Do you feel like life is speeding up? How to slow down time to 2025 | Science

IIt's the season of endless clichés. From “It's the season” and “The gift that keeps on giving” to “New year, new you,” there's no place to hide from tired old phrases. One of my favorites is that “Christmas comes earlier and earlier each year,” which ignores the fact that one year is equal to one revolution around the sun.

However, clichés often contain a kernel of truth. A recent study by Ruth Ogden and colleagues at Liverpool John Moores University showed that the majority of people in both the UK and Iraq do indeed experience Christmas (or Ramadan). It's getting closer every year. This may be partially due to the festive decorations happening early in the season. But it's also influenced by how we psychologically perceive time.

The pervasive feeling that time is passing quickly makes us especially susceptible to stress as the new year approaches. We can become so obsessed with what we haven't accomplished that we end up feeling like we're out of control. However, it turns out that it is possible to slow down the perception of time.

Human perception of time is very strange. Depending on what we are doing, time can speed up or slow down. And in retrospect, it can shrink or expand. Mark Wittmann of Germany's Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health defines this subjective experience as “The time I felt”, as opposed to the more objective “clock time”.

Moreover, how we experience time at one moment is not necessarily the same as how it is experienced when we look back. We all know that time flies when we're having fun, and time flies when we're bored. But when we look back at the boring days full of routine, those days blend together and blur in our minds. This distorts our sense of time periods and makes them seem shorter. “when Looking back, nothing happened,” Whitman explains. “This has been shown in several studies: the more everyday people When I look back, time passes so quickly”

This is supported by experiments. people have lived in caves for long periods of time – No friends, no sunlight, no clock to tell the time. For example, extreme athlete Beatriz Flamini was surprised to find that 500 days had passed when she emerged from a 70-meter-deep cave in Granada in April 2023. Looking back on a particularly uneventful year and a half, she spent knitting, reading, drawing and exercising. She thought she was only in the cave for 160-170 days..

MAll scientists believe that this phenomenon is due to how memory works. “The brain is lazy. We don't always monitor time,” Ogden explains. “So when we want to know how long a year has been, we look back and use the number of memories formed as an indicator. Periods with lots of new memories, especially if they are rich and exciting, It feels like a long time, but a period with few new memories feels short.”

Neuroscientific evidence supports this hypothesis. A recent study measured people's brain activity with an fMRI scanner and tested how accurately it could estimate the length of a video clip. The hippocampus, the brain's immediate memory center, lights up more strongly in relation to people's other brain regions Who was better at making period estimates?. In another recent study, Alzheimer's patients Associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus and memory problems, Judgment of duration was worse than others.

Novelty helps encode more memories and seems to slow down time in retrospect. But Steve Taylor of Leeds Beckett University prefers to interpret this in terms of the amount of information the brain processes at any given moment. Time goes faster when there is nothing to process.

In fact, this is one reason why time seems to pass faster as we get older. “When you're a kid, everything is new,” Taylor explains. “You're like an alien who landed on a strange planet.'' But as we get older, things become more routine and experiences that are truly novel become rarer. Also, when novelty wears off, there is less information to process and memory to encode, which saves time. According to Whitman, the phenomenon of time speeding up with age may be universal and has been replicated in many worlds. different countries.

Taylor has just published a book called Time expansion experiencelikes to use a thought experiment about twins to explain how this works. Imagine one of the twins finishing school, getting a job in his home town, and staying there for the rest of his life in the same job. The other finishes school and spends his life traveling the world, meeting new people and learning new languages. “If we assume they died at the same age, the traveling twins' lives would have been subjectively much longer,” he says.

our emotional state and level Note It also affects how well you remember something. When we are emotionally involved and attentive to an event, we remember it more vividly. And being in a new place, such as on vacation, automatically increases your mood and alertness.

TRavel is certainly a great way to slow down time. Both Mr. Whitman and Mr. Taylor recall living abroad as the longest and most enriching experience of their lives. Taylor remembers arriving in Britain after spending eight months in eastern Germany just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and feeling like eight years had passed. “I felt like a Roman soldier coming back from spending years in a corner of the empire,” he says.

