Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Older

However, when our attention is diffused or unfocused – in such states as boredom, impatience or anxiety – a massive amount of cognitive information flows through our minds. When our minds aren't focused, they fill with “thought-chatter” – thoughts about the future or past, fragments of conversations or songs, thoughts about politics or celebrities and so on. Hundreds, if not thousands, of such thoughts may pass through our minds in a matter of minutes. And all this cognitive information stretches time.

Although it may not seem to directly relate, information processing also helps to explain why time seems to speed up as we get older.

It’s common for people to report a slow passage of time during childhood. This is mainly because, as children we have so many new experiences, and so process a massive amount of perceptual information. Children also have an unfiltered and intense perception of the world, which makes their surroundings appear more vivid.

However, as we get older, we have progressively fewer new experiences. Equally importantly, our perception of the world becomes more automatic. We grow progressively de-sensitized to our surroundings. As a result, we absorb gradually less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less stretched with information.

However, there are certain things we can do to resist the process of time speeding up. The most obvious is to keep introducing newness into our lives – for example, by traveling to new places, learning new hobbies, and meeting new people.

Alternately - and perhaps more effectively – we can also slow down time by living mindfully, paying conscious attention to our day-to-day experiences of seeing, hearing, feeling and so on.

On a more long term basis, we can cultivate conscious awareness through meditative practices that quieten the chatter of our minds and weaken the power of the conceptual labels that filter out the raw reality of the world.

Both of the above methods increase the amount of information that our minds process, and so expand our perception of time. They show that, although the experience of time speeding up with age is common, it is not inevitable.