Most of you have probably heard “Time flies when you’re having fun” more times than you can count. I don’t know if there’s a catchy phrase for the feeling that time drags on when you’re bored, but you’re probably also familiar with that sensation. If so, then you already have one tool that you’ll need for making use of this post: the understanding that you can change the flow of time by changing your mindset.
Before we go further, you may wonder why anybody would want to make time pass more slowly. Well, when you break down a typical day for the average person (there’s one such breakdown in this video), it’s very easy to let time get away from you and find yourself with little to no time left to do the things you most enjoy. Then there are things like watching friends and family members grow up and move on to other things in life, enjoyable events that feel too short, and a feeling of lacking control over your life. If you can stretch out the time you have, your life will feel a lot longer, fuller, richer, and more enjoyable, and you’ll be better able pursue your interests. With that in mind, let’s dive into how this works.
Being in a negative mood will make time feel like it’s moving slower. Good things will seem to take a lot longer to arrive, bad things will seem to go on longer than you’d like, and it’ll feel like forever before you’re out of that situation. Even once you’re out of it, looking back on it, it will seem to have taken up a larger part of your life than it actually did. A positive mood, on the other hand, will make bad things pass more quickly, good things appear sooner, and a rough situation will seem much shorter while you’re in it as well as when you look back on it. Being present, which I talked about in my previous blog post, will help tremendously with this. In addition to helping you keep and maintain a positive mindset, it will also make you more aware of the passage of time (I’ve found that this is often sufficient for making it feel slower) and of your surroundings. Presence makes it easier to use another tool for slowing down time: keeping busy.
By “keeping busy”, I don’t mean doing a lot of pointless tasks or never stopping to rest. I mean minimizing your idle time by accomplishing productive tasks (tasks that put you and those around you in a better position than before you did them) and then finding other useful things to do with your remaining time (such as reading about a subject you enjoy, visiting with friends, learning a new hobby, etc). When you look back on a day in which you accomplished a lot, it will feel longer than a day in which you accomplished very little; the more full days you have, the slower time will move and the longer your life will feel. Plus you’ll go to bed feeling good about getting a lot of good things done, which will make it easier to keep a positive mindset the next day and create a positive feedback loop that makes this easier and more natural as you go.
Since I started doing these things earlier this year, time feels like it moves a lot more slowly for me. I can make three or four hours before going into work feel like twelve hours, and I can usually stretch out one day into two or three; this works nicely for making one day off feel like several, especially since my normal days off aren’t consecutive. Rather than getting stressed out and rushing to get things done as fast as possible, I can breathe, slow down, and move at my own pace while still getting done everything I need to do and most of what I want to do in any given day. I also feel like I have a lot more time to plan for the future and put those plans into action than I did before.
This is a subject I haven’t talked about much and it was tricky to figure out how to explain it, so I hope this post makes sense. There is a great article from The Art of Manliness that covers this subject and looks at it in ways I did not. I recommend checking it out if you’d like to learn more about this. I hope you found this useful and enjoyable, and I will see you next time (pun intended).