Why Time Feels Like It's Speeding Up (And How to Slow It Down)

0:03Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all.

0:24Darin Olien:Get ready to start living your super life.

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2:16Darin Olien:Welcome to the show. This is Darren Alleen. Today, I'm going to be tackling a question almost all of us has felt. And I'm going to give some examples that will show you that very thing. Why time feels like it's speeding up. And the scientific truths around it, certain points in history, COVID shifts, the illusion of time. We're going to tackle all of that. First question I have is, why does time seem to speed up as life goes on? Why did 2020 feel like both it was an eternity as it was going on and yet a blur? Why do years now feel shorter than they used to as a kid? And could it actually be true that our brains construct time, making it something that feels real but isn't?

3:07Darin Olien:We're going to explore what neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science actually shows and separate feeling time from measured time. This is wild. I feel like I should be taking psilocybin as I do this episode. But it's exciting. It's interesting. What is time perception? Time as measured by a clock is not the same as time experienced by the brain. subjective time. The felt duration of moments emerges from how the brain processes the sensory input, attention, and memory. It's not just literal internal clock. It's not just an internal clock that we have. Time perception research shows that your brain stitches events into the perceived duration using attention, memory, emotional salience.

4:10Darin Olien:So like how meaningful it was, how powerful it was, how emotional it was, and the perpetual processing. All of those things are going on in the brain stitching of time. This means that subjective time is inherently malleable. It changes based on what your brain is doing, not what the clock says. Some examples of this. Idle boredom feels really slow. When you're staring at a clock, you're waiting for someone to pick you up, and they're late, and oh my god, time is so slow. Also, deep engagement feels fast. When you're in the flow, when you're finding something you're stoked about, when you're on an adventure, time flies.

5:05Darin Olien:Also, a rich memory feels long in hindsight. A repetitive day feels shorter compared to the novel one because it gets compressed. And we'll get more into that later. This malleability is foundational. It's not just anecdotal. psychologists have shown that attention and memory significantly influences how long time feels. This is important. And it's important how the brain builds time. So let's break down the mechanisms behind time perception. Clock models versus attention, memory models. Traditional internal clock models suggest that the brain ticks time like a stopwatch. But more recent research shows attentional and contextual change models fit human experience better.

6:04Darin Olien:That means time seems longer when experiences are rich, novel, and memorable. I get this all the time when I travel, especially when I'm shooting stuff and we're on an adventure. We're doing a thousand things throughout the day. We get so much packed into the day and it feels long and rich and in the flow. The counter to that is time seems shorter when experiences are routine. They're shallow and unremarkable. So gosh, you know, they have those days where like you're kind of just doing stuff. You're returning emails and phone calls. Time seems shorter. They're less impactful. the brain's kind of like, nah, there's nothing really to grab onto.

6:56Darin Olien:Research specifically links attention and memory processing to subjective durational judgments. When attention is focused and vivid memory is encoded, time seems longer. When attention is divided, keep in mind, this is important. When attention is divided, moments disappear quickly. So what is attention divided? Social media, scrolling, all of that shit just vanishes time in the brain. In experiments when people attend more closely to stimuli or memories, subjective durations are lengthened. This explains why watching memorable or striking scenes can make us feel like longer stretches of time.

7:48Darin Olien:Because the brain encodes them infinitely more densely. So let me just jump to the year 2000. The digital shift that happened. Roughly. Roughly 2000. This was the explosion of the digital technology. This was around 2000. And onward. Of course. Since then, technology has fragmented our attention, encouraged constant task switching and scrolling, increased sensory stimulation and stress, loaded our days with micro-interpretations largely full of a bunch of nonsense. Psychologists argue that changing technology changes how we distribute our attention and that changes how time is experienced. Constant interruptions that break our sustained attention making it harder to encode experiences as a coherent memory.

8:51Darin Olien:It's kind of compressed and then shoved away. So all of that time that was filled full of micro stimuli is compressed in the brain and shoved away. So all of that time is gone. There's no encoded memory. And therefore, where did the time go? Well, it wasn't because you were in flow state. It's because it was a bunch of wasted time and you have virtually no memory of it. While there's no specific lab studying and saying time perception changed exactly since 2000, neuroscience does make clear that divided or overloaded attention makes subjective time more compressed and harder to track. A German sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, described a social acceleration in the modern life while the immediacy and the constant connectivity reshapes how we experience time, not the clock, but the felt, but the felt quality time is experienced.

9:59Darin Olien:But that changes the felt quality time. So the change post-2000 isn't about physics. It's about the human cognition adapting to novel, rapid, fragmented information flow. Now, let's jump to the big one that I feel is so weird, right? It's such a weird shift. COVID-19 and the temporal experience. So 2020 came. The early COVID pandemic became a natural psychological experiment in time perception. Researchers studied time perception during this lockdown period. Days felt like they were both slow and sped up. Weeks and months blurred together. Groundhog Day. People reported a distorted sense of time compared to normal life.

10:54Darin Olien:Why? Because typical temporal landmarks, the commutes, the social events, the weekends, going out with your friends, having physical meetings, all of this stuff disappeared. Without those anchor points, the brain had fewer reference cues to organize time. We live in a world of fatal conveniences, and that often includes your skincare, full of questionable ingredients. That's why I've partnered with Caldera Lab. Their code is clean performance and they are the definition of performance skincare without compromising the values around clean and non-toxic ingredients. Let me walk you through why they are so different.

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13:39Darin Olien:Extensive research confirms that when routine becomes monotonous and predictable, the subjective experience of time significantly changes. One longitudinal study found that as pandemic lockdowns went on, People experienced a shift towards faster perceived speed of overall time passage because this condensing and then shoving it in the brain, both daily and long-term scale. So COVID didn't warp actual time. It changed the brain's temporal context that it relies on for structure and experience. This aligns the other large surveys from early 2020 shows that over 80 % of people reported altered time perception during the lockdowns.

