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Feel like time accelerates as you get older? You're not alone, but you can slow it down.

At some point, you swear the math between decades is wrong.

Photo credit: Canva

Time is really all about perception.

You're scrolling along, minding your own business on the internet, when this little chestnut comes across your timeline: "1980 and 2023 are as far apart as 1937 and 1980. Sleep tight, old fogies!"

Wait, what? Your first reaction is, "That can't be right," so you pull out the calculator and do the math yourself—several times because you're sure you must've missed a number somewhere each time. You remember how long ago 1937 seemed in 1980, and there's absolutely no way that much time passed between 1980 and 2023. Buy you're wrong. As the warped reality of time washes over you, you sit in stunned silence, contemplating the existential crisis you've just been thrown into.

Why does time work this way? Why does it seem to get faster and faster and condense to make decades seem shorter and shorter as we age? And perhaps more importantly, how the heck do we stop time from feeling like a runaway freight train?

Here are a few theories about what creates the freight train phenomenon and what to do about it.

Time perception is relative—and kids perceive it differently

"Time flies when you're having fun" is a saying for a reason. Time also drags when you're doing drudgery work and feels like it stands still in moments of significance. And yet the ticking of seconds as they go by doesn't change tempo. We measure it with steady, unchanging beats, but how it feels changes constantly.

kids playing, time passing, perception of timeTime moves more slowly for kids.Photo credit: Canva

This relativity exists in every passing moment, but it also exists in the bigger picture as well. The years felt like they passed by much more slowly when we were children, and by middle age, they feel like they pass in the blink of an eye. The pandemic gave us an even greater sense of this relativity as disruptions to our normal routines and the stress associated with the COVID-19 years messed with our sense of time. (On an odd side note, surveys show that our time perception during the pandemic varied a lot from place to place—people in some parts of the world felt that time moved more slowly, while others felt time moved more quickly.)

According to a 2023 Hungarian study published in Nature Scientific Reports, very young children perceive time differently than older children and adults. Researchers split 138 people into three age groups—pre-kindergarten, school-age and adults 18 and over—and showed them two videos of the same duration, one that was "eventful" and one that was "uneventful." Interestingly, the pre-K group perceived the eventful video to be longer, while the older children and adults saw the uneventful video as longer.

The way the study participants described the length of the videos in gestures was also telling. Young children were much more likely to use vertical hand gestures, connoting volume or magnitude, to indicate a length of time than the other two age groups. School-aged kids and adults tended to use horizontal gestures, indicating time as linear, increasing with age.

Our neural processing slows down as we age

Professor Adrian Bejan has a theory based on how neurons process signals. As we age, our neural networks increase in size and complexity and, as a result, process visual information at a slower rate. That slower processing means we create fewer mental images each second than we did when we were younger, thereby making time seem to slow down.

time, time perception, science of time, aging, neural processing, youth, lifespans, female aging, woman's face over the yearsA woman slowly ages over about 15 years.assets.rebelmouse.io

“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth, Bejan shared with Harvard University. "It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful; it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”

In other words, processing the same number of mental images we did in our youth takes longer now, somewhat counterintuitively making time seem to pass more quickly. So goes the theory, anyway.

It might simply be about time-to-life ratios

Another popular theory about why time feels different as a child than it does as an adult is the ratio of any given day, week or year to the amount of time we've been alive. To a 5-year-old, a year is 20% of their entire life. For a 50-year-old, a year only is 0.2% of their life, so it feels like it went by much more quickly.

hands, clocks, passage of time, age aging, old age, time perception, time fliesAn elderly person's hands holding a small clock.Photo credit: Canva

It's also a matter of how much change has happened in that year. A year in the life of a 5-year-old is full of rapid growth and change and learning and development. A year in the life of a 50-year-old probably isn't a whole lot different than when they were 48 or 49. Even if there are major life changes, the middle-aged brain isn't evolving at nearly the same rate as a child. A 50-year-old looking back at the past year will have a lot fewer changes to process than a 5-year-old, therefore the year will seems like it went by a lot faster.

“Our perception of days, weeks, years and that kind of time seems to be especially influenced by our perspective: Are we in the moment experiencing it, or are we looking backward on time?” psychology professor Cindy Lustig told the University of Michigan.

The key to slowing it all down? Be mindful of the present moment.

Lustig has a point. When we are in the moment, our perception of time is much different than when we look back. So, being fully conscious in the present moment can help us rein in the freight train effect.

One way to do that is to be mindful of your physical existence in this moment. Feel your heart beating. Feel your breath going in and out. Cornell University psychology professor Adam Anderson, Ph.D., conducted a study that found our perception of time may be linked with the length of our heartbeats. (Study participants were fitted with electrocardiograms and asked to listen to a brief audio tone. They perceived the tone as longer after a longer heartbeat and shorter after a shorter one.) He suggests starting a stopwatch, closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing for what you think feels like a minute. Then, check your time to see how accurate your estimation was.

Breathe World Series GIF by MLBGiphy

“This can give you a sense of how much your experience of your body is related to your experience of time,” Anderson told WebMD. “It will help teach you to enjoy the pure experience of time.”

