Why Time Goes So Fast
And what you can do about it.
The more life you’ve had, the less storage space you have.
The days blend into one because your brain is clever - and bored.
Survival mode robs you of some memories you want.
All these things contribute - but why? And how can you change it?
Every few weeks I hear myself saying How is it nearly (month) already? Where’s it gone?
At first I was confused, then I felt like I was missing something - a secret for keeping track of time that I’d never learned. Then I questioned the theories of why time speeds up as your life progresses. Theories I knew about from my psychology studies back in the olden days, but which didn’t always explain it well enough.
Now I get it.
Let’s look at the first thing that we know to be true:
Disc Space…
An interesting effect of time is the way memories are stored. You know how many times you’ve been to Paris (still 0 for me!) but you don’t know how many meals you’ve eaten. They’ve all blended into one big blur, apart from those special meals by the sea, or with your best people, or for a special event.
Our brains crave novelty - new experiences to wake it up, to switch off auto-pilot and notice. When we’re engrossed in something new we tend to pay attention, taking in every detail, totally in the moment. If we don’t have these new experiences there’s nothing to break up the monotony that puts our brains into sleep-walk mode.
As we live more life there is more in the past - each year becomes a smaller proportion of the life you’ve lived - and more importantly only the unusual stands out. The rest get filed away as ‘more of that', ‘unimportant’, or ‘the same as’.
It saves disc space.
But novel experiences don’t get filed with ‘more of that’: they get filed with ‘ooh, something new!’. Our brains love something new to get their teeth into.
Or it’s classed as unimportant to our survival, and get’s thrown into the ‘unimportant’ bin in the back office.
Stress…
There are so many memories you actually don’t know you have, because your brain has classed them as dull, irrelevant or as too traumatic to recall.
I know I have memories that I just can’t access; even fun stuff, or important things. It’s frustrating. But I know for me, so much of my life was spent in this state of survival that it explains why I can’t recall things I WANT to remember - fun stuff, conversations, events that might explain my current feelings.
Stress, being busy, too much to do, too many dramas to manage. We all know the feeling of running on fumes and spending all our energy on getting through the days: these are the days we drop into bed at night and wonder where it all went and what we actually achieved.
This is Survival Mode. Survival mode narrows your awareness, the brain prioritising safety over presence. You stop seeing detail, stop seeing, hearing, feeling. And this happens every minute of the day, so by the time you get to the end of your day, very few memories have been laid, no new neural connections - because we didn’t actually ‘experience’ it, we just got through it. And we wonder why we can’t remember what we had for dinner the night before.
What does remain is emotion. You know how you feel at the end of the day, even if you can’t name it, explain it, or remember how it happened. Or those days you wake up in a mood and don’t really know why. The emotional hangover, when unexamined, becomes your way of being.
Your emotional hangover is a message from your brain: it want you to pay attention to your life, not just survive the days.
So what can you do?
Your Daily Round-Up
If presence is currently difficult for you because you’re in the thick of it, the best thing you can do is a daily run-through of what’s happened during the day - it really does help you remember more.
At night, as you prep for bed, or snuggle under ready to go to sleep (I recommend doing this during teeth and face drills if you tend to drop off fast!) run through each event or each hour of the day from waking:
name what you saw
how you felt
who was there
what you did
No particular order, just what comes to mind. So it may go like this:
Woke up at 7, to birdsong. There was a breeze coming through the window. My first thought was ‘what shall I wear today. I felt calm, but a little anxious because I knew the trip would be a faff’.
Then…
Run through the whole day. Then in the morning check in with yourself about what you recall from the previous day. After a week or two you’ll remember more, and your days won’t feel like they’re vanishing but are actually full of life.
The Thing About Presence…
Presence is one of those things that’s both easy and difficult. It might also sound too simple to be true.
It does take practice to learn, but it takes a only a little bit of practice to maintain really really well, once you have the hang of it.
But the effects are life-changing if you jump in with both feet. Fully in. It changed mine. Just like everything else you want to do well, you have to be prepared to actually do it, and not expect it to land on your lap without commitment.
It’s not something we grow up with really, is it? Most of us have never hear of it as a ’thing’, let alone learned how to do it - or why to do it.
What I can tell you is that it works. Next time I’ll tell you how - and how it led to the forgiveness I needed.
If you’re in survival mode and need help to get out, lets have a chat.
I support you in different ways, 1-1, to recognise where your patterns and habits came from and help you move out of it to a place of living in each moment.
Message me on 07812 593 966 or write to me here, and I’ll respond or we can set a date for a chat. Let me put your mind at rest. You won’t regret it.