Slow Down to Speed Up | Leading Through Disruption
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
"Looking back, the decision took only moments to make—but in the thick of it, those moments felt like hours, warped by pressure and the weight of uncertainty."
In moments of stress, crisis, or uncertainty, time can feel both compressed and agonizingly slow. In high-performance or flow states, time may vanish altogether—only to return later, stretched with meaning. For leaders, this paradox of time perception isn’t just a curiosity of the human experience; it’s a strategic lever. Like super athletes who report time slowing down in clutch moments, the most successful leaders in business and the military are typically those who excel at making good decisions under stress. For ordinary mortals like the rest of us, it helps to understand how the brain distorts time under different conditions. This permits us to manage our own perception of time which in turn allows us to decide more clearly, to move through disruption with greater agency, and to lead wisely.
The Neuroscience of Time Perception
Our perception of time is governed by neural mechanisms including an intricate dance involving the insular cortex, basal ganglia, and prefrontal cortex, among other brain regions. Under normal conditions, these structures work together to process the passage of time in a way that we perceive as relatively linear. Under disruption, threat or high stress, however, our brain chemistry alters this perception significantly.
Research in neurobiology suggests that the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline shifts our internal clock. A 2023 study published in Nature Neuroscience found that under acute stress, the brain prioritizes survival-related processing, suppressing detailed memory formation while amplifying the sense of urgency. This can make minutes feel like seconds and contribute to the perception that time is slipping through our fingers. In contrast, slow and mindful experiences engage the prefrontal cortex more fully, elongating our sense of time by embedding richer sensory and cognitive details into memory.
Time in Flow: The Paradox of Speed and Expansion
Understanding how time works in the phenomenon of flow, the life’s work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a useful place to start, because flow states are reported both by those super athletes and by the military and business leaders so good at making decisions under duress.
* In the middle of flow, time vanishes. You’re locked in, deeply focused—writing, presenting, solving, building—and hours pass without you realizing it. One executive client described it like this: “It felt like 20 minutes, but it was a four-hour strategy session. I forgot to check my phone. I even forgot I was hungry.” In the present-tense experience of flow, time speeds up, slipping by unnoticed because the brain is so absorbed that it quiets the inner clock.
* When we look back on those moments, they feel expansive. Unlike the blur of a back-to-back meeting day, flow leaves behind a trail of vivid memory—decisions made, insights sparked, meaningful engagement. The time felt short while it was happening, but later, it feels long and full. That’s because the brain encodes more richly when we’re fully present, which makes the moment seem bigger in retrospect.
Time both speeds up and stretches out in flow. It’s not a glitch; it’s a gift. And for leaders, that paradox is a clue: if your day disappears and feels empty in hindsight, you weren’t in flow—you were in overload. But if it disappears and you remember it with clarity, you were probably right where you needed to be.
This dual nature of time in flow—fleeting in the moment, expansive in memory—reveals something critical: our internal experience of time is not fixed, but responsive. This insight opens the door for leaders to become active participants in their relationship with time, rather than passive recipients of its distortions. The next challenge is learning to carry that sense of grounded presence into less optimal conditions—especially when stress is high, stakes are urgent, and the environment is anything but calm. Because outside the rarefied air of flow, time often doesn’t feel like an ally. It feels like a trap.
The Leadership Challenge: Decision-Making Under Time Compression
For leaders, the sensation of time compression can be particularly dangerous. It can lead to reactive decision-making, a narrowing of cognitive flexibility, and an increased likelihood of relying on heuristics, or past patterns rather than innovative solutions. This effect, sometimes referred to as "temporal myopia," can prevent leaders from stepping back to gain a strategic perspective.
The late Daniel Kahneman, in his foundational work Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes how under pressure, our brains default to fast, intuitive judgments—what he terms “System 1” thinking. While useful for routine or low-stakes decisions, these heuristics can become traps during complex, high-stakes scenarios. Leaders may misread a situation, substitute a simpler question for a more complex one, or rely too heavily on precedent instead of considering novel inputs and approaches. In time-compressed contexts, this reliance on cognitive shortcuts can amplify risk and reduce adaptability.
One countermeasure is to consciously slow down, to regulate stress responses through structured reflection and deliberate pauses. Research from Harvard Business School highlights that leaders who engage in brief mindfulness or structured deep-breathing exercises can slow their perceived passage of time, allowing for better cognitive processing and more deliberate decision-making.
Expanding Time Through Awareness and Intentionality
To counteract the compressive effects of stress on time perception, leaders can implement practices that encourage cognitive spaciousness:
Metacognitive Awareness – Regularly stepping back to assess one’s thinking patterns helps counteract the urgency bias.
Temporal Reframing – Asking, “How will this decision look in six months or a year?” can slow reactive impulses.
Embodied Practices – Activities like walking, deep breathing, or even structured silence can recalibrate the nervous system and restore a more natural sense of time. Try a practice here.
Narrative Expansion – Reframing situations as part of a broader story rather than an isolated crisis can alter the subjective speed of unfolding events.
Dancing with Time
When chaos strikes, complexity increases, and time seems to compress. In the middle of my career / marriage / parenting life I often felt as though I lived in a time vice, always exhausted, haunted by a line from a Pablo Neruda poem: “Time cannot be cut with your exhausted scissors.” Under periods of disruption, global or personal, it is easy to feel as though time is slipping beyond our grasp. Yet, as Neruda reminds us, we do not wield time as a tool to be divided or controlled by force. Instead, we shape our experience of time through awareness, presence, and intentionality. Leaders who recognize the elasticity of time can better navigate disruption, making decisions that are not dictated by urgency but guided by calm, clarity, and wisdom.
Want to talk about how to change your relationship with time? Reach out.