Time is an omnipresent part of the universe that can’t be broken. It is possible to bend time by travelling close to the speed of light, but is there a way to do this under the normal scenario of being a human?
I think there is. At least in our minds.
It is possible for us to see a completely straight line, and yet perceive it as bent. Just like our minds’ inability to comprehend the true physics of the situation, we can also bend time for ourselves.
Quick evidence
When you watch a TikTok video for the first time and hit a moment where you are bored. It feels painfully long. Every millisecond is an age. You are pulled to compulsively flick to the next thing.
The moment a viewers attention waivers they move on, because they can’t handle this prison of watching something that isn’t mind-blowing. They don’t remain in this dragging limbo of pain, because there is no concept of waiting. Time is ironically precious as we spend time wasting it.
If you make it to the end and rewatch it, the weirdest thing happens. It feels faster. You know each part that is coming up and the 15 seconds fly by.
Our mind is doing freaky things.
The speed of time has not changed. Our perception has.
Why?
We are stimulated by doing new things and put on edge waiting for a variable reward.
Our body is in higher alert so it can take in more things and react faster.
Curiously this slows down our perception of time.
If the mind is familiar with something, it has less to worry about or be alert for. It sits back and stops trying to learn from it’s surrounding or react quickly.
It also isn’t making new memories.
Memory is precious use of resources. With millions of inputs a minute the brain is busily ignoring and forgetting as much as possible. When we do novel things the mind works harder to pay attention in these moments.
It’s an interesting conundrum that the preception of time can be tricked as much as our eyesight.
What practical lessons can we gather?
1 - Regularly do new things
The amount of photos I take is a reliable barometer for how interesting and novel my month has been.
If I’ve been at home working and doing the same habits I can reach the end of a month with barely any photos. I haven’t been anywhere or seen many friends or gone out. It’s a warnig sign I need to do more.
Some months I have a bursting collection of photos from different things I’ve enjoyed.
My memories are so rich and full of what that month meant to my life. The more memories saved create a longer experiential time perception to reflect upon.
For many Covid lockdowns felt like a year just disappeared into a black hole.
When all your days blur into one the month or year flashes by.
What is a long life?
Your memory is like a notepad on which you write your life. Each day is a new page.
It’s not about having more pages, it’s about writing more on each page whilst avoiding long stretches of blank pages.
A book’s true length is determined by the number of words, not the number of pages.
Put it this way.
We want to stay alive, so that we have more moments.
What we should seek, is more moments that make us feel alive.
A long life is a full life.
A year passes just like every other year. We can’t change time but only our approach. It is up to us to fill that time in ways that fill our memories.
2 - Reframe feelings - Ride the edge
So often the feeling of anxiety is something we want to resolve with something easy.
When I am stuck with my writing or editing I want to relieve the tension by going to the fridge and eating. I might find myself checking my email or my social or the stats on my podcast.
If I find myself in a conversation that doesn’t feel relevant I have the urge to stare at my phone.
I’m not used to sitting with tension.
Can we learn to think of these moments of tension as a friendly feeling?
Can we instead be in the moment and think of this as an opportunity to be mindfully in flow?
Waves are for riding
A wave is caused by two conflicting pressures. They create a wall of water that you can ride.
The edge between our two wants is a natural part of doing anything difficult.
Do we jump off the edge and do the other thing? Or continue on the difficult cusp of the current task?
Can we relabel that feeling to give up, as the very feeling we want to try and ride?
Surfing a wave is much harder than sitting in the water doing bugger all. Yet that is the point of surfing.
You would not be surfing if you avoided every wave the instant it arrived. You would just be sitting around in the water.
Doing work that is hard is always going to be like riding a wave, it’s difficult and we can always just bum around doing nothing.
If we jump off at the very moment a wave arrives, we aren’t a surfer. If we avoid our work the very moment the work arrives we aren’t working.
So often the time our best work is about to happen is the moment we give up.
Reframing tension
Percieving that feeling as the very opportunity we are sitting around and waiting for can make us grateful. We can learn to run with it.
This might sound odd but even if no one else agrees with me I like this concept.
Relabelling my feelings has been one of the most beneficial ways I’ve improved my life:
When I got into public speaking I had to reframe the feeling of fear of standing up as excitement.
I’ve gone on to win public speaking competitions and do standup comedy and a TedX. I still get butterflies, but in a happy and welcome way.When I did Vipassana I learnt to reframe anger as empathy and curiosity.
That feeling of annoyance is no longer directed at that person’s actions but an opportunity to appreciate that I have more to understand. Maybe they’ve had a bad day, maybe I haven’t explained myself, or maybe they are actually a dick and I can feel sorry for them.
Whatever it is there is, no need to let the situation ruin my day or my mood.If you learn to fast you reframe your relationship with food and hunger.
You don’t have to eat whenever you’re hungry. You can actually sit with that feeling inside without satiating it.
I honestly learnt to enjoy that gnawing in your stomach and slight headiness.
Instead of solving hunger straight away, it is something that feels cleansing and freeing. Like a chance for my body to exhale after the constant input.
None of those changes were easy.
Gratefully they all taught me that emotions do not always mean what we first see them as.
We can learn to interpret them differently and use them as a signpost of opportunity for something wiser.
What does it all mean?
It may seem I have gone off track from the topic of making our experiential life longer. I was not accidentally talking about productivity under the guise of emotions and surfing.
Learning to feel these moments of tension as flow means we can stay in them longer.
These moments are the ones where time slows down for us. They drag painfully second by second when we could have time passively whisked away by doing something easy.
If we can savour these slow moments longer we can spend more of our life in a state of slower time perception.
Our faffing around each day doesn’t make us feel alive and worse, it speeds it up time.
If you want to slow down time you need to observe when time slows down and stay there. Running away to the safety of an easy thing is the opposite action of someone who wants to experience their life.
When we grow our ability to stay in slow time was can actively seek out activities that slow down time and make our moments longer.
“Time management is pain management”
Nir Eyal
It isn’t easy, but if you can do it your life will reward you with a greater sense of fullness.
Our life is ultimately just feelings and nothing to do with physics. So it is not about what is true with time but about what we sense with time.
So there you have it.
One master theory on slowing down time and living a fuller life.
Fretting about where all our time goes is not the way to spend the one life we have.
Enjoying our moments and working with time is the way to live.
“The purpose of art is to stop time”
Bob Dylan