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The new year encourages us to look back and reflect, and this year more than any other, we’ve been made aware of time passing. Do events that happened this time last year seem as if they happened two or three years ago?
Although time itself moves steadily, our perception of its passage varies according to three factors – your mood, what you’re doing, and your age.
When you’re enjoying yourself, particularly when what you’re doing is important and challenging to you, time seems to fly. This is what Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University calls “flow”.
Even just looking at appealing images can speed the sense of time passing, as Philip Gable and Bryan Poole at the University of Alabama discovered. They showed participants images of geometric shapes (neutral items), flowers (low positive appeal) or delicious sweet treats (high positive appeal) for varying lengths of time and asked them to estimate how long each image appeared. Participants consistently underestimated the time sweet treats were displayed.
If, however, you’re frightened or angry, it can feel as if time slows down. Sylvie Droit-Volet at Universite Blaise Pascal showed participants various videos: frightening films such as The Scream or The Shining; sad ones such as City of Angels; or neutral clips – for example, weather reports. When asked to estimate time duration of exposure afterwards, participants overestimated time more after watching frightening films than after viewing sad or neutral content.
Leah Campbell and Richard Bryant at the University of New South Wales demonstrated the effect of mood on time perception when they asked 76 novice skydivers to rate levels of fear and (positive) excitement before skydiving and soon after landing. Those who felt frightened reported time passing slowly; those who were excited said the time seemed to speed by.
In effect, anything that demands vigilance makes it seem as if time passes more slowly. However, the experience need not be negative. Oxford psychologist Mark Williams points out that practising mindfulness – giving your full attention to the present moment – seems to slow the passage of time. Awe-inducing experiences have the same effect; Melanie Rudd and colleagues at Stanford found that participants who read about an awesome experience felt time moved more slowly than did those who were offered happy or neutral stories.
Attentional demand helps explain why time seems to speed up as we grow older. When we’re young everything is new and demanding of attention, so time seems to move slowly. By the time we’re adults, much of what we do is routine and passes by without notice – for example, you may sometimes be unaware of your journey to and from work – so time seems to speed up.
If you wish to manipulate your sense of time passing, how would you do so?
If you want time to pass quickly, repeat well-learned (preferably enjoyable) tasks. Better yet, engage in activities that put you into flow.
When you want time to slow down, embark on new adventures and new learning, practise mindfulness, or seek awe-inspiring experiences, particularly – as Mariya Davydenko and Johanna Peetz at Carleton University in Ottawa found – in natural settings.