The Reason Time Seems to Speed Up as We Age

It’s not just you. The days pass more quickly, and physics has an explanation.

Where does the time go?

The older we get, the faster the days seem to go by. We turn around, and a month has passed. We forget ourselves in our routines, and another year has spun by.

The fast-forward growth of children never ceases to amaze us. We simply can’t believe it’s been ten years already since some significant event marked a change in our lives.

As it happens, there is a physical basis for the sensation that time is accelerating.

The key lies in the difference between how we objectively measure time — “clock time,” calendars, the rotation of the Earth and its revolutions around the Sun — and our subjective perceptions in “mind time” based on our memory formations, neural pathways, and the aging of the brain.

Time Flies

Today is my birthday. I’m 42. It’s not a year invested with a special significance for me. It’s not a milestone. It’s just another year.

In fact, my last year went by in such a blur I doublechecked the math to remember how old I was this time around. Strange, isn’t it?

Most people, as they get older, tend to feel as if time is moving more quickly. As children, the days took forever, especially if you were waiting for something like the start of the school year or a holiday.

Now, I tend to start digging my heels in to savor special moments and take a more planful approach to life.

I can feel Thanksgiving and Christmas looming around September — and not only because the stores jam the aisles with holiday displays earlier and earlier. It’s because I know I must start planning or the days and weeks will get away from me.

Why, as we age, do we feel like time is “getting away” from us?

For my birthday this year, to stave off those somber thoughts about mortality, I decided to look for a scientific explanation for this subjective feeling.

In a way, the phenomenon of my insignificant 40-something birthday is a symptom of what’s happening.

My forty-second birthday marks a year that’s just a sliver of my life.

But on the same day that I turn 42, my son turns 18 months — a half-year birthday I mark because that six months between one and two represents a huge chunk of his young life. He’s one-third older than he was at his first birthday, and the experiences he’s gone through in that time have turned him from a baby into a little boy.

It’s obvious, but also amazing when you think about it.

For a child, each year is a huge percentage of their lives. In that time, they’re constantly confronted with new experiences that help them form the architecture of their minds and memories.

Misalignment of reality and perception

So what’s going on?

There’s time and then there’s time. There’s the way it happens and how we experience it.

In a May 2019 paper published in the academic journal European Review, Duke University mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan explained:

“[M]easurable ‘clock time’ is not the same as the time perceived by the human mind. The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs.”

Mind time represents changes in our lives which we perceive and record in memories through our senses, especially our vision. The mind registers time passing when the images change.

“The present is different from the past because the mental viewing has changed,” Bejan states, “not because somebody’s clock rings.”

So while all of us are subject to the same rate of Earth’s rotation, and the clocks ring the same, we take in images at different rates and interpret them differently. A young person experiences more new images during a day than an old person — or the same person in old age.

It’s the misalignment between that speed of image input in mind time and the steady ticking of clock time that causes the perceived duration of one “time unit” to quicken as we get older.

As we grow, we process and make sense of new inputs, and our brains are conditioned to recognize them. We process them more consciously through more complex neural pathways.

As we get older and more experienced, Bejan writes, we interpret stimuli more and more as “only the most plausible solution, and not a confusing manifold of possibilities that occur during unconscious processing.”

We awaken from the dream-like mental functioning of infancy and early childhood into a world where things make sense. By the time we are middle-aged adults, we’ve “seen it all.”

Can we slow our mind clocks down?

When I feel overwhelmed, I start to have a “Stop this planet — I want to get off!” reaction to the daily grind.

Of course, it’s not possible in a practical sense, at this point, for humans to manipulate clock time. We can’t slow down the objective passage of time. We can’t turn the world’s clock backward.

But is there a way to slow down mind time, to return to the leisurely pace of childhood?

If the sensation of slower mind time in childhood is due to the longer processing time of our experiences, one way to stretch our days in older age might be to more consciously rework our days.

In a 2018 interview with NBC, Santosh Kesari, MD, PhD, a neurologist at Providence St. John’s Health Center, suggested a “retrospective-time enhancing hack”:

“I suspect that if you spend half an hour every night really reflecting on what has happened that day, it may ingrain them to make them more unique… Memory is short-lived and many of us just aren’t that engaged in the everyday things we’re doing, so if you slow down and engage more in the moment, and look back on everything deeply later, you may find time lasting longer.”

Another potential way to slow our mind clocks is to introduce new experiences back into our lives. Patricia Costello, PhD, a neuroscientist at Walden University advised:

“How can we stop that feeling of things going too fast, of missing out on our own lives? It comes back to learning new things… Are you learning a new skill? Are you cooking something different? Introducing novelty into your life when you can will make the memories stand out and stretch time in a way.”

The combination of learning new things with a conscious review of the day may help adults retain a slower sense of time.

Making time count

It presents a fascinating paradox: time flies faster the less you do. By tackling something new and filling your days with new challenges, you may actually experience a sense of having more time.

This year, for my birthday, I’m going to reflect on the past year and consider what I’ve done with it. Have I cognitively challenged myself? Have I learned sufficiently to keep my mind nimble?

What can I do in the coming year to tap into the childlike wonder? We all retain the potential for learning like children, but we have to make the decision to embark on something hard.

The sense that time’s passage is quickening can provoke a kind of existential dread. We’re sliding toward the inevitable.

For that reason, birthdays for older people can sometimes feel like black tick marks on our mortal clocks. Death is approaching.

There’s nothing we can do to stop that eventual outcome — life is something nobody gets out of alive, after all.

But what we can do is make our days count. We can consciously choose what we do with our external inputs. We don’t have to passively accept that our “mind time” will wildly accelerate and become uncontrollably misaligned with the “clock time” of our physical world.

Time flies when you’re having fun. It flies faster when you aren’t.

We can count our days. Or we can make our days count.

“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.” ― Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor’s Handbook

Edie Meade is a poet, essayist, and literary fiction writer with a background in visual arts. Her topics include parenting, society, economics, science, and creativity. Subscribe to her weekly Author Newsletter for exclusive content, or connect on social media.