August 2024 Founder’s Corner: Time: The Older We Get, The Faster It Goes

A common experience that most of us feel is that TIME is speeding up as we age. Time, once meandering on a slow, neighborhood street, seems to be speeding more like we’re driving a Porche 911 down the Audubon. Why is that? Why can’t things be as slow as they once were when we were kids? Why is it even our children have begun to complain, “Is summer already over?” or our teens are saying, “I feel like life is moving too fast”. Aren’t the younger years supposed to be full of long days and endless time to play?

Researchers have many theories about why time speeds up as we age. For example, it’s been suggested that our perspective is the culprit to this time deception.  Cindy Lustig, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan says, “Our perception of days, weeks, years and that kind of time seems to be especially influenced by our perspective: Are we in the moment experiencing it, or are we looking backward on time?”[1]

Another potential reason we experience time speeding up as we age relates to what French philosopher, Paul Janet, called ‘log time’. ‘Log time’ is the idea that the way our brains take in new or novel information changes as we age. As summarized in an article written by author Dr. David Hamilton, “It’s that as we age, a year becomes a smaller fraction of our entire lives up to that point. A year for a 5-year-old is one fifth (or 20%) of their life so far, but a year to a 50-year old is one fiftieth of their life (or 2% of it) so it seems to pass ten times faster. If you’re 33, a year is 3% of your life so far, so time passes almost seven times faster than it did when you were five. Time for an 80-year-old passes almost in the blink of an eye, sixteen times faster than it does for a 5-year-old.” [2]

As a clinical psychologist for more than 16 years, I have yet another idea to explain the time vacuum. I believe this has to do with how much (or how little) we allow playfulness in our lives.  That is, how busy our minds are, how open our hearts are, and how often laughter brings tears to our eyes. Playfulness. It’s not a new concept and there are countless podcasts and research studies about the benefits of play.[3] And play can look a lot of different ways. There are the obvious activities to consider, such as imaginative or symbolic play, but also less obvious activities such as dancing, singing, horsing around with friends, or building and creating.

I think most of us would agree that, as children, playfulness flows more freely through us. That is, young minds, driven to explore the world through movement, touch, sound, scent, and sight, rely so much less on their minds to figure the world out. Children don’t think as much as they seek: to explore and fill in the empty spaces of knowledge through their play and other methods of self-exploration.

I don’t know about you, but I find moments of playfulness are limited in adulthood. While children unconsciously use play to learn, I believe adults learn to stop playing. We are conditioned to grow up, work hard, stay focused, and get the job done. When I think honestly about the last time I felt truly playful, it was a very long time ago. I chuckle here because a vivid and somewhat ridiculous memory comes to mind, both sweet and cringe-worthy at the same time.

It was an afternoon when I was about 11 years old. I walked up the long stairs from my childhood home to the street curb, sat down on the last step of the stairway, and leaned back into my palms, head and eyes raised to the skyline. It was one of those cottony days, stringy and wistful clouds mixing with patches of brilliant, navy sky. Seemingly alone, despite the six or eight houses circling up at the end of in the cul-de-sac, and without a care in the world as the warm sunrays melted into my cheeks, I had the sudden (and questionable) idea to start singing. To be clear, this was not a nice, sweet humming moment, or one where my voice softly lifted over the lyrics from my Walkman. Nope, this was a full-throttle bellowing, head raised to the sky, eyes closed, voice almost a shout, as I offered up our neighborhood my rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I can still feel the slight heat of the pebbles pushing into my bare arms and into the back of my head as I leaned on the asphalt, letting the tendrils of my song (aka scream) bellow into the air as if I owned the day, as if the song was made for me. It felt as if every fiber of my body was made to sing, and that every neighbor in the area would be incredibly grateful to have this golden opportunity to listen to my talent in the afternoon. Trust me when I say there is no American Idol in my future, but at 11 years old, I really believed I had something brilliant to share for the few minutes I roared into the quiet street.

Why does this vivid memory stick to my mind while I cannot tell you what I had for dinner on Tuesday of last week? Why does that 11-year-old sense of me believe that that summer was a decade long? Time was elastic back then. Everything was so much slower. It could have been my perception, and maybe my ‘log time’ on earth. There is definitely a sense that the memory was well encoded into mind because I was extremely present.

I have come to believe that I recall that moment well because it was an experience that felt extremely freeing and playful; freedom to let it all go, be in the moment, and not let a care in the world disrupt my open mind. The truth is open minds create a freeway of possibility. Being playful is probably one of those open highways, a sense of floating in time, between crevasses in space, free from stress, over thinking, or pain. It’s a space where all things are possible, and doubts disappear. We feel light-filled and available to our hearts, our imaginations flying freely without constraint. Play loosens our attachment to perfection and moves us away from our ego. In essence, play might be the one place time seems to stop, expand, and release.

What might be disturbing is that children and teens in our modern times may not have this sense of freedom and playfulness that previous generations once experienced. I’ve worked with many children and spoken with hundreds of teens throughout the course of my career. A noticeable thread I’m beginning to hear is that children are feeling a sense of aging even as young as 8 years old. They seem to feel the presence of aging in a way I, and maybe others, never experienced it. I suspect their awareness of growing older may have to do with the increased performance stress and pressure our kids are facing; stress from scholastic perfectionism, anxiety relating to athletic overachievements, emotional dysregulation and preoccupation from social media exposure. So, not only are adults noticing that time seems to be speeding up, but so are our children.

What can we do about this? While there are many ways to help reduce the time/speed conundrum, I propose we start making time to play. I know we have jobs, school, families and those who read my blog might be saying, “I don’t have time to breathe, let alone play!” To that I would say, “Not true…you’ve been conditioned to think you have no time, but just because you are thinking you don’t have time, does not mean that is a fact.” Thoughts are not facts, and if we challenge our perspectives and open our minds, we can indeed create opportunities to live our lives in new and maybe more playful ways. If we want to slow down our lives, we need to start engaging in playful, joyful, and freedom-inducing experiences as soon as possible.

Engaging with playfulness is not at the exception of doing hard work and striving, but more to create a balancing point; a work/life balancing point. And here’s the best news: playfulness can be achieved in an endless array of activities: structured play such as finally trying out that game of pickleball everyone has been talking about, or less structured play, like winding up a hand towel and gently whipping your partner’s booty as you cook dinner together. Even having a tickle fight with a child just before bedtime can be enough. I argue that simply engaging in activities that don’t have a specific goal or outcome, activities meant to bring a smile, laugh or sense of inner freedom and release, away from big-brain, overthinking behavior, is one sure way to slow down time.

Be in the now. When we are present in the now, in our youthful expressions of aliveness, we are potentially getting off that speeding highway, stretching out our experiences and encoding them as important and memorable. Doing so, we are setting up gateways into our pasts that can be extraordinary, allowing the distance of moments from long ago, to live with us today. Isn’t that in some way merging and stretching time from a sense that it’s all going too fast, into moments of re-experienced bliss?

I hope you will join me in your very own sense of belting out, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Find ways to be silly, sing too loudly, dance off beat, or roll on a grassy hillside. I dare you to try it and notice if any room has opened in your busy mind. The truth is, at the end of our lives, I doubt anyone will say, “Geeze, I wish I hadn’t taken so much time to have a fun.” Let’s stretch time into an endless series of smiles, find a rainbow, and fly somewhere out there where time is simply as important as the moment you are giving in.

References
[1] https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-news/time-flies-by-faster-as-we-get-older–here-s-why-.html
[2] https://drdavidhamilton.com/why-time-speeds-up-as-you-age/
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2013.761905