As we come to the end of another year that seems to have whistled by it seems an apt moment to pause and reflect on how we, as humans, perceive time passing. I did a bunch of reading on this a few years back but it’s always struck me as a fascinating topic, not least because it has such an impact on how we perceive our lives. So for my final post of the year, I’ve written about a few insights that really stuck with me.
Interoception
This is the idea that time perception is a deeply embodied experience, not just a mental construct. Our subjective experience of time is closely tied to the body’s internal physiological rhythms, like the heartbeat. People who are more attuned to their bodily states (e.g. those people who can accurately count their heartbeats without feeling their pulse) tend to perceive time differently than those who are less aware.
So in moments of stress or fear, the heart beats faster, and time can seem to slow down. It’s amazing how this works – it’s a direct interaction between your body’s physiological state and your brain’s estimation of time. The brain basically ‘samples’ your internal bodily signals, and when those signals are frequent (like when your heart is racing), time seems elongated. Conversely, when you’re calm or in a meditative state, your heartbeat slows, and time may seem to speed up or even feel irrelevant altogether.
I’m not a practitioner but this is why practices like mindfulness meditation can alter the perception of time so profoundly. They slow bodily rhythms, creating a more expansive sense of the present moment. This essentially means that by learning to regulate our internal states (through breathing exercises, meditation, and so on) we can, in a sense, influence our experience of time itself.
Anticipation
Our perception of time is also profoundly influenced by anticipation and whether we are looking forward to something or dreading it. Our brain actually ‘pre-lives’ anticipated events, stretching or compressing our sense of the present moment depending on the emotional weight of what lies ahead. So when you are eagerly awaiting something, like a holiday or an exciting event, time leading up to it feels slower. Conversely, when you’re anxious or dreading something, like a difficult meeting or an upcoming exam, time seems to accelerate as the event looms closer.
This bending of time is tied to how our brain processes future events. Our brains use memory and imagination to simulate future scenarios, and this mental simulation creates a ‘temporal pull’ on the present, making us overly aware of time’s passage. Emotional anticipation can amplify this distortion of time perception by changing the way the brain encodes time intervals. Positive anticipation (like excitement) can make waiting feel like forever, while negative anticipation (like fear) compresses it. Ironically, we spend so much energy mentally rehearsing the future that when it finally arrives it rarely matches the intensity of our anticipation leading to a psychological mismatch. So a long-awaited holiday can fly by because your brain has already ‘lived’ much of it in advance through anticipation, and a dreaded event can feel less terrible or shorter than the endless ‘countdown’ leading up to it.
Why life seems to speed up as you get older
The brain doesn’t perceive time as a continuous flow but instead, it takes snapshots of reality at certain intervals (a process called ‘temporal sampling’). These temporal markers are key to how we perceive time and how our memory structures time. Unique experiences create more mental markers or temporal landmarks that punctuate time, making it feel longer in retrospect. Our childhoods for example, are more likely to be filled with novel experiences, creating rich memories which seem to stretch time. If we have less novelty as we grow older, there are less mental markers to encode and time seems to compress, making years seem to pass quickly.
There are also other things at play here. For example, the proportionality effect means that as we live longer each year represents a smaller fraction of our total lived experience (for a 10-year-old, one year is 10% of their life, while for a 50-year-old, it’s only 2%). This shrinking proportion makes years feel subjectively shorter as we age.
Then there’s the theory that as Dopemine levels decline with age, this reduces our sensitivity to new stimuli and may even affect the brain’s internal clock mechanisms, slowing down how frequently the brain ‘ticks’ or samples events in real-time. And the ‘Attention Drift’ hypothesis which posits that time perception is closely tied to how much attention we pay to our surroundings. Younger people tend to be more present and curious, noticing details and being fully engaging with their environment. Adults, preoccupied with responsibilities and familiar environments, may experience ‘attentional drift’, where their focus shifts away from the present moment, reducing cognitive load but compressing time.
Another way of thinking about this is the brain’s reliance on predictive processing based on past experience. When events match expectations, they are processed faster and with less effort, making time feel shorter. Our brain switches to ‘autopilot’, reducing mental markers. So driving the same route to work every day for example, may become so automatic that one trip blurs into another. It’s worth noting that how we reflect on our past also influences how we perceive time. People who feel gratitude for their life experiences often have a more expansive view of time, while those who dwell on missed opportunities or regrets experience a compressed sense of the past.
The lesson, I guess, is to make sure you continue to have unique experiences as you age (something which I fully intend to do) and then to be grateful for them.
The paradox of boredom
Given the lack of cognitive engagement and novelty, in times of boredom our brain has fewer temporal markers to break up the flow of time. So the passing of minutes and hours can feel stretched. The brain may even actively try to recalibrate or self-tune its timekeeping by heightening awareness of small changes which can make even a minute feel interminable.
Interestingly, while boredom stretches time in the moment, it compresses it in memory. Looking back on a boring period, you may struggle to remember much of it because there were few meaningful events to anchor that time. This is why a monotonous week can seem endless as it happens but vanish into a blur in hindsight.
Conversely, in highly engaging or novel experiences, time flies while you’re immersed, but in memory, those same moments feel rich and expansive. This paradox highlights how boredom creates the illusion of time abundance but robs it of meaningful content.
Why time passes quicker when you’re absorbed in something
We’ve all had the experience of being so immersed in something that we lose track of time. Activities that require higher cognitive engagement often make time seem to pass more quickly – but why?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s well known concept of ‘flow’ describes a state of deep focus and enjoyment where you’re fully immersed in an activity. In a flow state, your attention narrows meaning that all of your cognitive resources are directed toward the task at hand, leaving little bandwidth for noticing the passage of time. But you also stop thinking about yourself and your surroundings, including the concept of ‘clock time’. The brain regions responsible for self-awareness and self-referential thinking actually quiet down.
When you’re engaged in a cognitively demanding task (like playing music) your brain is processing a large amount of information, leaving less ‘mental bandwidth’ to notice time. Your ‘temporal resolution’ changes with the brain taking fewer snapshots because you’re not consciously scanning your environment and with fewer time markers recorded, the brain perceives the period as shorter in retrospect.
It’s as if the brain’s reward for deep focus is the gift of freedom from time itself. It’s a reminder of something quite profound: time perception is not about the clock, but about how engaged we are with the world. And that’s the thought I’d like to leave you with. How we fill our time (physically, emotionally, and mentally) matters far more than the ticking clock itself.
A version of this post was also published on my weekly Substack – To join our community of thousands of subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
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