Why do we feel like time is passing faster and faster?

Einstein already said it, time is relative. It doesn’t always flow at the same pace. In fact, an hour can feel like an instant or an eternity.

Among other issues, its speed depends on what we are doing: we all know that spending an hour enjoying a recital by our favorite artist is not the same as spending an hour waiting in line for a tedious procedure. In the first case, time flies. In the second, it seems to be making no progress. An hour is always 60 minutes, but the perception can be very different.

Many adults have noticed something they are not very happy about: The older you get, the time seems to go by faster.. This has a scientific explanation and we will tell you here.

The older we are, the faster time passes.

How does your time move?

In 2005, the psychologists Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lenhoff of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich conducted a study to investigate this phenomenon. They surveyed 499 people between the ages of 14 and 94 to find out how they perceived time moving. They were asked to give a score to each given period of time based on how quickly they thought it passed.

From the results, they observed that, for short durations, such as a week or month, the perception of speed did not increase significantly for older people. That is, it did not vary with age. However, in relation to longer periods (years or decades), differences were found: Adults tend to feel that time passes faster.

In turn, most of the participants who had lived four decades or more mentioned that during their childhood they had felt that time passed slowly, but As they got older they estimated that it accelerated more and more.

The time having lived few or many years

When we are little, every day is an adventure. 24 hours is a lot when you barely exceed 8760 hours (a year) existing. Now, a 10-year-old child has lived 87,600 hours. And a 50-year-old adult has 438,000 hours under his belt. When you are a one-year-old child, a day represents a considerable percentage of your entire experience, but when you are an adult, a day can feel like something very small, Well, you’ve already lived a few.

Think about it like this: when you turn four, 50% of your life is simply two years. On the other hand, when you turn fifty, half of your life corresponds to nothing more and nothing less than twenty-five. People of different ages have a notion of time very different, partly because their life span is different. In fact, the very abstract conceptualization of time means that young children do not fully understand its meaning. It is not something innate, but is acquired at 6 or 7 years old.

One more step: experiences

Both the quality and the level of novelty of each experience are elements that assume a certain role when determining how fast or slow time has passed.

In this sense, it is important to make a clarification: human beings have different perspectives regarding time.

The prospective perspective It is what we perceive about an event that is still happening or will happen in the future. While the retrospective perspective It occurs once the event ended and therefore became part of the past.

It is for this reason that we may feel that time flies on a fun and exciting vacation (prospective perspective), but when we are already home and remember that trip, we have the feeling that it lasted longer than other, less amazing experiences (retrospective perspective). .

This happens because Our brain tends to store new experiences in memory, and not so much everyday ones.. Therefore, you may remember in detail something surprising that you experienced on an exotic vacation. However, if I ask you what you had for dinner last Thursday, you may have a hard time giving me an answer.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains to us that When an experience is repeated frequently, the neurons that are responsible for recording it are activated less. On the other hand, the memory of novel experiences will be much richer.

Novelty helps slow down time

So our perception of time is based on the number of new memories. The stage par excellence for new experiences is childhood, right? During childhood we live innovative adventures daily. Everything is pure discovery. Animals, colors, games, activities with friends, meals and anything else that happens can open up a magical and fascinating world. Well, everything is a potential wonder.

This means that the more unknown experiences we experience and the more memories we have, We will have the feeling that time “lasted longer.” But the life of an adult tends to become very routine due to work, home, family. New experiences become more and more sporadic as we get older.

Novelty influences the perception of time.

Fortunately, all is not lost

Now that you have this information, you can modify your perception of time by incorporating new activities. Escaping monotony can give us pleasant surprises. Some ideas: sign up for an Arabic cooking course, plan a trip to a place that has a culture opposite to yours, change your commute to work, try a sport for the first time.

Do anything you haven’t done yet. From there you will obtain new memories that, although they will not allow you to pause time, will help you perceive it more slowly.

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