Why Time Flies… and how to slow it down

Time and how we experience it has always perplexed us. Physicists have concocted fascinating theories, but their time is measured by a wobbling pendulum or a vibrating atom and is not psychological time, which minces or leaps with little regard to clock or calendar.

Psychologists have long noticed that large units of time, such as months and years, fly on swifter wings as we age. In the early 19^th century, Robert Southey, a poet laureate of England, remarked, “The first 20 years are the longest of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that follow.”

This phenomenon has to do with simple mathematics: A year to a five-year-old is 20 per cent of his lifetime, whereas to someone who is 50, it’s a mere 2 per cent. Thus a year seems much longer to a youngster than to an adult.

Charles E. Joubert, a psychologist at the University of North Alabama in the United States, notes that the more time is structured with schedules and appointments, the more rapidly it seems to pass. For example, a day at the office flies compared to a day at the beach. Since most of us spend fewer days at the beach and more at the office as we age, an increase in structured time could well be to blame for why time seems to speed up as we grow older.

Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at the Pennsylvania State University, says that we maximize this sensation “by being unaware of it.” People can best accomplish this, he says, by doing things they love – climbing mountains, dancing, reading or painting.

Exception and familiarity also make time seem to flow more rapidly. Almost all of us have had the experience of driving somewhere where we’ve never been. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery, with no real notion of when we’ll arrive, we experience the trip as lasting a long time. But the return trip, although exactly as long, seems to take far less time. The novelty of outward journey has become routine. Thus, taking a different route on occasion can often help slow the clock.

When the das become as identical as beads on a string, they blend together, and even months become a single day. To counter this, try to find ways to interrupt the structure of your day – to stop time, so to speak.

Learning something new is one of the ways to slow the passage of time. One of the reasons the days of our youth seems so full and long is that these are the days of learning and discovery. For many of us, learning ends when we leave school, but this doesn’t have to be.

Ronald Graham, an internationally renowned mathematician at AT&T Bell Laboratories, never complains about the flight of time. His secret: “Don’t be afraid to be a beginner.” In the past 40 years, he has mastered Chinese, learned to play the piano and kept up his juggling and acrobatics, all the while writing dozens of papers and traveling tens of thousands of mile a year.

Sometimes slowing the clock is a matter of reviewing the past. Keeping a journal or writing your autobiography is an excellent way to sort out the blur of years so that they no longer meld in a meaningless jumble but, rather, form a satisfying pattern of events and achievements

Fill your days with accomplishments and novelty. Savor each moment. For as the French essayist Montaigne said “The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them.”