Why do years fly by at the end of life, but at school it seems like a month stretches for eternity? Psychologists offer their explanations and give recommendations on how to stop the running of time.
“How quickly time passes,” we say, looking back. It would seem that quite recently they themselves went to the first grade, and now we are already collecting our own child for school. In childhood, it seems to us that summer is a “little life”, but time passes, and we no longer have time to enjoy even a two-week vacation. Why is this happening?
The French philosopher Paul Janet, who lived in the XNUMXth century, believed that our subjective experience of time is based on comparison: we internally compare the volume of the usual measures of time (day, month, year) with the length of a life already lived. According to this idea, over time, our life in quantitative terms must inevitably “depreciate” more and more. Pretty pessimistic, isn’t it?
Today, cognitive psychologists suggest starting from the emotional and information richness, which determine our perception of time. As we get older, we are more likely to encounter sensations and phenomena that are already familiar to us. The behavior of people seems to us more and more predictable, and we already know how these or those of our actions will turn out. When our brain accumulates new information, life seems to be full. But when it transforms it into experience—habits, attitudes, tastes—we spend less time and energy thinking about it. The more automatic our life becomes, the faster it goes for us.
Can we manipulate our perception of time? Yes. The key task here is to break the monotonous flow of life. Stylists know that a set of clothes of different colors can make a person visually taller. Similarly, our life, if it consists of many different activities and hobbies, constantly keeps us in a state of “here and now”.
Here are some tips to help prevent time slippage.
Meditate
Meditation teaches us to listen to our body, its sensations, the processes that occur in the body, in our head. On the one hand, we become calmer. On the other hand, we begin to see the meaning and value of every moment.
Try new
Start learning a new language, master a musical instrument. Diversify your day with something unusual: return home a different way, give a ride to a fellow traveler. Experiment with using only one hand or speaking without using certain words. So you will understand that even routine activities can be a source of new sensations.
Chat with people who are not like you
Of course, we are not talking about radically changing the circle of communication. But making friends outside of your environment can be useful. So we can look at the world from an unusual perspective and rethink our usual views and beliefs. By contacting people with unfamiliar views or unusual lifestyles, we keep our minds open.
Travel
A simple change of scenery can sharpen our perception of reality. Being in a new place, we receive a lot of new information from the senses: sounds, smells, visual images. The more sensory impressions we receive, the denser and richer time will seem to us.
Keep a diary
“Writing down what happened to us during the day, we sort of re-live it, reflect, draw conclusions,” says James Pennebaker, author of the expressive writing technique. In this way events find their place in our memory. So we learn to keep our own timing, which is controlled not by the running of the second hand, but by the depth of our own thoughts and feelings.
About it
“The conquest of time. How time affects us, and we affect time. We often rush, rush, complain about the lack of time and the inability to cope with it. And each of us has noticed that in childhood, time flowed much more slowly, and the older we get, the more it speeds up. The book by British writer Steve Taylor is an attempt to explain why we perceive time so differently in different periods.