As a child, you can easily live through an hour and it feels like a lifetime. However, getting older, you soon see time as a thief. It speeds up so quickly and eats at every activity. Soon, you ask yourself the common question among adults, “How did time fly?”

 

The truth is that it has no wings until you give it some. All that really matters is how you perceive it.

 

You can take a walk down memory lane to when you were growing up. It seemed like you had all the time in the world. At dawn, you would wake up and wait for the sun.

 

Then it’s time for fun and games, and you’d find yourself eager to play. Playing would take so long — probably all day. But then you won’t even notice it because you’d have had such fun. You have such a good time enjoying all the new experiences. Everything seems like an adventure to you, mostly because it’s new.

 

 

Fast-forward to when you get older. You’ve seen a lot in life and it becomes too familiar. Nothing seems new to you anymore, and you just want things to happen — as expected. Time then seems to go by faster for you and you wonder why. The truth is it’s all on you. Whenever you wonder where time has gone, remember you probably kicked it in the b**t.

 

In an Inc Magazine article, Burkhard Bilger noted,

“The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. ‘This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older. Why childhood summers seem to go on forever, while old age slips by while we’re dozing. The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain writes down, and the more quickly time seems to pass.”

 

How you can slow down time

 

The best way to slow down time is to become more mindful of how you spend it. Take time out to be conscious of how you spend yours, and you’ll realise that it does wait for you. All you need to do is to manipulate it to suit you. Becoming too familiar with your experience makes time fly by. If you can’t expose yourself to new experiences then enjoy the old ones, find out how to do that below.

 

When you are having your bath in the morning, rather than hurry through the process, be more aware. Enjoy the experience of every lather, every scrub and also every rinse. You will notice that time will slow down instantly.

 

When you travel, take cognisance of the environment, including the people, the food, the places you visit and even the bed you sleep on. In the midst of processing all these new information, it will pass by slowly.

 

Just as British journalist Claudia Hammond puts it, any amount of input our brain receives at any given moment can create a timewarp. An Elle review explained this theory as such.

 

“Humans seem to process the world in three-second increments (the duration of a handshake, the length of the annoying sound computers make when they start up, and the periodic rhythm of speech),. And we develop a sense for how those increments sync with clock time. Time can warp when our brain receives much more or less input than usual in a three-second span. (For example, time slows down when you are about to crash your car, but you can easily lose a whole day watching things on YouTube.)”

 

Generally, be more mindful of what you see, feel, taste, smell and hear, rather than your thoughts. Live through your senses rather than through your mind.