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4 days ago
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It’s the time of the year for endless cliches. From “tis the season” and “the gift that keeps on giving” to “new year, new you”, there’s nowhere to hide from tired old phrases. One of my favourites is “Christmas comes around quicker each year” – which ignores the fact that one year equals one trip around the sun.
There’s often a kernel of truth in a cliche, though. A recent study by Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues showed that the vast majority of people in both the UK and Iraq really did experience Christmas (or Ramadan) approaching more rapidly every year. This may be down partly to festive decorations appearing ever earlier in the season. But it’s also a result of how we perceive time psychologically.
The widespread feeling that time is speeding up can be particularly stressful as the new year approaches. It can leave us feeling out of control, fixating on all the things we have failed to achieve. But it turns out that it is possible to slow down our perception of time.
Human time perception is deeply odd. Time can speed up or slow down depending on what we’re doing. And it can shrink or expand when we look back at it. Marc Wittmann from the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany calls this subjective experience “felt time”, as opposed to the more objective “clock time”.
What’s more, how we experience time in a certain moment isn’t necessarily how we experience it when we look back at it. Everybody knows that time flies when we’re having fun and drags when we’re bored. But when we look back at boring periods, filled with routine, the days blend and blur in our minds. This distorts our sense of duration, making the period feel shorter. “When looking back, nothing happened,” explains Wittmann. “This has been shown in several studies: the more routine people report, the faster time passes in retrospect.”
This is backed up by experiments in which people have spent extended periods of time living in caves – without company, sunlight or clocks to mark the time. When the extreme athlete Beatriz Flamini stepped out of a 70m-deep cave in Granada in April 2023, for example, she was surprised to discover that 500 days had passed. Looking back at her rather uneventful year and a half spent knitting, reading, drawing and exercising, she thought she’d only been in the cave for 160-170 days.
Many scientists believe this phenomenon is down to how memory works. “The brain is lazy – we’re not constantly monitoring time,” explains Ogden. “So when we want to know how long the year was, we look back and use the number of memories we formed as an indicator. A period with loads of new memories – especially when they’re rich and exciting – feels long whereas a period with hardly any new memories feels short.”
Neuroscientific evidence supports this hypothesis. One recent study measured people’s brain activity in an fMRI scanner, and then tested how good they were at estimating the duration of video clips. The brain’s immediate memory centre, the hippocampus, lit up more strongly in connection to other brain regions in people who were better at making duration estimates. Another recent study found that people with Alzheimer’s disease, which is linked to a shrinking hippocampus and memory problems, were worse than others at judging time duration.
Novelty appears to help us encode more memories, slowing down time in retrospect. Steve Taylor from Leeds Beckett University, however, prefers to interpret this in terms of the amount of information the brain processes in the present moment. When there’s nothing to process, time speeds up.
In fact, this is one of the reasons why time appears to tick by faster as we age. “When you’re a child, everything is new,” explains Taylor. “You’re like an alien that’s landed on a strange planet.” But the older we get, the more routine and fewer genuinely novel experiences we have. And with less novelty, there’s less information to process and fewer memories to encode, making time speed up. According to Wittmann, finding that time speeds up with age may be universal – it’s been replicated in many different countries.
Taylor, who has just published a book called Time Expansion Experiences, likes to use a thought experiment about twins to illustrate how this works. Imagine one twin leaving school and getting a job in their home town – spending their whole life working there, in the same job. The other leaves school and spends their life travelling around the world, meeting new people and learning new languages. “Assuming they die at the same age, the travelling twin’s life will have been subjectively much, much longer,” he says.
Our emotional state and levels of attention also affect how well we remember something. If we’re emotionally engaged and attentive during an event, we remember it more vividly. And being in a new place, such as on holiday, often automatically heightens our mood and attention.
Travel is indeed an excellent way of slowing down time. Both Wittmann and Taylor recall experiences of living abroad in foreign countries as some of the longest and richest of their lives. Taylor remembers visiting the UK after eight months in eastern Germany, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and feeling like eight years had passed. “I felt a bit like a Roman soldier returning from years in a distant corner of the empire,” he says.