14:39Darin Olien:So here we are now with age and time perception. As you kind of are following what I'm saying here, as we age, this subjective time tends to feel faster because a common experience supported by this eMERGE science shows that in 2025, a brain study showed that older adults, their brains registered fewer distinct neural events, more monotony during the same objective interval compared to younger adults who had more experiences. That means fewer unique perceptual markers in your life, fewer distinct markers, segmented fewer moments, therefore experiencing feels shorter. In other words, if you're following me, when the brain signals fewer distinct events in a stretch of moments, time feels compressed.

15:41Darin Olien:This doesn't mean objective time speeds up. The clock doesn't speed up. It means that the neuro representation of time changes with age. Moreover, it changes with the amount of experiences you're having or not having. This scientific observation supports the common experience of childhood appearing long with many experiences. And adult life seems to be appearing and vanishing and going extremely fast. Like, bam! As I'm recording this, January's already gone. Time flies, it feels like. So is time an illusion? Well, we can confront the philosophical edge of this. Is time real? Here's what the science actually suggests.

16:30Darin Olien:time perception is constructed. The perception of time is constructed. We've seen that the brain builds subjective time from attention and memory, not from literal internal stopwatch. We do not have an internal stopwatch that we've put in the world if I'm looking at my clock or watch. Physics show objective time is relative. Einstein said that there is no universal now. Different observers experience time differently depending on motion and gravity. That's objective physics, not subjective experience. Some physicists and philosophers argue that time itself may be emergent rather than fundamental.

17:18Darin Olien:So is time emerging based on our brain's perception? The mainstream view isn't that time isn't real per se, but that the way we experience time isn't a direct readout of external reality. You might say our experience of time is real, but it's not the same thing as physical time. Our experience of time is real, but it's not the same thing as physical time. The scientific view says subjective time is constructed, not absolute. How to slow down your experience of time. This is the fun part. Here's what's super exciting. You can influence your subjective experience of time, not the clocks, but by how richly you feel your life unfolding.

18:11Darin Olien:What are you doing? Where are you going? What are the purposes you're having? What adventures are you on? Research suggests time feels fuller when you encode more distinct memories. When you go on that vacation, time distorts and you remember the time. And the time that you subjectively had feels long. You engage deeply within those moments. experiences are novel rather than repetitive which means let's break monotony let's break the repetitive nature as much as we can we still have to get on phone calls and return the emails and all of that stuff stop scrolling because that just condenses and wastes our time also subjectively you sustain attention instead of multitasking studies show that memorable vivid stimuli caused the brain to perceive time as longer.

19:14Darin Olien:Create memories. Hang out with friends. Go to events that you care about because they produce richer representations in the memory and certainly of that time spent. And again, that's why vacations often feel longer in memory than the routine weeks that we work at. So to slow down your felt experience of time, if we want to not blink and it's 2027, seek novelty. Go to work on a different road. Take longer to have an experience. Meet someone along the way. Get out of your car. Go for a walk. Break up the monotony. and focus deeply on things that you're doing. Turn off notifications. Eliminate going on social media and just put boundaries around it.

20:11Darin Olien:Reduce this digital interruption of attention. Be mindful of these daily tasks. These aren't philosophical tips. They're grounded in how our memory and attention shape subjective time. Hell, this is just a way of saying enjoy life, create experiences, and you will feel like you have your time back. Time isn't speeding up, but your experience of time is shaped by what your brain records. Modern life changes attention and memory patterns, period. COVID disrupted the temporal landscapes of our brain. Aging changes neural event encoding by the monotony of having less experiences as a kid. Physics show that objective time isn't universal.

21:02Darin Olien:Your brain doesn't measure time. It constructs it. And once you understand that, you gain agency. Because life isn't measured in seconds. It's measured in experiences, in moments you're deeply living. And those ones that you're deeply living, you remember. And you feel like you've had all of these experiences. is let's create 2026 with richness of experiences, adventure, breaking the monotony, still getting our stuff done, but doing things differently. Hell, Toltec shamans back in the day when I was studying with them 20 years ago, they said, sleep in your bed the opposite way. Put your head where your feet is.

21:49Get out of bed on the other side. Switch your room around. uh go like i said before go to work in another way have change your meeting room flip it around

22:01Darin Olien:meet someone rather than on the phone meet them on a hike have rich experiences this episode is full of sources and the bibliography is big and it's fun to dive into this stuff welcome to my brain I'm fascinated with time. I'm fascinated with adventure. I'm fascinated more than ever because I love traveling and we're working on this new happiness docuseries. This to me is a hack into creating my life so that I have rich experiences. I've had that throughout my life. People have been asking a lot lately about, hey, we want to know more about you. And people have been asking some interesting questions.

22:44And the more questions I ask, the more I acknowledge like, wow, I have adventure. in my life and I am still adventuring and my perception of time also increases now realizing I've had so much adventure and experiences in my life even though I fall victim to monotony but that time compression steals that time away I'm no longer going to do that monotony is going to be my excuse to change and create an opportunity to have and disrupt the monotony in totality. Still get my stuff done, but just do things a little differently. Okay? Hope you enjoyed this episode.

23:28Darin Olien:Please, if you got anything from this episode, like, subscribe, share it with your friends. It helps us and my team out tremendously. Comment. What other topics do you want me to get into because I'm stoked. I'm here to help build and bridge a super life for all of us. Let's break the systems so that we can rebuild our lives in a way that we're freaking jazzed. Okay? I love you and keep charging on. Happy New Year.