Is Life Speeding Up? Here's How to Slow It Down

Is Life Speeding Up? Here's How to Slow It Down

Ever feel like time is slipping through your fingers?

You're not alone. Recent psychological research suggests that our perception of time accelerates when we fall into repetitive routines and lack novelty in our daily lives (Nelson & Moore, 2020). This can lead to increased stress, burnout, and a nagging feeling that life is passing us by faster than ever.

Interestingly, neuroscience shows that when we engage in new experiences, whether it’s trying a different walking route, meeting new people, or even changing the order of our morning routine, we activate the brain’s hippocampus, which plays a key role in time perception and memory formation (Suddendorf et al., 2021). Essentially, more novelty = richer memories = time feels slower.

Mindfulness practices have a similar effect. By staying present and attuned to your environment, you engage the prefrontal cortex and reduce the brain’s default mode network activity (Farb et al., 2007), which is linked to mind-wandering. That means fewer racing thoughts and more moments that feel full and grounded.

But here's the twist: our brains are prediction machines. They're constantly forecasting what's next based on past experiences. This predictive processing helps us navigate the world efficiently and makes time feel like it's flying when we're stuck in monotony. When the brain's predictions match reality too closely, there's little new information to process, leading to a compressed sense of time (Clark, 2013).

Introducing variability to your life can look like learning a new skill or exploring unfamiliar environments, creating prediction errors, and prompting the brain to update its models. This enhances learning and stretches our perception of time, making experiences feel longer and more memorable (Eagleman, 2009).

So, if you feel like life is speeding up, maybe it’s time to mix things up, slow things down, and start experiencing your time rather than racing through it.

References

Clark, A., 2013. Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), pp.181–204.

Eagleman, D.M., 2009. Human time perception and its illusions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(2), pp.131–136.

Farb, N.A.S., Segal, Z.V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z. & Anderson, A.K., 2007. Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), pp.313–322.

Nelson, L.D. & Moore, S.G., 2020. Routines and time perception: How habits compress psychological time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(4), pp.657–667.

Suddendorf, T., Redshaw, J., & Bulley, A., 2021. Time, memory, and the mind: The psychology and neuroscience of temporal perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(6), pp.432–446.