New Year’s Eve, birthday, another Christmas. In between, time feels like it’s running away at an increasing pace for many people. Why is that? What can we do to keep up? That’s what we’re dealing with here.
2024. For some people that means it’s been another five years. For others it’s more like ten and for some it’s 20. But most people agree on one thing when they look back on the last few years: That happened pretty quickly.
There is a discrepancy in various ways between our subjective perception and objectively measured time. For example, many people say that they don’t feel as old as they are, not like 40, 50, 60 or 102. But what could a statement of a period of time say about how a person feels who is already for lived this period of time? When a person says they don’t feel 40 or 102, what they really mean is that they have a different idea of what it’s like to be that old. Which in turn means that she had no accurate idea of what it meant to live 40 or 102 years.
We can already see from this that the way we divide and measure time offers us the opportunity to meet up, work together, go shopping and organize ourselves together. However, we can only measure our lives to a limited extent. In order to observe our personal sense of time and our subjective perception of time, calendars, hours and New Year’s Eve celebrations can be extremely useful – even if we regularly think that there must be an error.
How do we subjectively measure time?
If we didn’t have clocks and New Year’s Eve dates, we would measure time by changes in our environment, but above all by signals from our own organism: hunger, thirst, breathing, tiredness, digestion, emotional impulses such as restlessness, fear, desire. “The interoceptive system, including the insular cortex, gives an impression of our internal organic state – how we feel. Studies using the fMRI brain scanning method have shown that the insular cortex is the most important brain region when it comes to estimating time periods ” writes psychologist Marc Wittman in an article for Psychology Today. The more intensively and attentively we experience our body or a feeling, the longer the moment of this experience seems to us – during it and later when we look back. The fact that we largely base our everyday lives on times and appointments and rarely consciously pay attention to our organic rhythm can contribute to the impression that time is sometimes running away from us. But that’s not all.
“We can say using the thumb: The more change and variety we experience in a period of time, the longer it later subjectively appears to us when we look back,” writes Marc Wittman. New experiences, excitement, first times – such life experiences trigger intense emotions in us, challenge us and fill our memory. After a week of vacation in which we visited old castles, enjoyed sunsets, and climbed hills, we can still write pages full or tell full-length stories years later. On the other hand, a routine, everyday week that differs at best slightly from 80 percent of the weeks in our lives leaves a much smaller lasting impression in our memory. In our personal perception of time, it appears to us as a very short, almost empty, barely existent period of time. Although objectively it lasted the same 168 hours as our varied, intensive vacation week.
For this reason, according to Marc Wittman, the feeling of time rushing away increases with age for most people: While as children we discover the world in a completely new way and experience it for the first time almost every day, as we gain more experience we become more hardened, harder to inspire, to excite and surprise. There’s something pleasant about that. But sometimes it feels like only a week passes between two New Year’s Eve parties.
Will each year of life necessarily become shorter for us without exciting incidents?
On the one hand, we can now say: It is what it is. We get older, at some point we understand that there are puddles on the sidewalk after a rainfall, we start work every day at 7, 8 or 9 a.m. and yet we are usually happy when nothing happens that disrupts our everyday routine. If that means that five years seem short to us – what does it matter, after all, from the sun’s point of view, they are. On the other hand, it is not for nothing that we are shocked when a 2024 suddenly appears above the annual horoscope. It’s been almost five years since we bought masks sewn from leftover fabric at the tailor shop and only met outdoors in pairs. And the fact that we are frightened shows us that something is wrong in our opinion. That perhaps we haven’t experienced enough for the time that has passed and been deducted from our personal account. But how can we experience more without changing our entire lives?
According to Marc Wittman, being more mindful of one’s own emotions can have an impact on our subjective perception of time. For example, one of his studies from 2015 showed that people who meditate regularly experience moments more intensely and generally perceive time as longer and more fulfilling than others. In a later study, he and his team observed the same phenomenon in people who did not meditate, but who overall maintained a reflective, attentive approach to their psyche and their inner impulses. “Emotional self-regulation, as an individual characteristic, means that a person actively responds to one’s own emotions rather than simply reacting to them. People who can regulate their emotions have more nuanced, subtler experiences in a given moment, which are deeper within them “Preserve long-term memory, which in turn slows down the subjective perception of time,” writes Marc Wittman. So learn to feel in order to live longer.
Conclusion
Whether we perceive time as slow or racing, our life as long or short: in a certain sense it is always both. If we consider how many years it took the earth to exist for humans to come into being and invent penicilin, our lives are short and five years is practically nothing. On the other hand, if we read a biography of an actress, hear the life story of our grandfather or a person our age who grew up in Brazil, we realize how much life can be packed into a few decades. And the person in Brazil thinks the same about our history. We realize, especially when looking at other people’s lives, that 30, 40 and even 80 or 100 years can be an eternity. An eternity that is enough and everything. If, after five years, we’re shocked at how quickly time has passed, maybe that’s telling us that we want more moments that last forever and everything. What a great luxury that there can be a discrepancy between objectively measured time and our perception.
Source used: psychologytoday.com