Use awe to expand your felt sense of time

An awe experience reliably makes time feel more abundant — use it before a rushed, pressured day.

Why it works

Keltner and colleagues found that awe expands the perceived availability of time and reduces the felt urgency of time pressure. The mechanism is attentional: awe redirects attention from the internal clock and the task queue to the present encounter, interrupting the time-poverty mindset that compresses subjective duration. A brief awe encounter at the start of a packed day can shift the experiential quality of the whole day.

How to do it

1. Before a high-pressure day, spend five minutes with something genuinely vast or beautiful — outside is best.
2. Do not multitask or plan during this time; the attentional reallocation is the mechanism.
3. Notice whether the urgency feeling has shifted before you begin your first task.

Evidence

Awe inductions produced increased sense of time availability and greater patience in Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker’s research, compared to happiness or neutral conditions. (rct)

The time-expansion effect was demonstrated with brief lab inductions; the persistence and practical magnitude in real busy-day conditions is less studied.

Sources

• Rudd, Vohs & Aaker (2012), awe expands people’s perception of time, Psychological Science

Common mistake

Saving awe for quiet days when time feels spacious anyway, instead of using it precisely when time pressure is highest — which is when the reallocation effect matters most.