Time, Fast and Slow

When she graduated in 1996, Amy Forbus’ four years at Hendrix College felt like a miniature lifetime. College had been the biggest undertaking of her life thus far. But when she returned to the same liberal arts school in Arkansas two decades later in a staff role, periods of four years seemed to pass with alarming speed. 

“It felt like you’d blink and the first-year student who worked in our office was about to graduate,” she said. 

Forbus’ experience is a common one. As we age, time seems to move with ever-increasing speed—a phenomenon that is documented but not well understood. Human perception of time is highly subjective and flexible. But, experts say, recognizing how our perceptions change as we age can help us manage time more intentionally and perhaps even “stretch” our experience of how quickly it passes. 

In some cultures, you’re expected to apologize if you’re a minute or two late. In others, an hour or two doesn’t matter.

Most people—surveys say about 90 percent—feel time passes more quickly in later life, according to Steve Taylor, PhD, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University in the UK and author of Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time (2024). 

“Time seems to speed up as we get older, and it happens gradually and proportionately,” he said. 

It’s difficult to pin down the causes of this perceived speeding up of time because our time perception is so subjective. Humans’ experience of “felt time” isn’t the same as measurable “clock time,” according to Marc Wittmann, PhD, of the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany. Instead, it’s highly flexible and prone to distortions. 

“Time is inseparably tied to our experience as a whole,” Wittman wrote in his book, Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time (2017). Feelings, memories, happiness, language, stress, mental health, self-consciousness and other factors all affect how we experience time.  

Time seems to pass quickly when we’re absorbed in a task and more slowly when we’re bored. Hours spent “doom scrolling” on social media can seem like minutes, because platforms are intentionally designed to mesmerize users with an endless array of entertaining snippets. People who’ve survived traumatic emergencies, such as a car crash, often report experiencing that time moved very slowly during the incident. And people of all ages generally tend to estimate events as being more recent than they are.  

“I’m in England, so if I asked, ‘When did the Queen die?’ most people will say, ‘Oh, it was last year, wasn’t it?’” Taylor said. (Queen Elizabeth died in 2022.) 

Different cultures view time differently too. Author Christine Hohlbaum lives in Germany, where arriving a minute or two late for an appointment requires an apology. “But in some cultures, in Africa for example, they might say, ‘We’ll meet when the cows finish grazing,’” she said. “A couple of hours earlier or later doesn’t matter.” 

The perceived speeding up of time as we age seems to transcend cultures. One study compared surveys of people in Iraq and in the UK about how they experienced the passing of time between annual holidays. About three-quarters of respondents in the UK said Christmas seemed to come faster every year; in Iraq, a similar number said the same thing about Ramadan. 

What the Science Says

So why does time seem to move more quickly for most people as they get older? 

One popular theory about why time seems to move faster is “proportional time,” the fact that each passing year represents a smaller and smaller portion of one’s life to date. 

“As we age, time does fly, metaphorically,” said author Mary Westheimer, 70. “When you are four years old, a year is one-fourth of your life. When you are 40 years old, it’s just one-fortieth of your life.” 

Another explanation: as we get older, we no longer experience life with “young” eyes. Psychologist William James (1842-1910) first proposed this. As children, he wrote, “We have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day.” 

As we age, James observed, time seems to speed up because “each passing year converts some of this experience into an automatic routine, which we hardly note at all.”

It’s akin to the experience of a daily commute—so familiar that the driver can navigate on “autopilot,” and arrive at the destination with no memory of the drive or sense of the passage of time. As we age, we grow progressively desensitized to our surroundings and absorb gradually less information. 

However, the subjectivity of time is not unique to older adults. A teenager experiences time as passing faster than a child; a retired older adult feels like the years fly by even faster than in midlife. Experiments have demonstrated how time perception changes with age, even in controlled situations

For example, research subjects were asked to listen to music or watch a film, then to estimate how much time had passed. Younger people tended to estimate that more time had passed than older people.  

Days can seem long for older people who are bored or lonely, though they feel that years are speeding by.

Many people remember how slowly time seemed to pass in childhood, whether it was waiting for Christmas morning or the first day of summer. Author David Hamilton recalled family trips to the seaside when he was child, which seemed to take many hours. Recently, he was shocked to discover that the drive took only about 45 minutes.  

While there does seem to be a biological component of time perception, humans are not equipped with precise internal clocks in the same way computers are, Taylor said. Without timepieces or external cues, such as sunrise and sunset, our perception of time can be surprisingly unreliable. 

