Last summer, I watched two friends react to the same sky. We were in the Shenandoah Valley, far enough from D.C. that the Milky Way was genuinely visible. One of them, a corporate attorney who runs her life like a military operation, lay on the grass and said, quietly, “This is the most peaceful I’ve felt in years.” The other, a startup founder who’d just closed a funding round, stood up after about ninety seconds, said “I can’t do this,” and walked back to the cabin. Same sky. Same stars. Two fundamentally different responses. What determines which one you have?
Research suggests that people who report a strong connection to the night sky also report higher levels of mental health and happiness. But embedded in that same body of research is a less comfortable truth: for a significant minority of people, confronting the vastness of the cosmos triggers not peace but something closer to panic. This split has fascinated psychologists for years, but only recently has the science caught up to the question. New neuroimaging research, field studies from South Africa’s Karoo desert, and the growing global trend of “star bathing” are converging on a picture that says less about the cosmos and more about how individual brains handle the problem of their own smallness.
What the Brain Actually Does When It Encounters Vastness
A UCLA pilot study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience put nine healthy adults into an fMRI scanner and exposed them to three different experiences: AI-generated art, sweeping nature footage, and cosmic imagery designed to prompt meditation on universal connectedness. The results showed that each type of experience spoke, as the researchers put it, its own neural dialect.
Nature footage quieted the brain. It reduced activity in areas linked to stress, emotion, and executive control while sharpening the visual cortex. The brain wasn’t being excited. It was being allowed to stand down.
Cosmic meditation did something different. When participants contemplated concepts of universal connectedness, their brains showed heightened activation in the fusiform gyri (object recognition), postcentral gyri (bodily sensation), and hippocampus (memory). Perception and introspection were woven together into a state larger than the sum of its parts.
Art, by contrast, stimulated visual processing hubs but didn’t reach deeper into memory or self-related areas. It posed puzzles of light and motion. Stimulating but bounded.
The distinction matters. Nature soothes by simplifying. Cosmic contemplation activates by expanding. And that expansion is where the divergence between peace and dread begins, because the brain regions engaged during cosmic awe overlap heavily with the brain regions responsible for self-concept and threat detection. Whether that activation resolves into wonder or terror depends on what your particular brain does when the boundaries of self start to blur.
The Small Self and What You Do With It
Psychologist Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley has spent years studying awe. His framework describes the experience as a “small self” phenomenon: when you look up at the Milky Way, your sense of individual importance contracts, and your mental model of the world has to accommodate something that doesn’t fit inside it. Keltner’s work at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center has shown that this accommodation process generally increases generosity, social bonding, and life satisfaction.
But that’s the average response. The mechanism can go the other way.
For people whose sense of control is already fragile, whose identity depends on feeling competent and in charge of their circumstances, the contraction of self-importance isn’t relief. It’s confirmation of a fear they spend most of their waking life suppressing: that they don’t matter, that their effort is futile, that the structures they’ve built to keep chaos at bay are tissue paper against the actual scale of reality.
I wrote recently about ambitious people running from versions of themselves they outgrew but never mourned. The connection to cosmic dread is more direct than it seems. People who construct their identities around achievement and control often have the hardest time with experiences that dissolve the self, because the self is what they’ve spent enormous energy building. The night sky doesn’t care about your career trajectory. For some people, that’s freedom. For others, it’s an abyss.
What South Africa Is Teaching Us About Cosmic Perspective-Taking
Some of the most interesting field data on this question is coming from South Africa, where researchers at Stellenbosch University’s CoCREATE Health Hub and the International Astronomical Union Office of Astronomy for Development are running a program called Astronomy for Mental Health. Researchers led by Lynn Hendricks, Therese Fish, and Nikki Thomas are testing whether structured stargazing experiences can alleviate psychological distress.
Families attended a guided astronomy weekend in Sutherland, home to the Southern African Large Telescope and some of the world’s darkest skies. Over two nights, participants observed Saturn’s rings, the Moon’s craters, and the Milky Way, combined with reflective fireside conversations.
