You've Already Given It Enough Thought, Now Get a New Perspective

Why the situation that will not resolve is not short of analysis, and what changes when you move the place you are looking from.

Niina Gullstén | Executive Energy Journal | Issue #74

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, where we explore a side of leadership few talk about—the subtle energy we have, live in, and how it impacts clarity, decision-making, and performance.

How EEJ works

• What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support
• What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins
• What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients
• Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

In this issue:

• An experiment where the only difference between conditions was the direction of attention
• Why the effect required no training, no belief, and no extra effort
• The move I make before I work on any question, and what it is testing

Introduction

Let's look at the one situation you have not been able to get sorted and out of your mind.

Say it is a working relationship that you sense has gone off. Nothing you can point to, no incident, no conversation you could quote, just a change in how the exchanges land. You have given it real attention. Hours of it even, spread over weeks. You have gone through what you might have done, what they might have meant, whether you are reading something that is not there.

The relationship stays feeling "off".

At that point most people conclude one of two things: that they need more information, or that they need to stop thinking about it. Both conclusions assume the same variable: that the question is how much attention the thing has been getting.

But I claim that the variable is where the attention is.

1. One variable

A study published in August in Nature Human Behaviour isolated this very clearly (Mizrachi, Rottem & Rozenkrantz, 2026). Fifty-seven people, an ordinary allergy skin prick raising a small controlled patch of inflammation on the forearm, measured over twenty minutes.

Both test groups looked at the same screen and the same sequence of shapes, on a task of matched difficulty. In one, each shape was a cue to return attention to the arm. In the other, participants judged whether the shape could exist in reality. Afterwards they rated how much effort they had put in, and the ratings did not differ.

So: same input, same load, and same effort.

The inflammatory response was around 1.6-fold smaller when attention was on the arm, in about nine of every ten participants.

One variable was left, and it was direction of the attention.

2. What it took to produce the effect

You could say, nothing.

No practitioners, no meditation, nobody was trained in anything relevant. The whole intervention was a recorded instruction: look at the screen, pay attention to the sensations arising from your arm, and if your attention wanders, bring it back.

They also did not know what was being tested. Fourteen per cent guessed the connection at the end, and their results did not differ from everyone else's. Belief was not doing the work.

Two further findings are notable here.

Attention did not work by calming anyone down. Heart rate, skin conductance, skin temperature and rated anxiety were flat across conditions, no differences at all. The only measure that moved was heart rate variability. Whatever this was, it was not arousal management (nervous system regulation) and it was not relaxation.

Also, it felt worse. Participants rated the itching and burning as stronger when attending to it. Stronger sensation, but smaller response. The felt experience and the physiological outcome came apart, and they came apart in the direction most people read as immediate failure.

Before the next section: where is your attention sitting right now? Not what you are thinking about. Where is your actual attention. 

3. What this does and does not show

The study was fifty-seven healthy adults, a localised skin reaction, twenty minutes. Medically, it says nothing about chronic conditions, infections or autoimmune disease, and so on.  Plus, as I learned when reading about the study, a smaller inflammatory response is not automatically a better one, inflammation is adaptive, and the right size depends on context.

What it does show is narrow, but very interesting from my point of view. Attention placed on the body altered a process in the body. Not the report of the process, the process itself. The authors put it as perception being biologically consequential rather than merely experiential.

The study used one position for attention: a loud sensation at a known site on your own arm. I work with several, and not all of them are inside the body, and that comes from twenty years of doing this with people, not from this particular scientific paper. I'm glad the research establishes the category, and I recognise the attention placements I use are my own work.

4. The one move

Before I work on any question — mine or a client's — I find out where attention is currently sitting, and I move it once, on purpose.

The simplest version takes about two minutes.

Bring the issue/situation to mind and notice where in your body you are thinking from. For most people it is somewhere behind the eyes, and it is very easy to find, because it has been there since about seven this morning, probably. Then place or drop your attention roughly thirty centimetres below your feet, to the anchor point. Let your attention stay there while you consider the situation, as if you were looking at it from the anchor point. Do not try to solve anything. Hold it from there for a minute.

This isn't whether you feel calmer, but whether the situation looks or feels the same.

Most of the time it does not. Something moves to the front that was not at the front before, or the thing you had at the centre turns out to be smaller or different that previously.

The point of this all: You have likely been running one position since you woke up. It was never selected, and it has never once been compared against another.

5. Where the cost starts to show

If direction is the variable, then every hour you have spent on that relationship has been spent inside a single position. Not badly spent, necessarily, just spent in one place, when there are options.

This is why the effort curve flattens. More thinking from the same position returns more of the same type of material but not more progress.

It does not stay in your head either. You walk into a meeting focused on reading on one channel, and one channel is what you get. The other person adjusts to what you are picking up, which confirms the position you came in with.

6. The takeaway

What changes is that the situation stops being one situation, instead of your thinking harder or more.

I my experience, a situation that will not resolve is rarely short of analysis. My clients are very capable of examining situations thoroughly, from one place. So what I offer is not more of that. When it gets looked at from somewhere else, what arrives is different information rather than more information, and the grinding stops, because the grinding was compensation for a fixed position.

This is not a capacity you either have or you don't. Fifty-seven untrained people produced the effect on a recorded instruction.

It also doesn't take time, once you know where to move your attention to. You just need to be able to register the shift.

7. Where to take it

Take what is useful here and leave the rest. The move in section 4 is yours to test and even develop, and for a number of questions it is enough on its own.

Where it stops is fairly specific. Sometimes you move and nothing arrives. Sometimes what arrives is real and you cannot place it. And some positions cannot be found from inside the situation you are standing in, which is not a shortcoming on your part, it is a property of being in it.

That is the part I can assist with.

You bring the question, in as much or as little detail as you wish. I listen to what is there while you talk, and part of what I am reading is energetic, which is a trained perceptual skill and the part I have spent twenty years on. I reflect it back. I check with you before I name where I see the question sitting, and we work with it together.  I do not tell you what is going on inside you.

If that is useful to you, the door is open here: Private Reset & Clarity Session

And if it is not, section 4 still works. Run it on the thing you want to open new perspectives on.

Until Sunday next week,

Niina

Reference

Mizrachi, N., Rottem, M., & Rozenkrantz, L. (2026). Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses in humans. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02541-1