Sixty Seconds That Change How Much Time You Have

What a moment of awe does to the way your hours get used, if you let it.

Executive Energy Journal — Issue #71 — Niina Gullstén

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, written for professionals who choose to lead with purposeful clarity. A grounded, science-informed take on managing subtle energy, spanning from neuroscience to spiritual connection.

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

1. The tell

If you manage people, your time is claimed twice. Once by the calendar, which anyone can see. And once by what you carry between the entries: the 1:1 that ended unevenly, the irregularity between two of your reports that has not surfaced yet, the decision you know needs to be made.

Here is the tell that the pressure is not a scheduling problem: A meeting cancels. A whole hour, returned to you without warning, and the relief lasts about ninety seconds. The list did not shrink, the tracking did not stop, and you spent the free hour at the same internal speed you spend the booked ones.

You already know the productivity  fixes that address the calendar. They work on the calendar, but the pressure is somewhere else.

2. What the research has settled

In research terms, the feeling has a name and a measured weight. Researchers call it time poverty: the persistent sense of having too much to do and too little time to do it in.

In an analysis of 2.5 million Americans, the subjective feeling of time poverty had a stronger negative effect on well-being than being unemployed (Giurge, Whillans & West, 2020). Read that again. The feeling outweighed the loss of the job itself. This is your first hint that the pressure is a state, partially decoupled from your actual hours.

To me, that raises a question. If the feeling can be that heavy independent of the hours, can it also be lightened independent of them?

One line of research says yes, and names an unexpected lever. In a series of experiments, people who were brought into a state of awe reported feeling they had more time available, and were measurably less impatient, than people feeling ordinary happiness (Rudd, Vohs & Aaker, 2012).

Awe is the emotion that arrives in front of something vast enough that your existing categories have to stretch to hold it. Same clocks, and same lives, but a different relationship to time, after sixty seconds of the right input.

Pause here. Don't think. Notice whether your breathing or posture changes when you read "more time available."

3. Where the evidence gets honest

Now the part most articles about awe leave out, and the part I find most useful.

When researchers tried to measure whether awe actually alters time perception, meaning the clock in the system as tested with careful timing tasks, the effect did not hold.

Two studies found that experimentally induced awe did not affect implicit or explicit time perception at all (van Elk & Rotteveel, 2020). A newer series found distortions, but they ran in different directions depending on the task, and the authors traced them to something simpler: awe-inducing input captures attention so completely that time processing itself gets deprioritised (Droit-Volet, Dambrun & Monier, 2024).

So awe does not give you minutes. It does not even reliably bend how long a minute feels. What it does is narrower, and better.

The monitor

Awe seizes the attention that was running your internal accounting of how much is left. Brain imaging points the same way: during awe, activity drops in the network that handles self-referential processing, the channel that produces my list, my deadline, my falling behind (van Elk et al., 2019).

The pressure is a report generated by an internal monitor. Awe does not argue with the report. Instead, it borrows the monitor.

4. How the clearing happens

In practical terms, here is what I observe in my own system and in clients', stated plainly as interpretation, because no instrument reaches this layer yet.

Awe clears by displacement. A signal arrives that is simply more important than what you were holding, and the system releases the less important loads to receive it, the way a hand full of small stones opens when someone passes you something you actually want.

The remarkable part is that the sorting of important from unimportant happens below deliberation. You do not choose what falls away. You do not inventory it. You do not even need to know what was released. The selection runs automatically, and in my experience it runs accurately: what returns afterward is only what genuinely still counts as worthwhile.

Whether that selection is as intelligent as it appears, whether the system reliably drops the drag and keeps the signal, is beyond what any current study can confirm. I work at that edge, and I name it as an edge.

5. The practice is already in your inbox

On Friday I sent out the Awe Clearance in the Friday Debrief: a few-minute practice of clearing your mind and your energy with awe. If you subscribe to the Debrief, it is already in your inbox. If not, you can join here and I will make sure it reaches you: Subscribe to the Friday Debrief

6. The cost accounting

The objection I hear is very often the same: I don't have time for this. So let the numbers answer.

In one study, adults took a fifteen-minute walk once a week with a single instruction, to practise noticing awe. After eight weeks they reported more positive emotion and less distress in daily life, and their photos literally showed less of themselves and more of the world (Sturm et al., 2020).

This was one conversation and one hour a month. And the most reliable trigger costs nothing and is already on your schedule: the sky performs twice a day, whether you attend or not.

But you know best what brings you awe. I recently found a new flower in my backyard/meadow and just stood there for a few minutes, returning inside with a sense of renewal.

If you want to test this on the study's own terms, borrow its protocol. One fifteen-minute walk this week, with the single instruction to notice what evokes awe. Do not log it or measure it. Notice instead how the afternoon feels afterward: the pace of your answers, how long the next irritation lasts, what you did not carry home. The evidence you are looking for shows up in the experience, not in a dashboard.

7. What actually changes

I want to be precise about what this gives you. The task list stays the same length, as does the week. What changes is that the monitor stops running between entries, and time you already had becomes time you can feel. People in this state answer slower, decide cleaner, and end the day with something left.

That is not a distant outcome. It is reachable, it is trainable, and the first tool is already free.

8. The workday problem

What I have not told you is what to do at 14:40 on a workday, between two meetings, under fluorescent light, with no meadow and no horizon in reach. Running the same release deliberately, on demand, without waiting for awe to visit, is a different skill. It is the one that changes a working week.

9. This week

Take what is useful here and leave the rest. This week, I do suggest you notice the exact moments the pressure spikes: the surge of 'not enough time' in your chest or your jaw. Notice when it happens. Then notice what you were holding in that exact moment.

Because that is what the spike has been measuring all along: your load.

Until Sunday in two weeks,

Niina

References

• Droit-Volet, S., Dambrun, M., & Monier, F. (2024). Awe and time perception. Acta Psychologica, 245, 104232.
• Giurge, L. M., Whillans, A. V., & West, C. (2020). Why time poverty matters for individuals, organisations and nations. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(10), 993–1003.
• Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.
• Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe expands people's perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130–1136.
• Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Chow, T. E., Morris, N. A., Neuhaus, J., Kramer, J. H., Miller, B. L., Holley, S. R., & Keltner, D. (2020). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044–1058.
• van Elk, M., Arciniegas Gomez, M. A., van der Zwaag, W., van Schie, H. T., & Sauter, D. (2019). The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe. Human Brain Mapping, 40(12), 3561–3574.
• van Elk, M., & Rotteveel, M. (2020). Experimentally induced awe does not affect implicit and explicit time perception. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(3), 926–937.