet. It’s not surprising, then, that most astronauts stress the need for action after space missions. One of the most famous examples is Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
So lastly, let’s find out how we can actually break the loneliness cycle by experiencing the overview effect and its awe more often.
Spoiler: it’s shockingly simple.
From Loneliness to Oneness in 3 Steps
Thanks to the large body of research on awe, we have a pretty good understanding of how we can evoke the emotion. In fact, psychologists came up with a three-step method and fittingly packaged it into the acronym AWE.
It goes like this:
- Attention: focus your complete, undivided attention on something you appreciate, value, or simply find amazing.
- Wait: take a moment, slow down, and pause to linger on your object of attention.
- Exhale & Expand: allow your sensations to grow and intensify. Make your exhales longer than your inhales to heighten feelings of awe.
The best part is that this doesn’t just go in one direction. Emotions and bodily sensations are a two-way street. Which means, effectively, that we can leverage the physiology of awe — smiles, wide eyes, jaw drops, deep breaths, raised eyebrows — to create a positive feedback loop. In other words, expressions of awe further intensify awe.
Yeah, right, I thought. As if it’s that easy to trick our brain into feeling better. So I tried it again and again. I climbed up several hills in my hometown from where I could overlook the entire city — just like I did in Viana do Castelo. I followed the AWE method. I deepened my breaths, widened my eyes, and raised my eyebrows. And lo and behold, I felt smaller — but in a good way. In a way that makes you see the bigger picture. In a way that can only be described as oneness.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Interestingly, awe isn’t just triggered by impressive viewpoints. Pretty much all types of nature are rich sources of awe: flowers, mountains, trees; rivers, lakes, oceans; dusk, moonlight, stars. In fact, awe is so diverse, we can experience it in anything that’s — as one study put it — “vaster than the individual.” Think: music, movies, virtual reality, meditation, museums. All forms of art, really. As Olivia Laing concludes in her book The Lonely City:
“[T]he way I recovered to a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made …”
When we connect to something larger than ourselves, we stop — by definition — feeling lonely.
The Oneness Effect
After diving down the rabbit hole of the overview effect and experiencing its awe firsthand, I found that the connection to loneliness is much stronger than I initially expected. It’s so strong, in fact, that I think the reuniting sense of awe during loneliness deserves its own name.
Let’s call it the oneness effect.
Not just because it better encapsulates its diversity but also because it sums up the feelings that soothe our pangs of loneliness: unity, connectedness, oneness.
Obviously, the oneness effect is not a magic bullet to eradicate all types of loneliness. But based on the research and anecdotal evidence, it promises an easy, accessible method to feel less lonely. To reconnect to the world and yourself.
The real power of the oneness effect? It’s a solitary activity that also nudges us to reconnect with others. This is huge. After all, talking to people when we feel lonely is, ironically, the last thing we want to do.
In this sense, the oneness effect can be the bridge to crossing the scary abyss of loneliness. We can use it to start our journey to reconnection. Or to make a well-deserved stop on the way. We can use it to build up the fuel we need to seek help. Or we can use it when loneliness gets unbearable.
When I recently experienced the oneness effect as I looked over my hometown, I thought about a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh. “Enlightenment,” he said, “is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean.” It’s funny, isn’t it? In our minds, we can feel so apart and divided. But really, sometimes, all it takes is a different vantage point. A better overview. And for that, we don’t need to be astronauts. Being human is already enough.