Don’t you hate the feeling that time passes too quickly and you just want to change that?
Here is what science says how you can feel that time is not flying – no magic involved
“I was just 27 hours in Berlin visiting my friend and it felt like a whole week!”, says my friend who is visiting her hometown of Hamburg and taking a quick trip over to Berlin (4 hours by train or 1 hour by plane from Hamburg) to see one of her best friends.
Isn’t that what we all want, that time feels like we have a LOT of it?
Sometimes a day feels wonderfully long, filled with so many different things and memories. As a kid, a day never ended. These days, when I start working in the morning and I look half an hour later (so it feels) at my watch - it’s 6 pm. Suddenly we celebrate a new year, but – wait, wasn't the summer break just over last week?
What did just happen? Where did the time go?
Can time go or run? Can time do something?
The measurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind.
Time is a mental construct.
We cannot grasp time directly with our senses and this gnaws at us and we try to compensate for this with ideas and speculations about time.
We give form and shape to time through images, symbols, and constructions like the clock. As a society on this planet, we all agree on a common system so we can operate.
Individually, each of us creates our own feeling and sense for time – when we express how we manage, save, win, lose, or waste time. Time becomes a subjective feeling. So it seems.
How do you feel about your time?
I was wondering if a mental shift can help us to change our sense of time. And give us a feeling of abundance instead of scarcity.
If you like to discover how you can feel that time is your friend and not your enemy and how to get rid of the constant nagging feeling of Where has the time gone? – then read on.
Time In Numbers
How can the way how we perceive, feel and sense “time” be so different from one person to the next? Everyone feels differently about it, about a number, about 24 hours a day. About 365 days a year. And most of us can agree that we feel that time flies as we get older.
What IS time and how is it possible that it can feel so different to different people? Clearly, our perception changes over time. But is there a way that the older we get that we can change the perception of time slipping away?
The numbers are the same. We decided a long time ago on a time system, breaking a day down into hours, minutes, and seconds and no matter who you are, you have 24 hours.
Twenty-four hours, that is 1440 minutes. You have 168 hours a week at your disposal (minus the hours you sleep). That is the math. What about our perception?
If we were slowing down does the perceived time slow down as well? That could be one way but there are other options as well.
Your Sense Of Time
When you are little, you get lost in time. The older we get the faster time seems to pass. Is our brain playing a trick?
The perception of time, which changes with increasing age, is not only a subjective feeling, it actually has a scientific background.
Science tells us that there are 3 interlocking reasons for what is happening in our mind in regard to our sense of time: Memory, habituation, and emotion regulation.
Your memory
The more we experience and can remember, the longer the period of time seems later.
The fuller the hard drive in your head, the more has happened in your life or a period of time, and thus the more time the brain allocates to those events in your head.
My friend’s trip feels like a whole week because she squeezed so many different things in 27 hours - exploring Berlin, visiting tons of different sights in this big city, eating and chatting with her friend – that she filled up her brain with lots of pictures, impressions, and experiences which trigger the brain to allocate a larger time span for these events than on less eventful days.
In addition, we deal with new experiences more consciously, we are more present and open.
In retrospect, the number of different experiences recalled from memory for the period in question shapes the subjectively perceived duration.
The more we experience and can remember the more the respective time span seems longer to us.
Your habits
Habits give you the subjective feeling that time flies.
We remember less well things that we have routinely done or have already experienced several times.
"The older we get, the fewer significant experiences are made and stored in our memory and as a result, perceived time speeds up, at least in theory," says Dr. Marc Wittmann, psychologist and human biologist.
Your emotions
How you handle your emotions affects how you feel about time.
People who are aware of their emotions and are able to manage them are usually more relaxed, not depressed, and less stressed. For them, time passes more slowly.
They pay more attention to themselves and their environment, are aware of what happens around them, and thus collect more impressions and experiences which are stored in the long-term memory. In hindsight, you collected more experiences and therefore you have more perceived time that has passed.
Time slips through our fingers because we sacrifice the conscious enjoyment of the moment.
Many permanently stressed people have enjoyed the completely new feeling of time during the pandemic lockdown. Their sense of time had a different dimension, without all that leisure stress we normally put ourselves through.
The perception of time had changed for them.
What Happens In The Brain Of A Young Versus An Older Person
Research has found that our inner perceived time is influenced by sensory impressions such as image sequences that act on our brain.
Experiences you collect in the form of memories and images in your head change over your lifetime and this is an important factor in how you sense time.
Our internal, felt time is influenced by sensory impressions such as image sequences that impact our brain.
According to studies (at Duke University), the days seemed to last longer in youth because the brain processed more images per day. The older we get the more images are absorbed and processed more slowly by the brain, thus fewer experiences are filling up your memory hard drive in your head. Time flies.
How High Tech Is Messing With Our Sense Of Time
The Internet, and mobile digital technologies have changed our perception of time.
