Why Time Feels Faster When We Age

I feel like we all have fallen victim to time at some point or another. You blink and summer’s gone. You open your eyes…and another birthday arrives. Somehow you’re making your next New Years resolution but it felt like last week you were making last years.

Time, once an endless summer that lazed on in the sunshine while you laid in the sand, now seems to sprint as fast as it can toward the finish line. (And no one likes what’s at the end of the finish line of life).

No, it’s not just in your head…or maybe it is, but not the way you think it is.

From the curves of Einstein’s relativity to the quiet rewiring of your neural patterns, science offers some answers finally. They all say the same strange thing: time doesn’t just pass…it stretches, shrinks, and shimmers depending on how we move through it.

Children Count Days. Adults Count Years.

Remember how long it took for Christmas to arrive when you were seven?

Each day was an era, each week an odyssey, summer lasted forever, and that little chalkboard with the countdown to Christmas started at 100 and ticked down super slowly.

Now though, at 34 years old?

It’s November before I’ve unpacked the beach chairs. Literally though. Somehow I got to the beach one time this entire summer and it was sort of a crappy partly hazy day where I didn’t even get a tan. Now it’s freezing and I’m turning the heat on in my house and trimming back my grape vine for the winter.

So what the hell happened?

According to the lovely scientists on the interwebs, our brain’s perception of time changes as we get older. And it’s not like the ticking of the clock is secretly speeding up when you’re not looking, but the way your mind records and recalls experience is.

Our brains are fantastic storytellers (I’d like to think mine is better than most, and if you disagree I’d love to have you jump into the middle of one of my nightmares), and they only record the new, the surprising, and the vivid.

A first kiss lingers longer than the hundredth, a trip to a new country stretches time, but brushing your teeth, again, again, again? Your brain barely logs it. It’s redundancy makes it more and more irrelevant to your brain.

As we age, we fall into routine.

Wake up, work, eat, scroll, sleep, repeat.

The brain (bless that little organ of ours), in its never ending epic quest for efficiency, stops recording these loops in detail. Because, why bother? So when you look back, there’s less “data.”
Less color, less depth, and a lot less details about the way your wrist moved when you brushed your teeth. Unless something news-worthy happens while you’re mid-stroke, you probably don’t take note of anything other than, yeah that’s done.

So, unfortunately for us, the months compress. Memory doesn’t just stack like neat books in the most perfect library on earth…it spirals, fades, and echoes strangely in that lump we keep three feet above our asses.

Relativity: Einstein Was Right, Too

Even beyond all that fun little psychology I just spewed to you, physics also nods its agreement.

In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time slows for things in motion and speeds up for those at rest.

Clocks on satellites tick differently than clocks on Earth, time bends under gravity, and it stretches (sometimes dramatically) with acceleration.

So in a very real sense, time is subjective. It’s a fabric and construction that you and I use because otherwise when our job tells us to show up when it feels right and don’t be late, chaos would ensue. How we move through time itself changes its shape. I haven’t believed time to be linear since my trauma.

Now pair that with your internal tempo (your awareness, your novelty, your routine), and you begin to see that time isn’t just measured, it’s felt. And feelings vary from person to person and thing to thing.

Here’s the brutal math for some perspective as well, to a 5-year-old, one year is 20% of their life, but to a 50-year-old, it’s only 2%.

We measure time relatively. So every new year feels shorter…not because it is, but because it’s a smaller slice of your growing memory pie. That’s why your first love feels epic, your first heartbreak eternal…and last Tuesday? Already gone. Can you even remember what you did while you sit here and read this?

Time Feels Fast When We Stop Paying Attention

Let’s get poetic for a moment, because you know sometimes my mind goes to strange places (with or without my permission).

Time doesn’t rush by, we just stop noticing it.

When every day blurs into the next, your brain doesn’t pause long enough to say, “let’s make this one count.” You fall into default mode.

And default is the enemy of time’s richness, but novelty, awe, and presence, those are time’s antidotes.

I’ve written before about how trauma really broke my internal clock for a little while. I have no recollection of literal weeks following my trauma, while other times memories I had long forgotten from my past cropped up (thanks EMDR).
It was more than just time though. I had felt like I was walking around in slow motion while everyone else raced around me. I noticed things I hadn’t in years (or maybe ever) like the way the wind rustled through grass or the way a bird cocked its head before taking flight. While my perception of time shattered into a million pieces, it also sort of restored some of the richness of life I had overlooked the past decade or so.

Why had I overlooked it? I stopped paying attention a long time ago to all the going-ons around me while I stressed about this and that and the other thing. And I also realized I wasn’t alone in this. Everyone around me who I thought was moving fast while I was stuck in molasses? Yeah, they were moving too fast to notice anything too.

You Can Slow Time Again. Here’s How.

Want to experience that time stretch I experienced again, or maybe to soften the rush of it?

Travel somewhere new, even in your own city and put your phone away. Don’t take any pictures (sometimes I think doing this is the equivalent of taking notes in class instead of actively listening. You’re brain isn’t absorbing what is said because it has a Plan B and our brains are lazy things).

Eat with your hands once in a while, and keep the silverware in the drawer. It’s fun to be childlike again every once in a while, it’ll make you and your dinner partner laugh at the ridiculousness of it.

Watch the moon rise and do nothing else but sit there and see it turn in the sky.

Change your route home and drive the long way. You might hit some traffic (I live in Philly so I hit traffic every day of my entire life), but you also might notice a new farm or plant nursery you’d never seen before.

Novelty creates memory density, so chase after new experiences a little more.

The more you notice, the more the brain records, and the more it records, the longer the moment feels. You can play these games right back with your brain and win if you just do it a little differently.

Make Memories Stick With This Simple Tool

If you want to really stretch time, journal even a few sentences a day.

Or use a digital prompt journal like this guided memory keeper.

Recalling memories (reconjuring detail) makes the brain relive them, which makes your brain think they’re important. Even if you’re just thinking about that fire tomato roasted chicken your husband made.

It’s not nostalgia, it’s neuroplasticity.

You don’t even need a notebook. You can write one good thing that happened to you every day and put it in a mason jar. At the end of the year you would have an uplifting summary of your year.

The Time of the Body vs. the Time of the Soul

We age on paper, in bone, and in our skin.

But in that inner clock, that one’s a lot trickier, because it runs on emotion, awe, attention.

A single hour of grief can stretch like weeks, while a weekend of joy and fun can flash by like lightning.

So maybe it’s not so much about slowing down the clock, but more about expanding our awareness inside of it. Maybe aging isn’t supposed to be the mourning of the loss of youth, it’s just an invitation to live wider than you had in the past.

You don’t need to chase time or fear it.

Try instead to reignite that wonder that used to live inside of you as a child, change your rituals, and say “yes” to things that scare you just a little. Because fear, excitement, and even uncertainty, well those are time amplifiers. They tell the brain, “this matters. Record this one. Hold it tight and don’t let it go so easily.”

Time Doesn’t Pass, We Do

For a deeper (and more frightening) outlook on life, time isn’t a thief, it’s a river.

And if you feel it speeding up, don’t panic. That means you’ve lived and loved and learned enough to fall into a routine.

Now go live some more…deliberately.

Let the calendar spin on by and time to do what it does best (Father Time is undefeated after all), but you?

You can choose to notice every petal, every pause, and every pattern in the sky moving forward, and I hope you do.