Most of us will agree: The older we get, the faster our time passes. When we remember our childhood, we feel that our experiences were longer, more fascinating and more intense at that time. Our birthday parties were endless spectacular festivities and in the summer we experienced a sweet pleasant boredom.

When we grow up, time seems to be accelerating. Memories of when what happened fade. We often wish we could stop time for a while, but it continues relentlessly.

Gathering life experiences accelerates the pace of time
It may seem obvious that as children we perceive time differently. Everything is new, we are curious, the relationships between individual events are difficult to understand. That is absolutely true. But what happens next?

To understand this phenomenon, a research team from the University of Kansas conducted a relevant study. The results were published in the journal Self and Identity.

The authors point out: "Perceiving life as running faster is psychologically harmful: unpleasant, demotivating and perhaps even evoking the feeling that life has no meaning."

The research was based on the theory of the philosopher Douglas Hofstadt. From him comes the theory that as we age, our brains tend to gather different but in some contexts similar experiences into larger common "files."

For example, after a certain age, each of our individual walks in the rain will be grouped in the brain as a set: "Walks in the Rain." 
Our brain encodes all the time spent on these walks as a single event that evokes the same impressions. There was no diversity in our events, we did not experience anything new, so we do not remember each of them as something unique. So the individual walks merge. And this is how we perceive everything.

Be aware! 
How can we slow down this process? The authors of the study suggest that we try to be more attentive and live more consciously. The motto "live in the present moment" is not banality, but a way to slow down the flow of time. 
Not only will the individual moments become more valuable, but you will spend your whole life much more pleasant.

It's easy.
Look at the world through children's eyes, explore things. Admire nature, animals, watch people. Don't walk down the street with tunnel vision, but look around and perceive all the details. 
In order not to be boring, you need to do something new regularly. Learn something, go somewhere, try new routes, or do things that you are used to doing in a specific way in a completely different way.

For example, you want to step out of the comfort zone from time to time. By inventing the original nonsense, they forced the brain to notice and begin to perceive even the ordinary thing as something completely new and adventurous.

This will slow down the flow of time and live your life better.

Translation by Google

prepared by © Alue K. Loskotová, www.aluska.org 2020 / mentioned study