You can also use focused breathing to purposely slow down your heart rate, and thus slow down your time perception. “We show that slow heart rates—that is, a longer duration between heartbeats—dilates time, slowing it down," Anderson said.

We can also alter our perception of time by taking in novel experiences, such as traveling to new places. According to Steve Taylor, author of Making Time: Why Time Seems To Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, people who go on adventurous trips report that their vacations feel longer than those who choose a predictable destination. You can also make small changes to your daily routine, such as trying new foods or taking a new route home from work to take in some new stimuli and slow your perception of time.

A study in 2024 found that people who do intense exercise experience a time warp, feeling like they exercised longer than they really did, so if you want to temporarily slow down time, you can push your body hard during a workout.

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Finally, try to take in the world the way you did as a small child. Take note of life's wonders. Engage fully in whatever you're doing. Notice details and take mental pictures as much as you can. Time goes by fast when we're distracted, so training our attention on the here and now can help. Ultimately, we can strive to perceive time more like we did when we were little, in its full depth and magnitude instead of a narrow, straight line.

This article originally appeared last year.

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The odd and alarming connection between racial biases and the perception of time.

You're walking in front of a lot of people. You tell yourself, "Don't trip. Don't trip." But what happens?

GIF from "The 85th Academy Awards."

That anxiety is real. You're so worried about embarrassing yourself or doing something wrong that you get distracted and make careless mistakes.

It happens to the best of us.

But instead of anxiety about embarrassing yourself in public, think about the anxiety some white people may have about appearing racist.

Their intentions are good. (But you know what they say about good intentions.) They don't want to mispronounce a name, say something even remotely offensive, or appear the least bit uninformed. They have black friends — honest-to-goodness black friends!

GIF from "Happy Endings."

But when some white people interact with people of color, they're so nervous about appearing racist, their anxiety can shoot through the roof.

Their heart may race, muscles may tense up, and according to a study released last fall, it can also screw with their perceptions of time.

Social psychologists at Lehigh University explored the idea of race-related anxiety and perceptions of time, and the results are fascinating.

First, they asked a group of volunteers (24 women and 16 men) to complete a questionnaire measuring whether or not they were motivated to control their racial biases. Then, they put the volunteers in front of a computer and displayed geometric images followed by black faces and white faces with neutral expressions. The shapes appeared for exactly 600 milliseconds. The faces appeared for 300 to 1200 milliseconds. It was up to the volunteers to determine whether they thought each face was given more or less time than the shapes.

It probably looked a little something like this. Photo by Connor Einarsen/Flickr (cropped).

The result? Volunteers mistook short amounts of time for longer ones when viewing the black faces. Their heightened arousal caused them to perceive time slowing down. The findings were confirmed with a second set of volunteers, this time 36 white men.

Why did this happen? Lead researcher Dr. Gordon Moskowitz believes it's likely due to race-related anxiety (or what some refer to as "white fragility"). People are so worried about making a mistake and appearing racist, they get nervous and can trip themselves up and do just what they were trying to avoid.

GIF from "Parks & Recreation."

“Ironically, people trying to suppress the appearance of bias are most likely to display this form of implicit bias because their motivation to control prejudice induces race-related arousal,” Moskowitz wrote in the study results.

OK, but who cares if race-related anxiety can make time seem to speed up? Why does that matter? Ask a black kid with his hands in the air.

There are many situations where this time perception can be troubling. Consider the white employer who guesses she met with a black job applicant for 30 minutes, when it was really closer to 10.

Or the doctor who was supposed to spend five minutes assessing his black patient, but really spent just a minute or two.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Or the police officer who might give a black teen three seconds to drop the object in his hands, but shoots after one.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

The consequences of this misperception can range from a perceived slight or minor inconvenience to death.

It may sound like a big jump, but consider this:

Bryant Heyward, a black homeowner in South Carolina, called 911 to report a home invasion. When police arrived on the scene, Deputy Keith Tyner took less than two seconds to fire his weapon to "suppress the threat." The threat in this case was Heyward who stepped outside to greet the officers while holding his brother's gun. Though the gun wasn't pointed at the officers, Deputy Keith Tyner shot twice because Heyward didn't drop his weapon quickly enough.

Mind you, according to the dash cam, the entire incident took two seconds.

Though Heyward survived, he is paralyzed and may not walk again.


Systemic racism, white fragility, and implicit biases affect us in ways we're only beginning to discover.

When you realize some of these biases might be embedded at a borderline chemical level, they can seem impossible to overcome. But none of these findings excuse poor behavior, inattention, abuses of power, or murder. Race-related anxiety is just one more thing to work through on the road to equality. We can and will get there.

Tackling white fragility is the best place to start. Frank and open discussions about whiteness, privilege, and microaggressions can loosen the stranglehold these implicit biases have on our society and culture. It's easier said than done but programs, like Portland Community College's Whiteness History Month, are creating safe spaces to do just that.

Instead of worrying about making mistakes, we need to do right by our friends and neighbors, put our hang-ups aside, and start looking out for one another.

A Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle, Washington. Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images.

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