Cats Eyes, Incense, and Hustle Porn - What is Time, Really?

You are afraid of it slipping by. The more it elapses, the closer you are to death, deadline, judgment, completion, and meeting the expectations of others.

It is your friend. It deepens flavors, develops character, illuminate insight, allows for evolution, and ages wine just right.

How ominous. How exquisite.

Your relationship with time creates different realities and experiences in your life. At both extremes, your relationship with time can cause breakdowns or breakthroughs for different reasons.

What is your relationship with time?

There are at least two ways to look at time.

We can see it tick by in uniformity in clock time. A minute always equals a minute.
We can feel it slowly. In felt time, time can feel like it stops, drags, slows down, or speeds up.

If you can identify and differentiate both experiences of time, this will empower you to consciously choose how to use both constructs for good, and avoid breakdown in favor of breakthrough.

Clock Time

Clock time can motivate you, push you to master your craft, and provide boundaries for achieving your goals. It is certainly important to work well in the time you have, honor your time, and know that your efforts lead to outcomes.

I love the thrill of working hard and reaching a goal. It builds my confidence. When Britney Spears’ Work B***h starts playing on my Spotify playlist when I’m on a 6 mile run, I pick up the pace.

But taken to the extreme, pushing yourself to achieve all the time means making choices that can neglect your relationships, health, and connection to yourself. Speed can take you out of conscious and strategic choice and into reactivity. High achieving business leaders and entrepreneurs who have big goals can easily fall into this pattern.

Have you heard of Hustle Porn? It’s a raunchy term that Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian coined last fall to describe the drive to grind, hustle, and work endless hours in order to get ahead. Hustle porn celebrates the martyrs who suffer to create something astonishing in business.

But overwork and self-neglect is not actually that astonishing (or sustainable) for you or for business. It can lead to health breakdowns, heart problems, memory loss, dropped IQ, loss in focus, loneliness, and performance decline. Overwork and self-neglect can also lead to lapses in judgment (think Elon Musk smoking pot on air and Tesla shares plummeting). Overwork and self-neglect can actually make you lose your edge.

Feeling Time Slowly

Can you imagine measuring time by looking into your cat’s eyes?

In Eastern cultures of the past, people told time by looking at the shape of their cat’s pupil. Time was also marked by the burn time of incense crafted to have a uniform burn rate.

Imagine the shifts in our culture if we all marked time by breathing in fragrant woods and flowers. Beautiful breath and inspirational markers of time would move us through connecting with others and creating our work. Consider that the Latin root of inspire is spirare, which means to breath.

Being in the material world is not just about linear clock time, being industrious, thinking rationally, being productive, and having a focus. Life and work is also about elevation of the spirit, presence, energy, purpose, and conscious connection.

Your time can be a conduit of beauty, inner peace, and connection to awe. You can move through time while breathing deeply and making eye contact - while you work and while you step away from work.

In felt time, you think by feeling, as Theodore Roethke writes in one of my favorite poems, The Waking. Time slows, and you are absorbed and open to what is.

In felt time, you can move into what positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow. Flow gives you a natural high and a feeling of oneness.

In the space between boredom and high stress, there is flow. If you have so much mastery over your work that it’s not challenging, then you’ll get bored. If you’re not great at something, then you’ll feel stressed out. Finding flow slows your inner experience of time.

Slow time is a host for creative and strategic thinking.

A broad sense of time creates an internal environment where you are more capable of creative thinking, according to positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson. Positive feelings (and not being in a heightened stress response) broaden your perspective and builds your social, physical, and mental skills. In contrast, speeding through work can trigger the stress response. In stress, you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode, and that narrows your thinking. In tunnel vision you have focus, but you can’t see the bigger picture.

Slowing time also helps you to get things right.

Slowness allows you to move down a path with wise action, and doing things right so you minimize gargantuan course corrections.

Consider a research study from the University of Texas at Austin in which classical piano majors from Julliard learned three measures of Shoshtakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The researchers found that the most successful pianists slowed down during practice at the right points. They intentionally paused to get the piece right, and they avoided learning the wrong notes.

This is known as strategically slowing down. You can’t always learn by speeding up and getting things done fast. That method reinforces the wrong notes. If you put all of your resources and time in to the wrong notes (your decisions, relationships, products, and services) that’s a big opportunity cost.

Choice

You have a choice in how you relate to time.

Knowing that clock time can motivate you to stretch your capabilities and achieve big results will help you to choose the clock time strategies that work for your goals, while also avoiding potential pitfalls.

Knowing that slow time is great for creativity, flow, strategic thinking, intimacy with your work, and learning will help you slow your experience and allow yourself slow time when your goal calls for it, and speed up when slow time isn’t a match for your goal.

Experiment

The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

So beautiful.

Spend a day noticing when you’re in clock time and when you’re in slow time.

Are you making the right choices for your relationship with time given your goals?

Consider the experiences, feelings, and support that help you move you through clock time in an energizing and inspiring way. Write a list or draw a picture (or sing a song or make a sculpture). Consider the experiences, feelings, and support that help you slow down and be present in slow time. Make another sculpture (you get the point).

Choosing how you relate with time, and being able to toggle in and out of different rhythms, will help you be fully present no matter what rhythm you’re in.

