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How to slow down time when life keeps speeding up

Skydiving or watching the grass grow? Psychologists and Buddhists explain how we can stretch our time.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My conundrum is common, I guess. I feel time accelerating as I grow older. I am expecting my second child, and as the days tick down until I meet her, I feel time catching up with me (I’m in my 40s). I want to savor every day, but they go by so fast. I know that novelty is a partial solution to this, so I do lots of new things. I take up hobbies, go to new places, etc. But I still feel an encroaching contraction of experience and memory, and I’m afraid my remaining decades will go by in a blur. I want to prepare to be as present as I possibly can to the new human I’ll work to raise.

Do you have advice on slowing down time, or wisdom on how to dilate and cherish the moment I’m in? I’ve tried “mindfulness” and various meditation practices. These haven’t caught hold yet, though I’ll keep trying. Daily journaling and getting away from social media seem to help, but the days still fly by.

Do you remember how long time felt when you were a child? I certainly do. I remember summer break stretching out endlessly; a whole eternity captured in one hot July afternoon. It’s no wonder that we respond with panic as we get older and weeks snap by so fast no matter what we’re doing — vacation, working, or as you are, growing a family.

Why it feels like there’s never enough time for your relationships

There are two ways to think about time: the way it feels when you’re living it, which is called “prospective time.” And then how you remember time, known as “retrospective time.” It sounds like you’re struggling with both. You want moments to feel longer as they’re happening, and to look back and feel like time didn’t just slip through your fingers.

What’s interesting about our perception of time is that there’s no specific organ dedicated to sensing time. Our eyes see, and our noses smell, but feeling time is a vaguer sense, cobbled together by the combination of various inputs. It is also more easily manipulated.

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I took a close look at the work of David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist at........

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