Every day is a new challenge. As we grow up older and busier, time just seems to fly away! Are you one of those who wonders “how to slow down time and enjoy?” As we approach the long winter nights, take a look back at the few months – does it feel that the summers went by in a blink or that the hot sunny months lasted forever?
Your feeling depends on your age! Although we understand that the time is moving at the same pace every day, but as we grow up getting busier in our daily routine, it just seems that the time is flying by faster and faster leaving us with no time for ourselves, as compared to the childhood boring never-ending summer holidays when all your friends had been at their granny’s house and you were left alone bored at home. If you are young, a week might seem like four and an hour might seem like a day. But imagine the same when the kid has all their friends and busy with activities all day throughout the summer holidays, when they look back, it might seem to have gone by in a quick blur.
You can’t slow down time technically, but there are ways you can learn to slow down the perception of time. How our brain sees time passing determines how busy or occupied we have been. Whether the days have been long or short, we have some control over it. If you have a new exciting thing demanding your attention, you can slow down time and enjoy as you are actively, closely, noticing things spending enough time with it to be satisfied with the time passing by.
It happens to me quite often when I drive my way to the office via the crazy traffic, struggling to reach my destination on time. But barely recall the time passing. This is mainly because my brain isn’t taking time learning about new information. Similarly, for old age people, time slips away while they are busy doing nothing by dozing most of the time whereas their childhood holiday seemed to go forever.
How age affects time perception: Of course, we all notice the weird feeling that the day looks really long even though it accounts for only 24 hours. With age, this process comes into the picture, even more, when the time flies faster and much faster. This is because when we age, we come across information that is already processed in our minds. This means we are familiar with information causing lesser time in our brain, taking a shortcut, giving us a feeling that time has sped and passed faster.
Whereas, for children, it is easy how they take interest in everything and thus the psychology works in reverse as compared to the elders. Since they are processing major information, they need more time and thus looks like forever to them.
How to make time slow down?
1. Focus on the details: As explained above, time slows down when you take time to process anything it in your brain. The natural pathway is to enjoy, focus and feel every significant detail. But for adults, walking in the park for an hour might be just a routine to complete, but for a kid in the park for the same time, he sees flowers, butterflies, insects and twigs on the road making his time slowly passing by.
i. To feel the excitement of your young days, try to train yourself on focusing on little details of life as much as possible. Take a small duration of time each day to appreciate some nature (like flowers, the sun rising, or gardening etc.). There are a lot of activities you can engage yourself in the day to praise life.
ii. Bring in all your senses alive even for the most insignificant things around. Maybe when you are struggling with the traffic, feel the temperature, smell the perfume in your car, feel your leg muscles moving while breaking or look outside and observe.
2. Keep learning: You should be open to learning new things to engross you to gather the detailed information. Instead of feeling pretty obvious with things to pass your brain the regular information, understand the newness. Constantly reading and trying new activities, helps you to slow down your time.
3. Focus on yourself: Do you even remember that we have to breathe to stay alive? Do you purposely breathe? No, we do not breathe knowingly. We do not realize that our lungs are pumping oxygen continuously involuntarily into our body! The point here is to focus on your breath and give yourself some valuable time to calm down.
i. Follow some breath mediation (R) which not only slows down time but also the easiest way of self-awareness.
ii. Give some quality time to yourself in between your work or busy hours, by sitting in a chair and maintaining a good upright posture, inhale and exhale taking a deep breath. Feel the oxygen coming into your body and nourishing you.
iii. Look around you, pay attention to the detaining of the things around you. Look at the sky, the walls, furniture, trees, everything. You will start appreciating things even better. Focus your head to live in the moment.
4. Visit new places: Look around yourself and you notice so many new things. Try to feel the sounds, smells, people, and colors and interpret them in your brain. Exposing your brain to a new environment and giving it plenty of work to do, lets you enjoy the longer days apparently.
5. Be spontaneous: Surprises never restrict your attention, does it? Surprises are similar to new activities where you try to put your brain into thinking process and give your brain lesser time to prepare itself. The lesser familiar to the activity you are, the more information it tries to gather and a longer period to process. It overwhelms your brain to make time slow down and stay in the present.
6. Focus on your body: Progressive muscle relaxation helps to seek your attention to different parts of your body. Focusing on different parts of your body makes you relaxed and helps you to stay active.
i. Close your eyes and move the facial muscles and feel it. Eat a food and feel your teeth breaking them into bits and pieces, swallow to feel it going through the food pipe into your stomach.
ii. Move different parts of your body like your hand, legs toes, fingers, hip etc., tense the muscles and slowly release them relaxing.
7. Break your routine: If you are doing the same things over ages, by now you might have even mastered it and do not require your brain to help you out much. However, change the repetitive action like while on your way back home from the office, like you can take a halt and go grocery shopping or take a break and walk in a park and carry on further towards home. This change can make your brain experience new things as often as possible. Do not perform the same task without realizing.
i. Ride a bike sometimes instead of taking the car. Or you can as well walk down two streets to the store instead of driving as always. Change your route to the office, helps you observe new things along the way.
ii. Do the same activity in a variety of location. For example, if you are used to studying in your room, try to come out and study in the garden or library.
iii. Switching the wrist you put your watch on, whenever you try to note the time, you feel and think about something new. Such small things can help you to notice more.
iv. Change the arrangement of furniture at your home, such that when you come back home after work, you still have new things to enjoy and observe.
v. Do things that scare you such that even a minute in a dark room feels like an hour of your day. When you jump into the scariest of the rides, even though it does not last for more than a few seconds, feels like hours as it gets up nervous and we experience every bit of our time while on the ride.
8. Stop multitasking: When you multi-task, you are dividing your attention into multiple different things, making it difficult for you to stay focused on what you are doing. When you complete with one thing and move on to the next, you center yourself devoting time and slow down time and enjoy.
So now you know how to make time slow down and live it. Do not rush into anything – it is your life, define your own pace to live.