The early results are striking. Participants reported reduced anxiety and improved mood. Many described experiencing a calm, uncluttered mind with room to process emotions without being overwhelmed.
But Hendricks drew a careful distinction, noting that the cosmic element, the vastness, and the awe create a shift that’s distinct from simple rest or escape. The experience doesn’t just calm people; it changes how they think about themselves and their place in the world.
That phrase, “changes how they think about themselves,” is the key. The night sky doesn’t just reduce cortisol. It rearranges the hierarchy of concerns in a person’s mind. The participants weren’t just relaxed. They were restructured.
Latifah Jacobs, a community leader from Kuilsriver who participated in the program, described realizing that life extends beyond her immediate concerns, and that experiencing the night sky with her community made it more meaningful.
Another participant, Rowan Roberts, described how recognizing his own smallness in the universe helped him put his daily stresses into perspective.
Both of these responses fall on the peace side of the divide. But notice the implicit cognitive move they’re making: they’re welcoming their own insignificance. They’re treating it as useful information rather than a threat. The question is why some brains treat that same information as deeply threatening.
Attention Restoration Versus Attention Overwhelm
The South African researchers explicitly ground their work in attention restoration theory, which holds that natural environments help the mind recover from fatigue through “soft fascination,” an effortless form of attention that restores clarity. The night sky is particularly effective here because it gently engages the senses without demanding focused cognition.
But attention restoration theory has a hidden assumption: that the person looking up has a baseline sense of psychological safety from which they’ve merely become fatigued. For someone whose baseline state involves hypervigilance, chronic anxiety, or unprocessed trauma, the night sky’s invitation to let go of executive control can feel like being asked to remove your armor in the middle of a battlefield.
The BBC has described how awe acts as a “little earthquake” in the mind, shaking loose rigid patterns of thought and creating space for new perspectives. That metaphor is revealing. Earthquakes can be liberating if you’re trapped. They can be catastrophic if you’re already unstable.
Mark Westmoquette, a physicist and meditation teacher who runs mindful stargazing retreats across the UK and Europe, has described how viewing the night sky can shift people’s perspective on their place in the universe. But perspective shifts are value-neutral. The shift can go toward integration or toward disintegration, depending on the psychological ground it’s shifting.
The Rise of Star Bathing and What It Reveals
The global emergence of star bathing as a wellness practice is both a response to this science and an interesting case study in who seeks out cosmic insignificance versus who avoids it. From the Yorkshire Moors in England to South Africa’s Cederberg Wilderness Area, structured nighttime experiences are being marketed as tools for emotional reset.
At Bliss & Stars, a luxury retreat in South Africa, the founder Daria Rasmussen has described guests having breakthrough experiences while observing Saturn’s rings. One guest, numbed by years of trauma, reportedly described the experience as transformative, saying it rebooted his capacity for joy. A grieving mother found solace in naked-eye stargazing, saying it felt like the universe was mourning with her.
These are stories of people who brought their pain to the sky and found it held, not erased. But they’re also self-selected. The people who book star-bathing retreats are, by definition, people who believe (or at least hope) that confronting vastness will help rather than hurt. The people for whom the night sky triggers existential dread aren’t booking retreats. They’re staying indoors. And we rarely study them.
This selection bias matters for how we interpret the research. Most studies on awe and the night sky recruit participants who are at minimum willing to have the experience. The people who feel genuine horror when contemplating cosmic scale rarely show up in these studies, which means the psychological literature may systematically overestimate the benefits and underestimate the risks of awe exposure.
What the Difference Actually Reveals
So what separates the person who looks up and feels peace from the person who looks up and feels dread? Based on the converging evidence from neuroimaging, field psychology, and clinical observation, several factors emerge.
Tolerance for ambiguity. People with a high need for cognitive closure, who need firm answers and clear categories, tend to experience threat rather than wonder when confronted with the incomprehensible. The night sky is, by definition, incomprehensible. It doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t answer. For people who can sit with not-knowing, this is soothing. For people who can’t, it’s torment.
