Why Time Goes Faster As You Get Older
Close your eyes. Remember yourself as a child, playing with your friends, stressing out about spelling tests at school, coming home to a snack on the table, and asking for help with your homework. What do you feel? Maybe you're suspended in a time when things felt new, fun, and exciting.
Now think of similar activities as an adult: getting ready for bed, reading a book, having dinner with friends. These moments don't seem as interesting or exciting as they did when you were a child. When we think back on our childhood, it feels like it lasted a lifetime, but now it's like we're passengers in our own life, with time merely passing us by. Time flies, and unfortunately for us humans, evolution never gave us wings.
This feeling, where time seems to go faster when we're experiencing it but feels much longer when we remember it, is called the holiday paradox, coined by psychology writer Claudia Hammond. The holiday paradox refers to the idea that when we go on vacation, a week or even two weeks seem to go by so quickly we can barely believe that we had a vacation at all. Yet when the vacation is over and we look back on it, it feels like it was much longer than just one week.
Scientists believe that one of the reasons for this is that when we're on vacation, we have lots of new experiences in a short period. You go scuba diving for the first time, you see art, you eat interesting food. These events are outside your daily routine. Then you return to your ordinary life, marked by routine workdays and weekends. The stimulation of that vacation seems long gone, and when you look back on it, it feels like so much happened; it feels like so much time went by. Even though when you were there, it felt incredibly short.
Our experience of time changes depending on what we're doing and how we feel about those experiences. That's why you hear things like, "time flies when you're having fun." I'm sure you've experienced it before too: your favorite musician's concert is over in the blink of an eye, and at the end of a great first date, you realize you've been talking for hours, yet the conversation still feels incredibly short. This happens because when we're immersed in an activity, we're not checking our watch to see the minutes ticking by, so we lose track of time, making it seem like time is going much faster than normal.
Immersion is the key word here. Because time doesn't only go faster when we're doing something exciting or something we'd love to do. How many times have you told yourself you'd only spend 10 minutes on TikTok, only to look up from your phone three hours later and see that the sun has gone down? Exactly! It's because of how immersive the app experience is, and it keeps you busy and makes you forget about time. These differences in perception make the holiday paradox both relatable and confusing.
To help us understand the phenomenon better, we need to look at how people think about their childhood. In a 2005 survey, 499 participants between the ages of 14 to 94 were asked about the pace at which they felt their lives were moving. When asked about shorter durations like weeks and months, all the way up to a year, the participants' perception of time didn't appear to increase with age. However, when asked about longer durations, the older people were, the faster they felt like their lives were moving.
People over 40 in particular felt like time went by slowly in childhood, then accelerated through their teenage years and into early adulthood, and then after that, time just flew by. But why? Why do we feel time goes faster the older we get? Our brain has a limited storage capacity, and so to keep things running smoothly, our brain encodes new experiences into memory; it tends to skip over the more repetitive events in our lives. The more memories we have, the more things we can look back on. When we're thinking retrospectively, the more things we can remember about a period of time, the longer we feel that time period was.
Think about your time in college or in high school. You remember most of that period of your life because you were absorbing so much information that your brain was forced to slow down to take it all in, creating new memories and learning new concepts. Your brain had to store a lot of new information, and so when you think back, there's a lot of things to remember, which makes that period last longer in your memory.
This is why scientists always encourage you to learn new skills, no matter how old you are. Because by learning new things, you're giving your brain a reason to absorb and store new information, which in turn makes that moment last so much longer. If you're interested in learning new skills like programming, math, or computer science, then I recommend you check out the sponsor of today's video, brilliant.org, the best place to learn STEM subjects interactively.
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Back to our story: new experiences don't always have to be good or fun to make time slow down. If you've ever felt fear, chances are your life seemed to move in slow motion. If you're in a car crash, a bike accident, or even feel physically endangered by another person, your cognitive reality shifts. What might only be a few seconds of fear feels like minutes or even hours. In her book, Claudia Hammond talked about a study in which people with arachnophobia were asked to look at spiders for 45 seconds.
When they were asked afterward, every participant thought they were looking for a much, much longer period of time. They may not have been in imminent danger, but their fear was triggered. Their world slowed down, desperate to get out of the situation they found themselves in. Over the years, there have been many theories about why time seems to speed up as we age. You can see that our world, in general, has sped up. This has caused all of us to feel like life is moving more quickly, but if you talk to a 5-year-old, chances are they don't feel the same life passing by them effect.
There's also the proportionality theory, which says a year feels faster at 40 than at 10, because one year constitutes much less of your life. When you're 10, one year is 10% of your life, but when you're 40, it's just 2 and ½%. This, though, only works when you're thinking about life in its entirety and not in the specific periods when time slows down or speeds up, like when you're dancing on your wedding night or doing a plank.
The holiday paradox tells us that our perception of time is everything, and that perception is deeply affected by our age and memory. If you graduated college four years ago, you likely remember walking across that stage like yesterday. But if you think about your first day of high school, it might seem like decades have passed, even though it's only been 12 years. Time impacts our memory, but memory also creates and shapes our experience of time. We're most likely to remember the timing of an event if it's distinctive and vivid.
