One of the genuinely reliable effects of moving through large landscapes, with a research literature that is modest and real.
Move through big country for long enough and something happens to the size of your concerns. The thing you were turning over at the trailhead is still there at the top and it has changed proportion.
This is not a technique and it is not available on demand. It is closer to a side effect of exposure: sustained time in a landscape large enough to be indifferent to you.
What it seems to do is loosen the grip of self-focus for a while. And the odd part, which most people report, is that being made small is a relief rather than an insult.
Awe research has found that experiences of vastness are associated with a diminished sense of self-importance — what the literature calls the small self — and with increases in prosocial behaviour in some experiments.5 The effects are modest, the manipulations are often laboratory approximations of vastness, and the field has had its share of replication questions.
The quiet-ego and humility literature points the same way: lower self-focus is associated with better relationships and, in several studies, with better learning, since a person less occupied with their own standing has more attention available for the thing itself.4
And the burden-of-self-focus argument is worth having: chronic self-attention is effortful, and a good deal of what people experience as mental fatigue is the maintenance of a self-image nobody else is checking.8
The first: some things do not shrink, and should not. Grief does not respond to a big view, and neither does a serious injustice. A landscape that puts your work worries in proportion will not do anything for a bereavement, and the disappointment of discovering that is its own small cruelty.
The second: smallness can shade into insignificance, which is a different feeling with a different valence. The useful version puts your concerns in proportion. The unhelpful version says nothing you do matters, and for some people in some states, the vast indifferent landscape delivers the second rather than the first.
Which means this is not a technique to prescribe. It is an effect to be available to, and to notice whether you are getting.
Almost entirely about exposure rather than attitude.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
Sustained time in large country loosens self-focus and restores the proportion of things — a modest, reasonably replicated effect, and a relief rather than an insult.
But grief does not shrink, injustice should not, and smallness can tip into insignificance. This is an effect to be available to, not a remedy to hand anybody.