In one famous 1962 experiment, geologist Michel Siffre spent 63 days inside a cave to see how his sense of time was affected without the normal day-night flow of life. Siffre reported that his felt time had “telescoped.” His daily cycle of wakefulness and sleep stretched from 24 to about 25 hours. And he was shocked by how quickly the research time went by for him at the end of the 63 days. What had felt like one month while in the cave was in fact two on the surface.

Sometimes the perception of the speed or slowness of time is paradoxical. Older people who are retired, bored or lonely may experience the days as long, even as the years seem to fly by. That’s because people experience time differently retrospectively (looking back in time) versus prospectively (while going through it). In one 2019 study, many participants (75 and older) reported that time had slowed down, especially among those who were unhappy. 

“The best predictors of this slowing down of time were the negative affects, namely sadness, which were particularly high among the participants living in a retirement home,” researchers noted. 

Conversely, there’s the “vacation paradox,” in which time seems to fly on a holiday, because it’s so enjoyable, but in retrospect, the experience feels longer than it was because of the abundance of memories.

Age-related cognitive decline also can impair older adults’ ability to perceive time. Older people, for example, may find it more difficult to recall how long ago something went into the oven. 

More seriously, there’s dementia-related dyschronometria, the inability to accurately estimate the amount of time that has passed. People with dementia may confuse minutes with hours or misjudge the difference between days, or even seasons. Similarly, those with Alzheimer’s may exhibit time-shifting—lapsing into the illusion of being in another time and place. They may dress inappropriately for the weather, thinking it’s a different season, or become distressed because a loved one hasn’t “visited in years,” even though the person visited the day before. 

Stretching Time

Psychiatrist Carole Leiberman, MD, says older patients bring up concerns that time is passing too quickly, which heightens their awareness of mortality. 

“As we age, we are more aware of how little there is left,” she said. “We start taking this into consideration when choosing what we do. For example, we ask ourselves if there’s enough time left to start a project that takes a long time, such as a home remodel or studying for another career.”

There are ways to “stretch” our experience of time, Taylor said. Mindfulness practices like meditation boost conscious awareness and help “de-automatize” perceptions of daily life. 

Simply resisting the tendency to fall into routines can also stretch time.

“Humans are very routine oriented, because our routines allow us to reduce uncertainty,” said Beth Ribarsky, PhD, professor of interpersonal communications and media at the University of Illinois, Springfield. “We like knowing what to expect. But we can increase novelty in our lives with something as simple as taking a different route to work or going out to a different restaurant or trying new activities.”   

Embracing the limits of one’s time can also motivate and inspire older adults, Lieberman added. 

 “We can either try to do more in a day, get on with things we always hoped to accomplish, or we can let ourselves be depressed and figure, ‘What’s the use?’” she said. “This awareness can make later years better or worse.” 

Lifestyle Changes 

Of course, time is perceived in more ways than just speed or slowness. As people age, schedules and lifestyles change. That, in turn, changes the way their time is allocated and how the passage of time is perceived. Daily chores that were once dispatched quickly—meal preparation, grocery shopping, a daily shower—may take longer. Older adults, even healthy ones, have more doctors’ appointments, which take up a more significant portion of time. Days filled with travel or multiple activities can feel exhausting and may require a day or two of rest to recover. 

Kevin Hall, 68, noticed how his relationship with time changed when he retired six years ago. 

“After 40 years in corporate America, time flies by much faster now than it did while I was working,” he said. “I’m doing more fun things and just forget to even think about time.” 

Meetings, deadlines and kids’ activities dictated his schedule during his work years. Now, Hall spends his time writing books and enjoying the outdoors. Like many older adults, he eats dinner a bit earlier and goes to bed a bit earlier, partly because he has the freedom to do so, and partly because that seems to better suit his body clock.

“Now I am the boss of my time,” he said. “I decide when to eat, go to bed or go to certain activities, or not.” 

Hohlbaum adds that her life was ruled by “clock combat” back in 2009 when she wrote her book, The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World. Between caring for young children and meeting constant deadlines and appointments, she was always in a hurry. Now, at age 56, Hohlbaum is less driven by the clock. 

“When I look back at the person who wrote this book, God bless her, she was trying to manage everything,” she said. “Now I just want to enjoy my life. There’s nothing to prove. Now time feels more abundant.”