My watch has been out of action for the last few days because the battery is gone. When I glanced at the little time and date section on the corner of my Windows 10 taskbar today, I was startled. It’s September 2nd apparently. My mind’s perception of time and how far it feels into this year has me somewhere around March 1st.
Where the fresh hell did those 9 months go? I turn 29 in nine days and I’ve noticed this phenomenon of time speeding up every year; something that pretty much every adult over 20 can relate to. Those three months of holidays back in school used to feel like three years. Now, three months feels more like three weeks.
I’ve used my bemusement and general despondency about time flying so fast as the inspiration for this post exploring why time speeds up as we get older. I think it’s also an ample opportunity to get a conversation going about some possible ways to alter our perception of time (and no, I’m not going to suggest LSD!).
Why Does Time Speed up as we Age?
There are a number of reasons for this universally shared perception of time moving faster as we age. The first and probably most explanatory is time as a matter of proportion. When you are 5 years old, one year is twenty percent of your life. When you are 52 years old, one year is not even 2 percent of your lifespan. It’s logical that less than two percent of your lifespan feels a tad shorter than twenty percent.
This Washington Post article provides some useful graphics to visually reinforce how proportion makes such a difference to how we perceive time.
A second reason time flies as you age is that your biology is different as an adult compared to when you were a kid. I vividly remember waiting for Christmas each year on December 1st and feeling like it was ten years away. There are differences in working memory, attention, and executive function between the adult and kid brain, which suggests a possibly slower perception of time for kids.
However, these biological differences are redundant in late childhood, so it appears the proportional idea of time is the best one for explaining why years seem to go by increasingly faster as we age.
What is the Holiday Paradox?
The Holiday Paradox is an interesting phenomenon of perception in which a holiday feels like it flies by while you are experiencing it, but in retrospect, you perceive it as lasting longer. Psychology writer Claudia Hammond coined the term “Holiday Paradox” in her book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.
The explanation for the holiday paradox is that novel experiences while you are abroad create a bundle of new and unique memories that can make your trip seem longer in hindsight. When you enter that post-trip nostalgia reflection, a three-day getaway to a new city can feel like you were there for two weeks.
Want to Slow Down Time? Seek Out New Experiences
The Holiday Paradox offers a unique opportunity to contemplate how we might all combat the seemingly relentless speeding up of time. By regularly seeking out new experiences without necessarily going on a holiday, you create more memories so that retrospectively, it feels like time has passed more slowly.
It appears that by getting bogged down in routine mundanity, our lives pass us by without us even realizing it. The key then is to integrate novelty in your life in as many ways as possible. An unimaginable variety of new experiences await all of us if we’d just venture outside our comfort zones. And going outside our comfort zones makes life feel richer and longer.
Speaking to myself as much as you, the reader; take up a martial art, join a cooking class, get piano lessons, go camping. Any time you do things outside your normal routine, you create many new memories and you can alter how fast you perceive time to be moving.
In an interesting way, this circles back to how differently we perceive time as adults compared to as kids. Constantly seeking out new experiences and learning new things resembles how you spend your time in childhood. Many of us fall victim to comfort zones when we get older and I’m one of the worst culprits.
Mindfulness Meditation and Altered Time Perception
Touted as a panacea treatment for every ailment from stress to depression to anger, you’ve probably heard a lot about mindfulness meditation in recent years. When your rolled eyes return from the direction of the sky to focus back on this article, I’ll happily inform you that mindfulness meditation can also alter your perception of time.
An interesting 2013 study on the effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception found that 10-minute periods of guided audio meditation caused participants to overestimate durations of time. The control group listened to an excerpt from The Hobbit, which didn’t lead to any change in estimations of durations of time.
What is even more intriguing about the study is that the effect occurred after just a single meditation session. The researchers who carried out the study speculated that the experience of shifting your attentional focus inwards during mindfulness meditation techniques slows down time perception.
From my own experience with meditation, this seems plausible. Force any beginner meditator to meditate for 10 minutes and those ten minutes will feel more like 20. However, from the perspective of someone who considers himself an intermediate meditator by now, it’s interesting that time seems to dissipate completely as a subjective perception when you get deeper into meditation. It is as if time no longer exists.
I think the overall long-term effect of meditation extrapolated out to the rest of our time is that it can make the days, months, and years feel longer. Because long-term meditators get less caught up in the constant chatter of their minds, they are more focused on the “Now”, as Eckhart Tolle likes to call the present moment. Being more present in life lets you appreciate its richness of experiences more fully and better process those experiences.
Seneca on Time
People have been pondering the nature of time since, well, time immemorial. One man who expressed his views on how much time people tend to waste in life was the Stoic philosopher, Seneca. In his book, On the Shortness of Life, Seneca reflects that people tend to complain about how short life is while squandering most of it on meaningless crap.
Considering I’ve just spent 20 minutes reading the comments section under (yet another) an article on The Guardian about Brexit, I can’t exactly disagree with Mr. Seneca. The Roman Stoic argues that people fritter time away as if destined to live forever, saying that “the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”
I’ll probably revisit this post five months after my 29th birthday when I turn 30, but for now, I’ll make it my aim try and spend the final year of my 20s in such a way that it actually feels like a year. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment.