455. Why does time start flying in our 20s?

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our 20s. Today, we are talking about time, specifically why it seems to move so much faster as we get older and why the months just seem to be shorter and shorter every single year. I want you to think back for a And to being a kid in summer, like those summers used to feel absolutely endless. You'd go back to school

and it felt like a lifetime had passed. Three months felt like eternity. Every six months, you felt like you were a new person. Compare that to now where an entire year can go by and you will swear it's been a couple of weeks. Where did that endless feeling kind of go? Where did it disappear to? I think a lot of us can point to a very specific moment where our relationship with time kind of broke. And that's probably during COVID. Suddenly our days had no shape.

There was no commute, no plans, no real distinction between a Tuesday and a Saturday. And for a lot of us, especially anyone who was a teenager in the early twenties at the time, I think months just kind of dissolved into each other. And I don't think many of us have fully gotten that sense of structured, meaningful time back.

The days just get faster and faster. So Today, we are going to actually unpack this. Why does time feel like it speeds up as we get older? And how do we slow it right back down again using actual psychology and actual science? We're going to talk about the different types of time, the ways that time can be measured, especially how they are understood across cultures, how memory and novelty play into all of this, how being online, our digital lives have changed our perception of time. And then most importantly, as promised, the three things that will make your life and your days and your years feel longer without you having to do very much at all. So without further ado, let's get into it. So in order

to really start answering questions about time passing us by with age and why that feels faster, we do need to understand how time is even measured in the first place. And I know it feels silly and quite obvious to ask things like, you know, what is time? It's very like philosophical because I feel like we all kind of know it's something ingrained in us very deeply, but there are levels to this. There's always levels to things like this.

Your sense of time originates in the brain. Different regions keep track of different aspects of your environment that anchor your time perception. For example, things like daylight, things like exhaustion, things like movement, attention. Interestingly, the evidence suggests that there may be a separate clock for each of our senses and that they all kind of talk and coordinate and communicate to just give us a sense of where we are in a day, where we are in a moment, where we are in our lives. Based on what you are experiencing, time can either dilate and feel like it's passing slower, like when you're bored, or it can contract and feel like it's speeding up, like when you're in a flow state or when you're in a really good

conversation or you're drunk and you're partying and suddenly it's 2am. All of this is based in your brain. So the neurological experience of time is one thing. Then there is the social experience or social measurement of time, which is a lot more critical for what we're talking about today. Things like morning, like noon, like bedtime, 2 p.m., lunchtime, midnight, that is what we would call the standard measurement of time or the social measurement of time. However, the typical units of measurement that we use, so minutes, seconds, weeks, years, that kind of stuff, they're just made up. They're made up.

We just use them to communicate and get on the same page. At some point, someone decided 60 seconds made a minute. 60 minutes made an hour simply because it was very easy to divide. That's like the one theory. It was an easily divisible number. That's why it was chosen. Measured time is therefore what we call a social construct and how time feels to us beyond that psychologically is also very cultural. So historically, and now we're really getting into the history here, but time has been measured differently by different cultures. Kind of makes sense, but agricultural societies used to measure time by changing seasons and crop rotations.

Others went by the position of the sun and the moon. That's what led to the invention of the sundial, the first original kind of clock measurement of time. Interestingly, there is an anthropologist, his name is Edward T. Hall, and he argued that Western societies, we see time as fixed and perpetual, which is why we like to think about things sequentially and chronologically and And we really like ideas of progress and we like ideas of growth and our behaviors and timelines are shaped by this experience and how we see time as kind of the segmented thing that moves forward. On the other hand, he and his kind of research and travels saw how other societies like those in Latin America and those in Asia are what we

call polychronic, meaning time is viewed more as a stream that ebbs and flows. A lot can happen all at once. and then they can be nothing for years. Nothing for years. I also came across this writing by the Kenyan-born philosopher, John Mnbiti, and he notes how Kenyan belief specifically doesn't conceptualize the future at all. Because in his view, time needs to be, well, not in his view, in their view, time needs to be experienced in order to be real.

So future time is not a concept. Since it's impossible to experience the future like Yeah, it just doesn't exist. Instead, like you need, the future is only created by the present moment. And you have to see how that perception that's passed along culturally will influence how people view the future and how people view planning and how people view death and all these sorts of things. So as we've evolved, we've definitely tried to get more specific and unified across different locations and different cultures, especially for capitalism, especially for the purpose of trade. And that is why we kind of invented standard time zones. And that's why we invented a coordinated universal time where we kind of all, we

can kind of know what time it is in Sydney versus what time in London versus Kenya. Despite that, each of us will still experience time differently. Our perception of time is very unique. It varies from person to person, regardless of what the time on a clock or on your phone says. 10 minutes to me might not feel the same as it does to you or the next person, even if it's measured the same way. It depends on what we have going on It depends on how we mark time personally. For example, do you mark time by big moments or novel moments or sleep or productivity or days?

It changes if we're listening to music. It changes if we're in a flow state. And it just changes because of other overarching personality factors like patience levels, temperament, even how you were raised. And this is the third face of time, the one that stems from your own psychology and your own experiences. And the one that we really need to explore to kind of understand why time feels so much faster now than it did when we were little kids or than it did when we were in COVID.

One thing that we know really influences our perception of time more than anything else is novelty. Basically, novelty is the more new things you experience, the more newness you have in your life. The more of that, the more that those long stretches of time are broken up by things that kind of create distinct snapshots. I know I said that time seems to speed up when we're really interested in something or when we're having a lot of fun or we're curious or we're excited, but those moments in hindsight seem to make time feel more expansive. So in the moment, novelty speeds up time. In hindsight, it actually slows it down. It makes it seem like you have more of it. In a 2007 study published in the Journal of Vision, researchers found that when people were

exposed to two types of stimulus, one which was exciting and large and colorful and flashing, and one which was very simple and slightly boring, people thought that they saw the first stimulus, the exciting one, for longer, despite seeing both the boring and the exciting one for the exact same period of time. Remember, the researchers were controlling this.

So this kind of proves this point that novelty seems to make time feel bigger. More is kind of crammed into the same amount of space that wouldn't be as filled with boring things. Further to this, there is a very, very famous experimental study and also an experimental method called the oddball experiment, which has kind of proven something very similar.

So the odd experiment is this protocol where during the experiment people are shown images over and over in the same order but at one point there is a novel kind of oddball image thrown into the mix. People reported perceiving this new image as being shown for a And this has been repeated time and time again. It's one of the most repeated studies and it essentially shows that time seems to stretch and seems to get larger the more that we are experiencing that is new to us.

This is really critical and this is why time appears to go faster the older we get. When we are younger, we are experiencing new things all the time, all the time, whether it's our first time learning about a concept in school or hearing a word or Our first time riding a bike or seeing a new species of flower or trying a new food. There's just so much stuff to see and to feel and to hear. We are constantly being exposed to new stuff. As we age, though, there are just fewer and fewer things that we perceive as entirely new because the more life you have lived, the more you have encountered, hopefully, and this is what causes the change in our perception. And that is definitely applicable in our 20s. And we probably notice it more here

than any other decade. If you think about it, our lives become a lot more structured during this decade, especially around work, especially around full-time work. And it can feel very tedious and monotonous. And this is why time seems to speed up very quickly after we leave school. When we were at school, we had more vacation time. We were always learning different subjects. We had a lot more space for new experiences. specifically during our every day, now we are normally focused on doing the exact same thing.

That's what a full-time job sometimes feels like. So time seems to get faster. Memory is also a big part of this conversation because our perception of time is not only limited to the present, but to the past, the present, and the future. Just like there are different types of time, you know, there's the social construct, there's the psychological construct, there are also different types of memory. These include things like episodic memory, which is all about our own personal memories and our own personal collections of important moments for us.

There's semantic memory, which is about facts and general knowledge. There's procedural memory, which is automatic processes, like knowing how to ride a bike, the classic one. How to think when you're typing on a keyboard, that's procedural memory. There's short-term memory or working memory. There's sensory memory. And then there is perspective memory, which is basically remembering to do something in the future. Like I say to myself, okay, I need to get groceries tonight. Later on, my memory is going to remind me, hopefully. When we are looking back on certain periods of life with fondness or maybe with pain or nostalgia, we're delving into episodic memory. And the reason time felt slower in the past is because

We are relying on memories that feel more distinct and segmented or chapter-like. And because past times in your life were once more filled with increased novelty compared to what you're experiencing right now, they stand out. Which probably, you know, right now probably feels very same-same. In hindsight though, what you might find is that actually this feels quite different when it's relative to other things that you've experienced. There's another really interesting layer here, which is emotion. Emotion determines what gets remembered and how time feels. We don't necessarily remember the happiest moments the most clearly. We remember the most emotionally significant ones because our brain yells out at

us that those are the most important ones. If you are experiencing fear or excitement or awe or embarrassment or social rejection, even love, Your brain is like, this really matters. This felt really, really intense. Save this. That is why emotionally intense periods of your life often feel longer in hindsight.

When you're falling in love in the few months after you're grieving, time you've spent away on your gap year, just the intensity of those first few months at university, those all kind of stick out to me. It's the emotional significance around those that strengthens memory consolidation because there's also more emo diversity. There's different feelings all happening at once that give layers to this memory, give it complexity, and basically give us more material to think back on and to reconstruct later. All of this combined has a name.

This whole thing we're talking about has a term. It's called the memory paradox of time. All we're trying to say is time isn't measured by a clock. It is measured by What you remember and what is consolidated and what is not and what your emotional state was at the time. And it's influenced by so many things that we don't think about. We don't think about our emotions and how they influence time or our mental state or our personality or newness. That's why you could have two people and they could both live to 75 years old.

And one person could feel like their time on earth probably equated more to 50 years. One person could feel like their time equated to 100 years. Time is just not the same for all of us based on how we feel it. Okay, we're going to take a short break here, but when we return, let's talk about the impact of the pandemic, shall we? And lockdowns and social media and why, for those of us specifically in our 20s, we are perceiving time as faster than maybe any other generation.

So stay with us. When it comes to thinking about why time feels different for people our age compared to our parents or even to younger generations, two things, two big things stand out. I've said the first one a couple of times. It's the pandemic. I'm not going to make too many sweeping generalizations about how old I think you are because I know there's a couple of like 60-year-olds, 30-year-olds, even like 15-year-olds who are who are listening. Actually, a lot of people that listen aren't in their 20s, but I know a big chunk of you are. And if you were between the ages of 17 and 25 during COVID, a big chunk of those memory-making years for you and experiences that were associated with those years, they just can't

be replicated and they didn't happen. Those things that were meant to happen to you at 21, they never did. You were indoors. You were inside. things like solo travel and exchange programs and graduations and orientation weeks and trips and time spent with friends before everybody got a full-time job, the opportunity for these things kind of feels like it came and went. And so you're missing this big chunk of years that weren't distinct, that weren't impressionable. And we're mainly, if we're being honest, spent scrolling TikTok. Like, During this massive period of your life when you were meant to be going out and having all these experiences, that just didn't happen for you. And it's very easy to feel

like that time passed. That time just was like a weird frozen state that we can't get back. It's also no surprise that the rise of social media and specifically TikTok, like TikTok took off during this period of time and it only sped up our perception of time. on top of the fact that we weren't experiencing as much novelty as we had before. The introduction of short form infinite scroll videos has drastically changed how people of our generation are experiencing time compared to older people, probably second only to the pandemic. We began this episode by kind of exploring the three types of time, the measured, the social, and the perceived. In this day and age, researchers are now saying there's a fourth, and that is the digital

experience of time. And it has completely flipped everything we know about time on its head. As digital technology has advanced to the point where I would say everybody has a smartphone or social media, unless they've made a very distinct choice not to, what we're finding is that perceptions of time are rapidly increasing and our ability to correctly evaluate how much time we spend doing things is decreasing as well. An example of this is like, you think that you've only scrolled for five minutes, you've probably scrolled for 15 and we can't tell the difference. You also think that cooking dinner is probably going to take an hour and Uber Eats is going to take 25 minutes, but it's actually the reverse. Our sense of how long

things take has just been flipped. Technology has made a lot of things a lot more efficient. Online shopping makes it so that we don't have to go all the way to the store to get what we need. Delivery services mean that you don't have to go out for food or You don't have to go out to the groceries. You don't have to go out to buy clothes. You don't have to go out to really do anything. There's online health services. There's online entertainment, everything that would require you to leave the house, even for appointments. It can now all be done online and it's apparently more convenient.

When you decide even then that you do want to go and you know do a chore in real life or go out to a restaurant or anything like deciding where to go deciding how to get there deciding what you're going to order like there's an app for everything you pick a restaurant google maps is already finding you the most convenient pathway you get there the reviews are already telling you exactly what's best to order This lack of friction seems like a good thing in many ways.

AI has only made it so much easier, which I feel like if you know me, you know I have many, many opinions on this that we need another episode for. But it can actually waste a lot more time because as soon as you're using your phone for everything, it's also where you're getting a lot of your enjoyment and pleasure from. So you're being pushed back into the same environment where you get entertainment every time you want to be productive. All of our decisions, all of our time, our whole life revolves around a screen, and that's doing things to our brain. I found this 2023 study where these researchers interviewed some students in France. They were all between the ages of 18 and 29, and they asked

them about their relationship to time and their relationship to digital technology, specifically their phones. The study found that intense use of digital media prompted students losing the notion of time almost completely during moments of the day and losing a sense of feeling in control. It felt like time was harder to manage. It felt like less was happening in their days. It felt like time was moving in a way that they couldn't perceive. They would blink and it was like, oh my God, 20 minutes has passed.

The thing is, our phones are fun. It doesn't always feel like a waste in the beginning. It's productive sometimes and there's a major sense of socialization and bonding and this all excites us and it excites our brain, but it also puts us into a mental state called cognitive inertia. This was a concept first labeled by the psychologist William McGarry in the 1960s. And he basically said, if someone is fixated on something and if they are at rest in that thing, it's hard to get them to move or to change because we like to stay the same.

We are organisms that like structure and stability. When we are scrolling, It is very hard to pull our brain away from that state if it's having fun. Even if it's not productive, if we are comfortable in this position, it's difficult to move us on from that. We just want to watch one more video. We just want five more minutes. Even as we start to feel less and less stimulated, the pull is still there because it takes more friction to move us from doing something to doing another thing than it does if we just kept doing that one thing for this whole time. also to return to the relationship between novelty and time, we're also seeing so much so quickly. And one would think that since we are constantly seeing new things online, you know, when

you scroll, like you literally could see somebody who's in Paris, somebody who's just hiked, climbed Mount Everest, like somebody who's just had a baby and somebody who's, you could literally find a video of somebody in every single corner of the world. Why, if this is novel, is this not making time feel like it's slowing down? Because that's what we explored before. Novel experiences make time go slower. If all we're getting is insane levels of novelty from our phone, why is that not happening? Well, the answer to this question also has something to do with what we talked about earlier, which is memory. Memory is so critical here.

In order for a memory to be made, any memory in your brain, anybody's brain, your mind needs to process that it happened in the first place. Very simple, right? But that's critical for consolidation. Something needs to feel distinct and it has to feel like it happened for us to remember it. When the span of a novel event is being fit into spaces of seconds or less, you know, the time it takes to scroll between two or three videos on TikTok, your brain just has a hard time deciphering between one thing and the next. There is actually too much going on. There is too much being pumped into your brain for your mind to actually find out or figure out or see what is worth consolidating. And so it processes it all as one big event. When

you're on your phone, that's one big kind of almost nothing event because there wasn't enough distinctness for your brain to devote a whole memory to it. The other thing that constant scrolling does is it makes it harder to consolidate memories that happen before and after you've been on your screen. Now this specifically is a phenomenon called proactive interference.

And it's when experiences outside of a memory interfere with that memory being processed. I know that sounds a bit complicated, but with a short form content specifically, your brain feels so overhyped and so stimulated so quickly. It is like, we are so in on this, whatever just happened, we don't have time to solidify that. We don't have time to recognize that that was real life. And then whatever happens afterwards, we're so overwhelmed by what we just saw and all this stuff that we can't consolidate anything that happens afterwards for a couple of minutes either. So all this time around these experiences around your screen time is erased.

You know, whilst our bodies naturally are going to make less memories as we age, research is showing that because of our phone sets happening at a much faster rate, the digital factor is the biggest factor in what is speeding up your sense of time. There was a study conducted in Munich literally last month that concluded heavy digital media use can produce the same type of time compression in people in their 20s and 30s that people used to experience in their 60s. Your sense of time is the same as somebody who is 60. And that is so scary to think about because when you are hopefully 60, What happens then? What is your perception of time going to be like then? Our life expectancy is also increasing

year after year, but does that matter if our experience of time is decreasing? Does it really matter? It's almost like we've hit this peak and now we're going back. I think that's a question that's much bigger than psychology, so we're not going to answer it on this episode. But if you want to avoid that happening to you, we can talk about that. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a guide as to what exactly we're going to do to kind of pause this process and to get time and us back on the same level so that we can have important memories, so that we can feel like our time here is filled with good stuff and is distinct and is something that we have control over. The obvious and the predictable answer

as well, I will admit, is to just simply control digital media use or eliminate it altogether. Get off our phones. If these pockets of lost or wasted time are freed up by taking us away from our screens, we can put that time to better use. We can have more novel experiences in the real world. That sounds very straightforward.

That sounds very uncomplicated. It's definitely easier said than done. Many aspects of digital media, we know this, are designed to hook people. They are designed to keep them on a very short attention span leash. And your level of willpower has very little say in the matter. Many digital media developers build their platforms with the help of neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists.

They design them to be inherently appealing despite your self-control. And now that we're all hooked, taking a step back means exiting a world where everybody else resides, meaning that you are going to have to pay a large social cost for your choice. And that's a really hard decision to make. I've done so many episodes on this. so many episodes on how to control your digital media usage.

We just did one on are our phones killing intimacy. We did one earlier this year on how to rebuild your attention span that talks about it a lot. So I'm just, I'm not going to go really, really deep into it, but I think the overall strategy for you right now, if your screen time is high, if you're realizing it's changing your perception of time is really to just do three things. And I'm going to say three things, but they contain a lot. The three things though are Have an awareness of your internal dissonance. Basically, if you want to control your screen time, notice that you are unhappy about your screen time and notice that you keep doing it anyway. Acknowledge the dissonance. Acknowledge, hey, I would

actually like to get better here. I want to add time back into my life, but I can't. Why is that? then you get testing. This is the second point, testing the alternative reality or the second reality as we sometimes call it. So trialing out periods where you don't use social media or your phone is left at home while you go out with your friends and really paying attention to if you feel better. Your brain, your body needs evidence that this alternative is not a threat. There's actually a lot of benefit and joy to not being on your phone as much. And then three, promising yourself slow implementation.

You know this works, you know you feel better. Now just try one strategy at a time to curtail your phone use until that one sticks. So whether it's app blockers, whether it's deleting social media at home, whether it's time limits, anything like that, one at a time. I will say one of my friends has this unbelievably effective strategy that I don't think anything can beat where she gets her friends to set her screen time password for her. And she has made us swear up and down that we will not tell her what it is at all. We said it for her one night when we were out and we were out drinking. I don't even think we know what it is. And that way, like when she wants, like she's not getting through. It's actually, she's basically locked

herself out of being able to break a promise to herself because she doesn't know the password. She doesn't know it. And there have been times, especially at the beginning where she'd be like, does anybody remember it? Like, please. But at that stage, like when she was begging us and asking us It's like, well, suddenly she was talking to us.

Suddenly she was back to where we were, back in this social environment, back having experiences with something other than a screen or other than a phone. That's how you kind of, it's such a basic way of describing how to break a screen addiction. As I said, we have more, much better episodes on it, but The second crucial thing for getting time back in your life and feeling like you have more time to live and to do things is that novelty principle and that novelty aspect. We're going to talk about that and so much more because it deserves its whole section of this episode after this short break.

If you want time to feel slower and more expansive, You've just got to give your mind some fresh experiences to hold on to. You need to think about all the ways that you can introduce novelty back into your life. And now, this doesn't need to be trying out new hobbies every single week or doing massive things like I'm going to go on an overseas holiday once every three months.

All you need to do is just micro-dose novelty more regularly. If you drink coffee, you can do this. Literally switch up your flavor every month Switch up your brand every month. Take the other route to work that you always avoid because it's five more minutes. Try and find more creative routes to work every single day. Try not to get lunch or dinner at the same place twice. And literally just do more stuff. I know it's really hard. I know we're pretty tired all the time. I personally just really want to be at home as well, constantly. I'm tired.

But you will have time for that when there's literally nothing else you can do. You know what will help you more than anything else to do this is your friends, I will say. Firstly, yes, definitely acknowledging like at some point I'm not going to be able to do anything else other than rest, so I may as well get out.

But the most invaluable tip for getting more out of life is just being around people whose natural inclination is just to do things. My natural set point is to be a homebody. But the moment I made friends with people who bought tickets to stuff, who wanted to go out on Thursday night, who wanted to do like the weird art class or were out of the house every day, like my life got so much bigger thanks to them.

And I know that's because of this very critical psychological principle that is known as behavioral contagion. When people we know or people we admire do things, we unconsciously feel the need to do similar things. This is positive peer pressure and being around people who are already doing stuff is the easiest way to kind of make it come about.

There's a very famous idea that we are the average of the five closest people that we surround ourselves with. Very famous. I feel like there's been books written about this. There's been academic articles written about this. And although the idea first came from somebody who wasn't in the psychology space, he was actually an entrepreneur. And he kind of mainly talked about this in like a business networking sense. The science does still support it from a lifestyle, from a psychology sense, a psychology perspective. You are the five closest people that you surround yourself with. So if you want time to slow down and you want time to expand around you, be around people who are going to make that happen. Be around people who are going to give

you more experiences the way you've given them more experiences. Cultivate connections. Go to things even when you just really, really would rather not. Like I said, there will come a time when you wish that you had the social freedom and the energy and the physical ability to do what you could do right now. So just take advantage of it. In our 20s, you may not have heaps of money to create novelty, but you do have heaps of time. And you have more time than you ever will have right at this point to explore and to be around your friends and to deepen relationships and to just do crazy shit. This is when you need to be doing it. Basically, newness in your life doesn't have to be self-generated. That's just what I'm trying to say.

It can be collective. It can be borrowed. And that is honestly one of the most underrated ways that you can speed up your rate of memory making and without really having to force yourself to do anything and therefore slow down your perception of time so that it feels like you have lived more life in your years than it seems. I think the final thing that expands our sense of time, especially from a memory perspective, which we know is critical, is just ensuring that you are documenting your life in some way beyond the screen. I've spoken about this before, but when I was younger, I was obsessed.

I was obsessed with this idea of storing my memories and not letting anything slip me by. And I was very worried I was going to get Alzheimer's and I would keep these massive photo albums and these diaries and these scrapbooks. And I used to do this thing called the one second a day diary. Hands up if you also did this, but for five years straight, I recorded one second of my day every single day. I was so obsessive about it. I think I started in like high school. I went all the way up to my third year of uni and And I look back at that and I'm like, I am so grateful I did that.

I now have my own documentary of my life that I made from that time. And I went back and watched it when I was like thinking about this episode. And you really don't realize how young you really were, but also how much time you have until you see the past in this romantic sense. And until you see all these moments captured that in the moment you just didn't have time to appreciate. And now that they are history, they just feel so much more full and so much more important. You know, when I watch those back, I think about time differently. I see how much of it I have had and how much of it I will have and how much good stuff has happened to me.

And it's such a gift from my past self. I'm so grateful that she did that. I don't think I knew how important it was going to be. I think maybe I had some idea. I think it was more of a neurotic compulsion, but I realize now the importance of documenting your life in whatever way is easiest for you. And I found that the times in my life that go by the fastest is when I'm not doing that.

So a journal, a junk scrapbook, a picture a day, a video a day, a podcast, it all grounds you. Very seriously, it grounds you. And it grounds you in a way that Instagram stories or Instagram posts, I just don't think can. I don't think they bring the same joy as creating something offline that you have documented just for you that has no social validation component, that has no that isn't reliant on a platform being up and isn't reliant on, you know, something working beyond you to have. Like, atomic bomb goes off, you'll still have your photo albums.

And I think that that's valuable in itself. And it helps you prolong a sense of time in your life. I just think time flies when we lose our appreciation for it. And that's why in our 20s in particular, things do reach this point where they really start to feel like they're speeding up. You know, when we were young, everything felt special. Everything felt new. And now things feel very routine and old. There is still so much that's going to happen to you. And there's so much to see and so much to experience. You just have to prioritize it. It's a lot easier said than done considering busy schedules and considering money and considering practicality. But even just a day or an afternoon in your week where

you promise to make something special and novel, and do something important for yourself is going to elongate your week, which is going to elongate your years, which is going to elongate your life. And I think I want to end this episode with one final thought that I have quite a lot. And I don't even know if this is relevant or helpful. So apologies if it's not, but this might get dark. But anytime I feel like time is running out for me in my 20s, I picture the thousands of people who have died at the exact age I am right now. You know, there is somebody who died at 26 years and 74 days old. And tomorrow, God willing, I get to live to be 26 and 75 days. What they wouldn't give for that extra day.

What a privilege. And it makes me really, really grateful for any time I get. And it puts all those other smaller problems into perspective. It's very hard to be productive and to want to work or do things that you don't think are important. when you remember that the day you're having right now was somebody's last day on earth.

And maybe that's the antidote for time flying. Like it's gratitude. Gratitude is the antidote. Gratitude for what you have and the fact that you still get to wake up and experience new things every single day and what a blessing that is, is the antidote to feeling like you are running out of time. Okay, I'm going to stop rambling here and I'm going to give you the quick summary of our episode before this turns into more of a philosophy podcast. then it already is. We're going to turn it back into a psychology one. Basically, this experience that you are having right now of time getting faster is really normal with age. It's super normal. It comes down to a reduction in novel experiences. It comes down to

how our brain processes the passing of time. It comes down to the role of memory, but it's also being exacerbated by our technology usage. If you want to add more years back into your life, Put down your phone and live. Go and do something. stuff, go camping with your friends, really challenge yourself to try new things, try new foods, see people, go to events, buy tickets to stuff, document what feels important. When you do that, time is going to feel less restrictive. It's going to feel more expansive.

And that's the best advice I have for you. So I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I also hope it wasn't too existential. Apologies if it was. If you want to watch more full episodes like this, you can do so on Netflix. And if you want the transcript versions of this very episode direct to your inbox so you can read whilst you listen or you want to know where we get the studies from, you can subscribe to us on Substack where I also share more research papers and academic science stuff in our study of the week series it's such a fun place to be I'm really enjoying it I feel like I'm posting more there than anywhere else at the moment so please go and follow us I also want to say a huge thank you to our summer intern Paola who pitched

this episode to me who helped with the research she spent all summer with us in London on an internship from Brown and she was just such a delight she was amazing so Paola if you are listening if you're watching We miss you already and we are so, so proud of you and we hope that you have the most successful, wonderful life and thank you for contributing to this episode. Until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We really hope you enjoyed and we will talk very, very soon.

455. Why does time start flying in our 20s?

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