The French cultural theorist and philosopher Paul Virilio, known for his writings about technology, describes a present in which the human sense of time is confused. He calls it a frenetic standstill. This has a lot to do with the technological changes that have taken place in recent years.
The rapid increase in communication technology has made the perceived time shrink more and more.
The linear passage of time, that one thing comes after another, has been replaced by the concept of simultaneity. In our world of the internet, the present is merged with the future.
"We have a new relationship with time. The time now moves far too quickly, and everything feels like it happened either 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago. We’ve hollowed out medium-range memory. I postulate that this is because we no longer experience time in terms of real, everyday experiences. The time now registers in our brains with online data intake and the microscopic dopamine hits it generates. Data is the new time. The cloud is the new infinity", declares Douglas Coupland, the Canadian Media philosopher, author, and columnist.
Suggestions for How You Can Change Your Sense Of Time
Have Diverse And New Experiences
The best way to change your feeling and sense of time is, as we learned now from research, to fill your day with lots of different, new, diverse experiences.
Take a different route to work.
Try a new cuisine from a different culture.
Have a brief chat with a friend/colleague on the other side of the world.
Take a brief walk to a place you haven’t been before.
Meet a new person.
Look at art (gallery, museum).
Try a new Café.
Taking breaks, in which you do the opposite of what you were just doing.
Doing Nothing
The artist Marina Abramović discussed the importance of spending time doing nothing at all.
We have all become far too busy and preoccupied with life, she says. Sometimes you just have to say ‘Okay f%ck it, I’m doing nothing today’ and that’s fine.
Abramović explains why sometimes doing nothing is the best way to do the most. You might think you waste your time, when in fact you might produce more than when running around busy. As Abramović says: “Life opens itself up to you in ways that one can’t possibly imagine when you are doing nothing. This is the greatest medium of them all. When I was doing nothing, I dreamt up some of my most important ideas.”
Ditching The Guilt Trip
Here is another hint: time feels longer if we don’t feel guilty about how productive our time is.
Dr. Rebecca Struthers, an acclaimed watchmaker, designer, and time historian explains that we suffer from ‘time guilt’. It is that bad feeling that we’re not achieving enough, not being productive enough, not keeping up with the things we think you should keep up with.
Our working lives are dominated by the idea of productivity. But it’s a creativity crusher. Although Struthers is immersed in making objects that track our time, as an artist she has learned the importance of not paying too much attention to clocking her own time.
Rebecca is all for patience and the slow labor of handcraft.
And, most importantly, give yourself permission to let go of the pressure of time.
Now Is The Time
One big manifestation of timelessness is the Now. There's not even a millisecond between now and now.
Leisure does not describe a state of laziness, as is often mistakenly assumed today, but a relaxed focus on the present.
Leisure time gives your brain the time to work things through, it is a time where your unconsciousness sorts out stuff. It is a time when the brain makes connections and links between various information, ideas, and input you accumulated.
Being Aware Of Time
Time flies less when you are not aware of time. You want to cultivate your awareness of your surroundings, little things, encounters, changes in scenery, and routes – all of which are little experiences filling up the brain, and the brain giving you the impression that time passes less quickly.
Awareness of time doesn’t mean slowing down. As with every balance, we always need both, slow and fast, hustle and idling. It is up to you to become more aware of situations and moments and to decide if a situation requires a slow or a quick response.
Our sense of time got all blurry when speed and digital technology came into play. Time and speed merge so extremely that people have difficulties distinguishing between different time phases.
Due to digital technology, everything can be done immediately, instantaneously, in a flash.
In 1964, the American sociologist Marshall McLuhan described the state of timelessness in "Understanding Media," and many thought he was crazy. Yet, most were already living by it. Instead of past, present, and future, there was suddenly "real-time," a life without waiting, if you wanted it that way. And, truth is, almost everyone welcomed that.
The awareness of time has changed through tech. But it is up to us how aware we are of life, experiences, and moments around us.
IN A NUDGE.SHELL
The perception of time, which changes with increasing age, is not only a subjective feeling, it actually has a scientific background. A mental shift can help us to change our sense of time.
With age, the neuron and nerve networks age as well and become less productive. Fewer images are processed in the same amount of time, so fewer experiences fill the brain - and time passes more quickly. More images, on the other hand, lead to more felt experiences, and felt time passes more slowly.
We can’t change the aging process of our brain and brain cells. But we can train our awareness and we can choose to change routines and experiences by embracing new things, places, conversations, and events.
If we pay more attention to our surroundings, we can store more experiences in our long-term memory. This in turn ensures more experiences in retrospect and therefore more perceived time that has passed.
This doesn’t give you back time. But you become more present and aware of your time and your sense of time expands. Your brain does not give you the feeling anymore: where did the time go?! You feel the opposite.
"Time isn't used, it's experienced." (Hopi proverb)
Very interesting article 👍