You would sometimes feel that your time and life are going very quickly. Have you ever wondered why time is going too fast or why it feels so? It mostly feels when you look upon your past. Despite this, the time of summer vacations, school trips, time spent with grandparents, and many other memories of childhood seems endless. As we grow, time probably also appears to you going at a terrifying rate with birthdays, events, festivals every year.
Why is time going too fast as we age?
But you do not need to have such emotions. Time is going too fast is not the case. It possibly happens because of our flexible experience of time which sometimes speeds up and sometimes slows down. There also exist altered states of our consciousness that might alter our experience of time. The psychological processes here make time more relative in our life just like it is in science.
Two main factors emerged because of the relation between our experiences of time and the quantity of information our mind executes in that time. One is that as we age, time seems to speed up and the second is that time appears to go slow when we expose ourselves to new environments and experiences.
We can think of our childhood and remember how long a single year of that time seemed. Now in adulthood, years roll fastly. A child takes the world as an attractive, enchanting place with several new experiences and feelings happening all around. But as we get older and older, our experiences in a particular duration of time decrease as compared to that in childhood, we start getting more familiar with the world. We start to feel more sensitive towards our experiences and lose ourselves in our satisfiable world by procrastination and overthinking. This makes us lose our control over time and after that at last we feel like time is going too fast.
Familiarity makes time go too fast
When we have a new experience or do something unfamiliar, we make memories about that, time appears to go fast at that event, but when you look back at the same event after days, months or years then that time seems too long. It seems to us that time is going too fast when we do familiar things. Other than that when an individual goes to a new place (let say a country), or goes to spend time with a special person, at such times that individual becomes more sensitive towards their surroundings and mind starts executing more information.
Everything seems unfamiliar(new experience ) in such conditions, and that individual pays much attention, takes more information. These all activities slow down the time as you are more in the moment then. All we require is expanding our experience of time. As we learned that familiarity makes time go faster, we have to expose ourselves to new challenges, and simply to something unfamiliar to us as much as possible. Traveling to new places, taking on new challenges, getting exposed to new learnings, such things increase the amount of information our mind processes and expand our experience of time passing.
Being in the moment slows time
The most effective way to slow downtime is to be more “mindful” of our experiences. If we have control over time, then only we will be able to experience it. It means giving your whole attention to what we are seeing, feeling, tasting, etc(as this is what we did in our childhood, just dedicated to one thing at a time) rather than to our thoughts(which most adults do).
It is most important to live your life through senses and experiences rather than through minds and psyche. It is a way to neglect familiar things and can be achieved by attitude towards life experiences.
When you are on your way home by bus then it is better to look up at the sky, feeling the passing trees, houses rather than being lost in the bad happening of that day. Being in the moment is very important to enjoy your time. When you enjoy your bus ride or simply live in the moment, you make yourself more sensitive to different experiences you’re gonna face, it expands time. As mindfulness led to an increment in the amount of information we process. This makes us understand and control our experience of time going.
Quality life
Many of us just do different things to have more living years like exercise, diets, etc. However, we should also need to increase the amount of time we experience in life, as most of the time we are lost in our life problems, thoughts, and imagination.
This is all that a quality life means to have an active, alert mind and effort for learning new things(likewise slowing down your time by being in it completely, experiencing it all the way). It is important to learn, engage with new people, learnings, cultures, develop new skills, etc. This will surely make the feeling of your lifetime qualitatively much longer, healthier and happier;)
So this was all about the article on “Why time is going too fast?”