If ringing in the new year came too quickly, you’re not alone. Time does seem to move faster as you get older.
According to Jamie Jirout, who studies curiosity and learning at the University of Virginia, the more efficient we are with our days, the less memorable they are.
“We tend to have a lot of routines and habits in our daily lives,” said Jirout, an associate professor in Â鶹ĆĆ˝â°ć School of Education and Human Development. “When we’re on autopilot, time can feel like it passes quickly.”
Jamie Jirout is an associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development who studies curiosity and learning. (Photo by Lathan Goumas, University Communications)
But Jirout said there are things we can do to make time feel like it’s slowing down. We sat down with Jirout for a quick chat on how.
Q. Why did it seem like a year took forever when we were kids?
A. When we are young, there is so much changing in what we know about the world, and the experiences we are having are so new, we don’t know what to expect. The experiences when you are 5 are much more likely to be new and require a lot more cognitive effort to process.
We attend to a lot more when we are young, partly because we aren’t good at controlling attention, but also because we don’t yet know what is important to pay attention to. We don’t know what to ignore and thus pay closer attention to more details. This leads to encoding more details and more events during experiences compared to adults.
This helps our brain create more impressions or bits of information we can use to recreate memories, which makes it feel like time had more happening when we remember it.
Q. Why does time feel like it speeds up as we age?
A. As we get older, we have a much more well-developed understanding of the world. Some of what we do becomes automatic, and a lot of what we do is more predictable because we’ve learned how the world works.
This means we’ve learned what is important to pay attention to, and we don’t pay as much attention to the other stuff. Because there’s less novelty in our experiences, we don’t create as many new, distinctive memories. This leads to the feeling of fewer things happening, which can feel like time is passing faster.
Q. What can we do to make it seem like time slows down?
A. Time feels slower when we pay closer attention and when we experience new or meaningful activities.
Mindfulness is a great method for paying more attention to what is going on and being in the moment. I thought “mindfulness” meant meditation. But I realized that being mindful can be as simple as noticing what is going on around you and really being present in the moment.
