Our Perception of Time & How To SLOW It Down
Time
the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.
Time doesn’t wait for anyone or anything. It’s always there just hanging out in the background and passing by in its comfort. We follow it with calendars, clocks, and all the random tools at our disposal.
The theory of relativity explains that the concept of time began way back when a tiny dot of matter burst into infinite pieces and created what we now know as space and our universe. Time was basically the descendant of such events. And through change and motion, we were able to represent it. Then we slowly developed systems that allowed us to better make sense of everything.
- It allowed us to document and understand historical events.
- The age, speed, and other variables of all sorts of artifacts.
- And it’s the way that we measure the cycle of our planet, the sun, moon, and everything else.
But this article isn’t about the fundamentals of time. Rather, it’s about better understanding our perspective and relation to the way that we perceive time in order to shift it in a more positive direction.
Natural Perception
From waking up, to going to school, hanging out with friends, or engaging in other simple activities; time was always the major guide to our common world.
Sometimes it was our friend, and sometimes our enemy. Days were long, and weeks sometimes felt like an eternity. Birthday parties, times in school, trips w/ family, most of them were like year-like expeditions through our lens.
However in difference to those times when we were younger, entering the adult stage of life feels more like days turn into weeks, months into years and everything else blurs into a blob of repetitiveness. The responsibility of growing up, and the endless pressures of society make our lives intensely busy with all sorts of things, and we end up wondering where all that time went.
However, time still moves the same way as it did during our childhood, so the only thing that changed was our perception of it.
The way we perceive time seems to be relative to the way the we feel about our experiences (of course also based on our actual biology, but we have almost no control over that). The more exciting and novel something is the more likely we are to remember it. And the more memories we develop, the longer our lives seem to be.
In other words, our brain prefers to encode new experiences into our memory instead of familiar ones, and those same memories create a timeline in our mind that dictates our retrospective judgement of time.
When we are young we have many fresh experiences and learn countless new things about our world, but as we get older, we have more familiar experiences and we live in more of a routine, so it makes sense to think that time goes faster and our lives become shorter. But, it does not have to be like this.
In general, we already live much longer than our ancestors ever did in the past. We have modern medicine now and more knowledge about our wellbeing than ever before.
How to SLOW time down:
1. Incorporate novelty into your life
Our brains process familiar information quickly, but when new information is introduced, it takes us longer to organize and process that data — making the experience more memorable.
This is one of the reasons that our childhood seems to stretch on forever. We’re seeing and learning and experiencing everything for the very first time. Each and every moment is novel, so our brain absorbs it all in amazing detail. This overlaps with the life stage full of “firsts”: first time riding a bike, first love, first sunrise.
So if you want time to slow down you need to break up the routine & incorporate more novel experiences into your life. Routines are all well and good, but they can also become too predictable, so we effectively perceive our time as one big chunk of life. If every day, day in and day out we eat the same breakfast wear the same clothes take the same route to work sit at the same desk talk to the same people do the same workouts there’s very little pattern interruption, as a result, we very rarely are forming new memories that are key to helping us prolong our perception of time.
2. Journal every once in a while
The easiest thing we can do for ourselves. All you have to do is write down your thoughts, pretty much whenever you can. Write about the new trip you went on, or simply write about your day. You can also write reflections about your life or the way that you feel any day. And overall, it will also help you regain direction, and track your life.
3. Make better decisions
Learn to think more about your options to make wiser decisions that will prevent excessive regret. Write down on a notebook, visualize the outcomes, the pros and cons, anything that makes sense. We often regret not having taken that job, that nice experience abroad, that simply walk with a friend, or a night with family. So do your best to make better decisions whenever possible.
4. Do a mental reset
Step away from technology for a while. From the busyness of your life. Request a day off from work. Throw away useless social media. Do something outdoors, or plan something with friends and family. There’s always too much going on around, and there will always be, so do your best to separate yourself from it in any practicable way that you can.
5. Be wise about external advice
This is specifically about who we surround ourselves with. Most people haven’t figured out life for themselves. It’s always great to pull people and ask them their opinions because there’s always something new out there, but make sure you take into consideration how much you’re actually weighing someone else’s opinion because at the end of the day it’s yours that matters the most.
Sometimes why we feel so lost it’s because we have this massive internal conflict of us and who we want to be and who we see ourselves as a person in confliction with how other people see us and want us to be. This could be on a smaller level, like your friends. But it’s probably more likely your family, of who you want to be or who you are as a person versus how your family wants you to be. Or it could be versus society. It’s a conflict of constraint that is sourced upon fear that is attached to us by other people.
6. You can always pivot
Realize that at any given point or given moment in life, you can pivot. You can change, and try to become anyone you want. It’s not set in stone. It’s also not the end of the world for us. Most decisions aren’t so grand for us to get caught up in. It does matter, but it’s just life.
This is why it is good to remember that the value of time is only really relative to how its owner decides to utilize it. For those who regret how they used their time in their lives, life will feel somewhat short and unrewarding; while for those who spend their time on things they hold dearly, it will most definitely feel long and well gratifying.
However, this is not to disappoint you as one of the many good things about being humans is that we learn a lot from our mistakes — and we usually have many periods of self-reflection throughout our lives to fix these mistakes.
Learning to appreciate Time
It is up to us to decide whether or not we want to cherish time in our lives by wielding and spending it correctly on things that we deem personally valuable, and not on notions that may lead to forms of demise in life.
This means that we should also learn to let go of negative feelings like anger, jealousy, guilt, resentment, etc. as often as possible, and learn to instead make amends with ourselves.
We should forgive ourselves more often than not, and learn from our mistakes as we go on. Our relationship with ourselves translates into our other relationships in life, so remember not to take this for granted.
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