But you don’t need to go on expensive holidays to slow down time – and constantly doing so can also become routine. Going anywhere you haven’t been before – even if that’s just to a different neighbourhood – can help. The same goes for any change to your usual routine, such as getting to know new people, seeking out new and surprising information or taking up new hobbies. As a bonus, these activities also reduce our chances of getting stuck in echo chambers.
Ogden stresses that it is important to realise that we have to spend time to gain the benefits, however. “Find the time and space to do the things that you’re going to remember,” she advises. “And spend time reminiscing about good things that have happened to you. Because the more we keep these memories alive, the more we’re likely to feel like the year was longer.” Keeping a diary or replacing stressful “to-do” lists with “I did” lists could help with this, she argues.
Another approach is to be more attentive and mindful in your everyday life – even if nothing new happens. Being mindful of our surroundings helps us notice new details – such as the changing colour of leaves, migrating birds or even the gradual progress of the roadworks outside the window. This means we’re processing more information and making new memories.
Spending time in nature may be particularly effective. “Nature is naturally meditative; it creates mindfulness,” says Taylor. Being part of something bigger, he suggests, may make us less obsessed with ourselves and more in touch with our surroundings – altering our time perception. Being in love or volunteering to help others may have a similar effect, he argues, connecting us to something other than ourselves. Such experiences also tend to be memorable.
This may be why drugs such as psychedelics and cannabis can slow down our perception of time, at least in the moment. According to Taylor, such drugs open our awareness and make us attentive to our surroundings. That said, they’re illegal in many countries and can become routine if indulged in the same setting over and over again.
But what should we avoid doing? Clearly, too much routine can put us on autopilot, doing rather than fully experiencing. In ongoing research that has not yet been published, Ogden and Wittmann have discovered that social media is particularly likely to make people feel as if they’ve wasted their time. Time may fly while we’re scrolling, but we’re often doing it because we’re bored and we don’t tend to remember much afterwards. “It’s not emotionally gripping,” explains Wittmann. Ogden agrees: “Don’t just witness other people doing cool stuff online – actually go out and do it yourself.”
Not everyone will want to slow down time, though. If you’re struggling with pain or trauma, you may just want the year to pass quickly and start afresh when you’re feeling better. Also, it is worth noting that there are a few drawbacks to slowing down your year by removing routine. Habits are hugely important, helping us to free up mental bandwidth for more important tasks than figuring out which new route to take to work. Many people are creatures of habit, and feel rather lost and anxious if they constantly change their routines. Karen Ersche from Cambridge University has developed a “creature of habit test”, where you can find out if this applies to you.
If you know you struggle with uncertainty, and get anxious from change, adding novelty to your life may not be beneficial to your mental health, she says. The same is true for highly impulsive people, such as those with ADHD, making life more difficult and chaotic. Routine is also a great source of comfort and help for older people who suffer from cognitive decline or dementia, as the automatic nature of habits makes daily tasks easier to carry out.
Rather than completely erasing routine from your life, you could opt to build new habits now and then, suggests Ersche. “The easiest way of doing that is by changing your environment,” she says. If you always work at home, try going to the office or library every couple of days. This could have positive knock-on effects by altering related habits. Perhaps you snack a lot when working from home. “If you instead go to the library, you may not feel the same urge to snack.”
Most people’s lives are governed by schedules and routine – even if we don’t like it. We measure success in terms of time, such as being married or getting a promotion by a certain age. Naturally, this can lead us to feel like we’re running out of time. “The sense that we don’t have enough time is really bad for our health and social relationships,” says Ogden, pointing out that it raises the risk of both divorce and heart attacks.
And when we’re feeling this way during the festive period, it’s easy to commit to yet more punishing new year resolutions, such as losing a certain amount of weight by a specific date or going to bed at a certain time every night. While such promises can help us achieve those very goals, they can add even more routine to our lives in the long run – potentially making us more stressed.
So perhaps this year, try freeing yourself from the shackles of time, and invest in doing a few things you know you’ll enjoy and remember. To sum it up in a cliche: carpe diem.
