The days between the last day of one school year and the first day of a new one used to last an eternity.Each was full of distinct moments — discovering a bird's nest, racing your brother through the woods, a chocolate popsicle savored until the last liquid drop.
And now?If you're like many adults, you may feel that time passes more quickly than you can grasp it.In a 2024 survey, psychologists found that most people felt like the holiday season seemed to arrive more quickly every year, Christmas after Christmas after Christmas.
Why does everything seem to speed up as you age?And is it possible to recapture that childlike sense of time moving slowly?
Time is relative
A number of factors probably create the sensation that time is either lasting forever or flying, says Christopher Dwyer, a psychologist and researcher at the Technological University of the Shannon in Athlone, Ireland.The first is that for children, a year — or even three months — is objectively an enormous fraction of their time on the planet.A single summer vacation is a substantial portion of all their lived experience.
At the same time, young children change rapidly, so the person who went on summer vacation in May might feel like a stranger to the one who heads back to school in September.
What's more, children are experiencing many things for the very first time, points out Steven Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University."New experience stretches out time," he says.The first chocolate popsicle, then, probably felt like a revelation.If that day also included a first trip to the zoo — complete with first monkeys, first giraffes, and first giant anteater — then it's not hard to see how it might have felt expansive.
Children are not the only ones capable of experiencing this kind of satisfying time dilation.Taylor recalls, as a young adult, falling in love and moving to East Germany from the U.K.."Everything was so different and so new.I was learning a new language.I was in my first serious relationship."
That novelty shaped his perception of time.When he returned to the U.K. for a visit, "I felt like I'd been away for eight years rather than eight months.So many things had happened in my life.I had had so many new experiences.My life was so different.I was surprised that my friends were still doing the same jobs."
Shaking off the familiar
This is the kind of sensation we chase when we think of slowing time: a sense of fullness, sustained over hours and days.
One way to bring that feeling back is to seek out novelty, experts suggest.Take a trip, whether it's to a new country or to a different part of town; the density of new experiences common to travelers can provoke a satisfying sense of time expansion.Even something as minute as trying a recipe with new ingredients can bring an echo of that old wonder — whether it's Jerusalem artichokes or marsh samphire, you will probably remember the dinner more clearly than one in which you made yet another chicken breast.
It's the memory that matters, in the end.The sensation that time is slowing down occurs in retrospect, upon looking back at time well spent.
Making something out of the time
Dwyer's practical recommendation is to find a new hobby."Try and do something new every day.And I'm not recommending that you need to go bungee jumping tomorrow, and then have Polish class the next day.It doesn't have to be unrealistically novel," he says."It's about breaking that normality."
But that novelty needs to be consistently renewed.Many of us, as we age, seem to grow inured to new things — they don't have the same power, says Taylor."There seems to be a kind of mechanism in our minds that switches our attention off to newness.If you go to a new environment, it's fantastically real for a few days, maybe even a few weeks.It's really stimulating and exhilarating.But at a certain point, you get used to it.Your mind edits out the newness of it.It becomes familiar, maybe even a bit mundane."
Is it possible to stay within the rhythm of one's own life, and somehow find it novel again?
Taylor thinks so."You don't physically have to move around all the time to slow down time.Ultimately, it depends on your state of consciousness, or your state of mind," he says."There's research showing that if you cultivate a state of mindfulness, a kind of openness to your experience, that will also slow down time."
Perhaps, with the right kind of attention, you can feel again that fractal quality of childhood, a sense of a thousand tiny arcs — the day of the popsicle, the day of the bird's nest, the last day of summer — for as many days as you have left.