Some people might coast through their 50s, not creating many new memories; then that decade might seem lost to time. But if you ask someone who went through a divorce or lost a loved one in their 50s, those years might feel incredibly like the slowest decade of their lives. Hammond writes that time perception matters because it's the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality. The mental reality of an adult stuck in their routine, unable to take vacations or learn new skills is much duller than that of a child experiencing the world for the first time. That adult's bank of new memories is simply running low.
We learned new skills from childhood to early adulthood and found ourselves in a lot of novel situations. Because of this, our early years tend to be overrepresented in memory, making them feel like they lasted longer than our later years. The 50-year-old divorcee finds herself in a period where time seems to slow down, because she's making new memories, having new experiences, and feeling new emotions.
In some ways, these midlife shifts that many of us have, for better or for worse, actually tap into the kind of mental experience we went through as kids. When you're a child, every sports game, good grade, or fight with a friend feels like the most important thing in the world. But as we get older, that feeling is much less frequent. We find ourselves waiting for significant life moments, like a marriage or promotion, to get the same rush we got as a kid, to feel that same experience of novelty and memory-making. And the rest of the time, we're just going through the motions, letting time pass without giving it too much thought, until we wake up one day and can't figure out where it went.
As it turns out, children might actually perceive time more slowly than adults. There's evidence that from a kid's perspective, time— as they're experiencing it—is slower. That's because memory, attention, and executive function, the cognitive control of our behavior, are all under development when we're children. Kids' neurotransmissions are physically slower than those of adults, affecting how they perceive the passage of time.
By the time we grow up, our circuits are wired to figure this out. Researchers conducted a study where participants listened to a series of tones and compared their duration. The youngest participants, about 5 years old, had the least accuracy in perceiving how long a tone lasts. They often heard short tones lasting much longer than they really did. This could explain why, when we're young, things feel like they take so much time. Even the most basic things, like eating breakfast or getting dressed, when we're adults, those same tasks feel like they go by in a flash. Often, we don't even remember we did them.
Somehow, you got dressed this morning, but do you actually remember it happening—picking out your pants and putting on your shoes? Every day might be so routine; it's not creating any new memories for you. The moments that we live in, but in which we don't form any new memories, are those bits of time that escape us. While time might move slowly at 5 years old, our experiences between the ages of 15 and 25 stick with us the most. This is the era of nostalgia for most of us. We remember scenes from our lives, the books we read, and the movies we saw during that time.
Can you think of your favorite movie quotes or funny moments? Chances are, they're from a film that came out when you were in your late teens or early 20s. This is when we have more new experiences than most other times in our lives. We have our first job, solo traveling experiences, relationships; it's often our first time living away from home and the first time we feel we have a choice in how we spend our days. While it's happening, this period feels like it's on overdrive, but looking back at it, it feels like that part of our lives lasted forever.
That's because we created so many memories, met so many new people, and saw the world in many new ways. We feel nostalgic for that time because it felt so complete. That is the holiday paradox. If you're living in that time, enjoy it; savor it. If you made it to your late 20s, you probably know the phenomenon of having a sudden longing for your younger self, your younger life. You've settled into a routine where stressful responsibilities often replace endless fun moments.
So how do we slow down our lives again? The truth is, of course, that we can't slow time down, but we can do more things to create memories of the time that we have. Look for novel experiences that engage your brain. You don't need a vacation to feel excited or refreshed about your life in the world. New things are waiting around the corner if you just open your eyes and look for them. Constantly challenge yourself to learn new skills, like maybe learning a new cuisine or building a bench for your backyard.
Maybe you just want to get better at meeting people—go to a neighborhood event or sit alone at a bar and talk to a stranger. Whether big or small, let something exciting take over your brain and let you feel like a kid again. Another hack is to try to remember your day as vividly as possible. Routine can feel good, but it also doesn't allow for new memories to get imprinted on our brains. Spending time reflecting on your day makes you more likely to ingrain the memories, even the bad ones.
Naturally, our memory is short-lived. It's easy to go to bed every night and not think about what happened to us during the day. But what if you stopped and spent a few minutes to relive it? Would mundane things become important or exciting? Would you remember someone or something you saw on the street that was new or strange? Suddenly your day might feel a bit slower. Whether you just think about it or want to write it down, try to make the moments of your life last and take up real estate in your head.
That's what we're doing when we're on vacation: we're banking all sorts of new, interesting memories—memories we might look back on when we want to reminisce about how full our days felt. Our own minds actively create the way we experience time. While we may not always have control over our time as the demands of life mount in front of us, we can control how we remember things, and therefore control our perception of the time we have.
Time, as we're told, is immovable; it's totally defined. A second is a second; a year is a year. And as much as we might want to change it, we're told that's the reality. But if you do think back to your childhood, a time hopefully filled with joy and novelty, a year feels so much longer. If you've been in danger, the minutes you weren't sure you'd be safe surely couldn't have been just minutes.
So yes, maybe time is immovable, but it's comforting to know that we do have some control over how we experience it. We can warp it to make it shorter or stretch it to make it feel longer. And while we might never learn how to travel in time, at least we know we have some small control over it.
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