Listen to Your Emotions

If you can identify your feeling and listen to their message, your emotions can empower you.

Anger tells you a boundary is crossed.

Sadness signals loss.

Fear signals danger.

Joy uplifts your energy.

Having feelings is richly human. Your truth matters.

But we’ve all experienced emotional hijacking. Something triggers you, and it’s usually an old wound. On impulse, you move to old behaviors that somehow helped you to take care of that old wound. Icing someone out. Telling someone off. Collapsing into a puddle of unworthiness. Numbing out with alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, or work.

Different results will happen when you give yourself space to respond to situations with calm instead of reactivity.

When you have mastery over your feelings, you learn to avoid your knee-jerk impulses that could hurt you and your relationships. That gives you more choices in how to productively respond to triggering situations or your own triggering thinking.

Tending to your emotions can help you increase your resilience and your ability to sustain awesome performance and high character regardless of the stressful situation that might be happening, or to take a pause long enough to process your emotion and return to work when you are able.

Not only does tending to your emotion help your performance, it also helps your emotional, mental, and physical health. There’s opportunity to heal yourself, and byproduct of that might be to offer healing to others who will learn from you how to be present and responsible with your feelings.

Mark Twain said this:

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Working through our emotions and stresses, we have the potential to create something beautiful.

So how do you grow your emotional mastery, and positively perfume your world?

Knowing your triggers will help you increase your inner and outer resources to work through a stressful situation, and to find some ease and calm. In working through stressful emotions, you can learn to cultivate the “relaxation response”, a term coined by Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. You can cultivate your ability to create calm at will. In creating this ease in your body and mind, you can improve your health, relationships, and decision-making skills.

An emotion lasts about 90 seconds, at most. If it lasts beyond 90 seconds, it’s because the emotion is continuously being triggered – either because you have not left the triggering situation, or you are perpetuating the emotion with your thinking.

You can learn to create space between the trigger and your response so your emotions are neither dismissed nor overblown. You can increase your ability to identify your emotion, listen to your need, and respond to your need.

No matter what your emotion is, there are strategies to identify your emotions, listen to your needs, and respond with your best outcome in mind. There are so many fun emotions to look at - here we’re going to look at anger.

Anger

Anger comes out of the the need to protect and restore a value, an idea, or a position. Someone has crossed your boundary. Your client is late to a call. You missed your own deadline. A technology glitch messed up a group call. You have a disagreement with your partner about the nature of love.

So, what do you do with your anger?

If you slow down your response, you can feel into it and choose how to respond for the best possible outcome.

Thank it. Celebrate it. Your anger has a place in your body for a reason. Tell your anger that it is absolutely welcome here. Have a personal experience with your anger in your body.
Notice and feel it. Is it hot and sharp? Where is the anger in your body? You might feel tight in your neck. You might feel a sharp sensation in your chest. You might have a headache. Your stomach might feel tight. Feel it.
When it has passed, think about it. How do you typically work with your anger? Do you back down, explode, get frazzled, numb out, or repress your anger? Do you get sarcastic, self-righteous, or overcome with rage? Does your anger empower you or give you clarity?
Consider how your anger impacts your well-being. You might experience anger as powerful and energizing. You might experience it as nauseating and debilitating. When you know your patterns with anger, you have perspective to think about whether your habitual responses to anger serve you, or if there are more productive ways of working with your anger.
Remember your values and choose yourself. What message is your anger telling you? What is important to protect, maintain, and value in this situation?
Choose your response. What will you say or do? Your response could be an internal action or an external action. You might decide to sit in the heat of your anger and let it pass while you remind yourself that you cannot control others.
Or, you might have something to say or do that involves other people. If you do have something to say or do, ask yourself, does it have to be now? Your aim is to communicate your boundaries so you are most effective - direct, empathetic, and clear.

Whether you’re working through anger, sadness, or fear - your emotions can be powerful messengers. It takes time and practice to refine your emotional skills, and no situation is the same so it’s a constant practice.

When you’re emotionally triggered, it’s often because you attach negative thoughts to a situation. A friend is succeeding and that means you can’t. You didn’t get a project that you wanted, and that means that you won’t get any future projects. Someone interrupts you and that means that they don’t value your ideas.

When you are going down the rabbit hole of negative thoughts related to the feeling, pause, and think about alternatives. A friend is succeeding and that means you can learn from them. You don’t get a project that you wanted, and that means that you have space for something even better. Someone interrupts you and that’s because they’re excited about your collective ideas.

The negative thoughts you have about a situation are sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Imagining positive alternatives is not about denying a shitty situation, but about expanding possibilities and channeling your feelings towards something better.

So, choose yourself when you have strong emotions.

Cultivate a positive intention to use your feelings for good. Anger can lead you to making a clear request or stating a clear need.

Consider how you’d like to feel and be supported. Maybe you need to self-soothe by pausing, taking a walk, wrapping yourself in blankets, placing your right hand on your heart and left hand on your stomach, or breathing in for 3 counts and out for 4 counts.

Consider how you want your customers, clients, and community to feel as you respond to situations that anger you.

Nobody but you can take care of your feelings and needs. Listening to your emotions and responding to them empowers you to lead with your values and your value.