As we get older, there is a sense of the transience of time, every second runs faster. The acceleration is noticeable every week, the month is getting shorter, and even the outgoing year has flashed in one fell swoop.
Obviously, time doesn't run out faster. The hour is still 60 minutes, the day has 24 hours, and the year, as always, takes 12 months and 365 days (366 leap days). However, research has shown that our perception of time does change as we get older. Over the years, time seems to accelerate.
Many psychologists believe that time has not accelerated so much that our perception changes with age. Biological changes in the human body are natural aging processes, such as a decrease in the release of dopamine from the brain, which affects the internal clock.
Scientists believe that the acceleration of time means a decrease in the frequency of emotional experiences, such as the first kiss, the birth of a child, the first reward for achievement - living in memory for a long time. However, over time, the accumulated emotionless and subsequent experience merge in memory as a single whole, and it seems that time “has accelerated” - a purely subjective perception.
The decrease in emotional intensity as we get older is a product of "addiction." This means that more and more we do mechanical operations in certain places, the less it stands out from the general background of actions. Events literally "drop out" from memory and are not remembered in time.
Think about the time you are on autopilot, whether driving to work, completing work tasks, or spending time with your family. All of this, as a rule, merges into a common memory, making past emotionally awakened experiences against this background much longer than they actually were.
Life on "autopilot" is generally normal, as the human brain is naturally connected to energy conservation in order to conserve resources for emergency use.
Everyday life condenses into a smaller part of our memory. Whereas events that evoke vivid emotions, such as extreme joy, love, sadness, and stress, occupy a large part of the memory database.
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By releasing a lot of energy in highly emotional experiences - events that happen less frequently, we get older due to the experience - everything else seems to be accelerated.
There is the phenomenon of "rapid telescoping", in which significant events occupy a disproportionate amount of brain space due to the significance of events in life before this point in time, and after the mark. This is why 10-year-old married couples make the remark, "It only looks like we've been married for 10 years." In fact, the memory of the marriage was so tightly implanted in their minds that the time in the memory "before and after" united.
Another reason why time seems to fly by with age is simple math. Paul Janet's Proportional Theory suggests that each section of time (month, year, or decade) moves faster than in the past. Everything from what is proportional, each new episode takes up less space for life than the previous one. Consider a great quote from William James:
The apparent length of a segment in a given period of a person's life is proportional to the total length of life itself. For example, a 10-year-old child feels that a year is 1/10 of his entire life, a 50-year-old estimates it as 1/50 - and life, meanwhile, maintains a constant length.
Can we slow down time?
1. Find more emotional feelings in the experienced events, which will help lengthen the time. It will captivate and provide more impressive moments to look back to see the previous powerful memories.
2. Enjoy the Present: Instead of always planning and strategizing for the next step for the future, take the moment and assess where you are at the moment. Do not try to constantly speed yourself up to get to the future point, live in the moment, enjoying the emotions.
3. Reducing the level of multitasking: Life often forces us to do several things at once. But solving multitasking won't give you more time to make new memories; on the contrary, it will “age” the memory.
It so happens that small events require you to exert more mental capacity at the same time, reducing your ability to long lasting memories in such moments. Relax and take things one at a time. You will be able to accomplish things that will have a longer lasting impact in life.
Finally, try something new: an emotional component, a life-changing experience, this will help fill the memory bank and slow down time, get out of your comfort zone and "refresh".
Do something new, thereby raising your chances of lasting memories higher than doing old and familiar things. Change your lifestyle, the more memories you acquire - the slowing down will be the perception of time.