Relationship to control. The UCLA study found that nature experiences reduced activity in executive control areas. This is experienced as relief by people who are comfortable letting go. For people whose sense of safety depends on maintaining control, that same neural quieting feels like vulnerability.
Quality of self-concept. This is perhaps the deepest factor. If your sense of self is flexible and loosely held, the experience of awe is like water flowing around a rock. Your identity bends and accommodates. If your sense of self is rigid and tightly defended, the same experience feels like the rock is cracking.
Social context. The South African research highlights something easy to miss: almost all of the positive outcomes occurred in group settings. Jacobs specifically described how sharing the experience with her community made it more meaningful. Looking up alone is a different psychological proposition than looking up together. Isolation amplifies dread. Company buffers it. The person who stares at the sky from a crowded blanket at a star party and the person who stares from a bedroom window at 3 a.m. during a bout of insomnia are having fundamentally different encounters with the same cosmos.
Prior exposure to existential reflection. People who have already done some version of reckoning with their own mortality or insignificance, through meditation, religious practice, grief, or even certain kinds of therapy, arrive at the night sky with neural pathways already shaped for accommodation. The experience fits into existing frameworks. For people encountering cosmic scale without any prior framework, the experience can be genuinely destabilizing.
The Policy Question Nobody Asks
I spent years on Capitol Hill watching how Congress thinks about NASA’s budget, and one thing that always struck me was the gap between how policymakers talk about space (in terms of national security, technological competitiveness, and jobs) and how the public actually experiences space (as a source of meaning, wonder, or anxiety). The Astronomy for Mental Health project in South Africa is doing something unusual: it’s treating the psychological impact of cosmic awareness as a public health resource worth studying and funding.
We’ve explored before on Space Daily the experience of feeling both insignificant and relieved by it. What the new research adds is specificity about who gets to feel that relief and why. The South African team is particularly thoughtful about equity here. As Hendricks noted, even though the night sky is free, access isn’t equal because of light pollution and geography. Dominic Vertue of the IAU OAD is pursuing PhD research on whether virtual reality simulations could deliver similar benefits to people without access to dark skies.
The question of access is also a question of preparation. If awe can destabilize as well as heal, then making cosmic experiences available without also providing psychological context could do more harm than good for some populations. The South African model’s emphasis on guided, structured, communal experiences may be the critical design feature, not just a nice-to-have.
Why This Matters Beyond Wellness
Understanding why the same sky produces peace in one person and dread in another isn’t just a curiosity of psychology. It tells us something about how human beings are built to handle scale, whether that’s the scale of the universe, the scale of global problems, or the scale of their own mortality.
People who can’t sit with insignificance tend to overcompensate. They build rigid hierarchies of importance, cling to status markers, and resist any framework that relativizes their concerns. People who can sit with insignificance tend to be more generous, more socially bonded, and more capable of holding perspective during crisis. The researchers at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center have documented these patterns across multiple studies.
I think about this when I take my son outside on clear nights in Arlington. He’s young enough that the sky is just beautiful. The question of whether it’s comforting or terrifying hasn’t occurred to him yet. That distinction will come later, shaped by how well he learns to hold ambiguity, how flexibly he builds his identity, and whether the people around him treat insignificance as a gift or a threat.
The UCLA data suggests that transcendent experiences leave fingerprints on the brain, engaging systems for sensation, memory, and self-awareness. The South African fieldwork suggests those fingerprints are deeper when the experience is shared. And the global spread of star bathing suggests that millions of people are intuitively seeking out the very cognitive reset that the science is now documenting.
But the people who need it most, the ones for whom the night sky triggers dread rather than peace, are the least likely to seek it out. And that’s the gap the research hasn’t yet closed. Understanding why the sky terrifies some people is the first step toward helping them find what others find naturally: that being small doesn’t mean being lost.
It might just mean being free.
Photo by Dmitriy Ryndin on Pexels