But you don't have to go on an expensive vacation to spend some time relaxing. Doing it all the time can become a daily routine. Going somewhere you've never been before can help, even if it's just a different neighborhood. The same goes for changing your usual habits, such as meeting new people, seeking out new and surprising information, or starting a new hobby. As a bonus, these activities also reduce your chances of getting stuck in an echo chamber.

Ogden emphasizes that it is important to recognize that we must do so. spend However, it takes time to reap the benefits. “Find a time and place to do something memorable,” she advises. “And spend time remembering the good things that happened to you, because the more we keep these memories alive, the more likely we are to make the year seem longer.” Keep a diary, She argues that things like replacing stressful 'to-do' lists with 'done' lists can help with this.

Another approach is more carefully, more carefully In everyday life, even if nothing new happens. When you pay attention to your surroundings, you can notice new details such as the changing colors of leaves, migratory birds, and even the gradual progress of roadworks outside your window. This means we are processing more information and creating new memories.

time spent in nature may be particularly effective. “Nature is inherently meditative. It creates mindfulness,” Taylor says. He suggests that by becoming part of something bigger, we become less attached to ourselves, more in touch with our surroundings, and our perception of time changes. He argues that falling in love or volunteering to help others can have a similar effect, connecting us to something outside of ourselves. Such experiences also tend to be memorable.

For this, drugs may be used, such as: psychedelic and cannabis Your perception of time may slow down, at least momentarily. According to Taylor, such drugs open our consciousness and make us more aware of our surroundings. That said, these are illegal in many countries and can become routine when immersed in the same environment over and over again.

But what should you avoid? Obviously, too much routine can put you on autopilot, just doing it instead of fully experiencing it. In an ongoing study that has not yet been published, Ogden and Wittman found that social media is especially likely to make people feel like they've wasted their time. Time may pass quickly when you're scrolling, but most of the time you scroll because you're bored and you don't remember much afterwards. “It's not emotional,” Whitman explains. Ogden agrees. “Instead of just watching other people do interesting things online, go out and try them yourself.”

NHowever, everyone will want to slow down time. Those who have suffered from pain or trauma may want to let the year pass quickly and start anew when they feel better. Also note that there are some drawbacks to eliminating routine and slowing down your year. Habits are very important and can help free up your mental bandwidth for more important tasks than figuring out a new route to get to work. Many people are creatures of habit, and constantly changing their routines can make them feel quite lost and anxious. Karen Ashe from the University of Cambridge has developed the 'Creature of Habit Test' which allows you to find out if this applies to you.

If you know you're struggling with uncertainty and anxious about change, adding novelty to your life may not be good for your mental health, she says. The same is true for people with high impulsivity, such as those with ADHD, making life more difficult and confusing. Because the automatic nature of habits makes daily tasks easier, routines are also a great source of comfort and help for older adults suffering from cognitive decline or dementia.

Rather than completely erasing routine from your life, you can choose to build new habits from time to time, suggests Elsche. “The easiest way is to change your environment,” she says. If you usually work from home, try going to the office or library every few days. This can have positive ripple effects by changing related habits. You're probably snacking more while working from home. “If you go to the library instead, you may not feel the urge to snack.”

Most people's lives are dictated by schedules and routines, even if they don't like it. We measure success in terms of time, such as getting married or getting a promotion by a certain age. Understandably, this can leave you feeling like you don't have enough time. “Feeling like you don't have enough time can be really detrimental to your health and social relationships,” Ogden says, noting that it increases your risk of both divorce and heart attack.

And when you feel like this during the festive period, it becomes easier to achieve even more demanding New Year's goals, such as losing a certain amount of weight by a certain date or going to bed at a certain time every night. While commitments like this can help us achieve that very goal, in the long run they can add more routine to our lives and create even more stress.

So perhaps this year, try freeing yourself from the shackles of time and invest in a few things you know you'll enjoy and remember. The cliché sums it up: Carpe diem.