Time

Have you ever noticed that sometimes time seems to be dragging for everyone you talk to? Or a day seems to fly by? Well, what if I told you that time actually does speed up or slow down depending on what you’re doing.

Not to get too physics-y here, but time doesn’t happen in a straight line. That’s just how we experience it. Time is always happening all around us. And science can measure how we experience the passing of time. 

An article in the National Library of Medicine explains:

Unexpectedly pleasurable events boost dopamine release, which should cause your internal clock to run faster. Your subjective sense of time in that case grows faster than time itself, so that short intervals seem longer than they are.

This immediately made me think of football, or sports in general. For me, a three or four hour game can feel like it was maybe only one or two hours long because it’s full of unexpected pleasurable events. But for someone who doesn’t like sports, it can feel much, much longer since the events don’t bring them any joy. 

The speed with which we perceive time passing is also affected by our age. A paper by Professor Adrian Bejan in the European Review explains the neurological reasons why, but here’s the gist: when you are younger, you’re processing more images because your brain is growing. As we age, brain growth slows and we process less. Additionally, we see less “new” things as we age which can make them less remarkable to our brains. Think about the first time you drove a car vs. the 475th time you drove a car. You likely have a vivid memory of the time you first drove but can’t even begin to remember the 475th time. That’s because over time, it became more common and less memorable.

I used to anecdotally think about this when I was 16 years old and working at In-N-Out Burger. A four-hour shift seemed like the longest shift in the world. I couldn’t fathom how people did an eight hour shift. Then I thought back to school breaks as a kid and how they seemed to last forever, but as I got older, each summer seemed to fly by faster and faster. 

When you are young, each day is fractionally larger than a day will be later on. For example, one day in a one-year-old baby’s life is 1/365th of their life. One day in a 30-year-old’s life is 1/10,950 of their life. That’s a significantly smaller fraction of life than it is for the baby. 

So there are many reasons why it feels like time passes slow or fast, why vacations never seem as long as they used to the older you get. But that highlights why it’s even more important to make every day matter. 

I frequently think of an idea I heard somewhere. You don’t have to make every day your best day. But rather, live each day in a way that if you had to repeat it for the rest of your life, you’d be OK with that. We have obligations, work, life maintenance stuff. Not every day can be a “perfect” day, but days can be the best you can make of them. A life is made up of tens of thousands of days, and each one helps complete the picture of the life you led.

This week, I’m going to try to be 1% Better by simply observing the passage of time and making tweaks. If a day is dragging on, that’s an indicator that I’m missing out on some good vibes. So I’m going to find a way to make it fun. If time is going fast, I’m going to try to be consciously present for more of the moments. What are some ways you can get control of your time to live your fullest life? 

With gratitude, 

Natalie