Remember when summers lasted forever? You’d ride your bike until the streetlights came on, eat three popsicles before lunch, and still feel like the day had room left over.
Now? You put the Christmas lights away, blink twice, and Costco already has them back on display.
Psychologists have a fancy name for this: the time perception paradox. Translation? The older you get, the faster time feels like it’s flying.
Here’s why:
The math is stacked against you. When you were 10, a year was a tenth of your life. That’s huge. At 60, it’s less than 2%. Suddenly, a whole year feels like a weekend trip.
Routines blur the days. As kids, everything was new. New school, new friends, new “adventures” (a.k.a. bad ideas involving tree forts). All those firsts marked time. As adults, our days often look like copy-paste. Your brain doesn’t bother filing away the reruns.
Memory cheats. The brain counts experiences, not hours. The fewer fresh experiences, the shorter life feels in hindsight.
So what’s the solution? You can’t actually stop time. (If I could, I’d bottle it, sell it, and retire on a beach somewhere.) But you can stretch your perception of it.
Here’s how:
Do something new. Take a different walking path. Learn a skill that makes you feel clumsy. Dance, even if you’ve got two left feet.
Mix up your movement. Swap the treadmill for a stretch class. Try a micro-workout. Move in a way that surprises your body, and your brain will file the memory differently.
Add a dash of adventure. Adventure doesn’t have to be skydiving. It can be trying salmon instead of chicken, or letting your grandkids teach you TikTok (just brace yourself).
Want more time? Don’t look at the clock. Add more moments worth remembering. The days won’t literally get longer, but they’ll feel like they did.
As the saying goes, “It’s not the years in your life, it’s the life in your years.”
Today’s experiment: Break one routine. Change your route, your workout, your breakfast—anything. Give your brain something new to chew on. That’s how you stretch time.
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