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How can you make subjective time go slower?

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11–20 of 71 posts

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#11
I don't know how true it is, but the reason I've heard that routine makes it seem like time goes faster is because your brain condenses similar experiences. If you have a lot of similar days, your brain will interpret them mostly as the same day, making it feel like you don't know where the time went.

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#13

Plank exercise. A minute or two seem to last forever. Or waiting for a microwave to heat your food. Kidding aside, meditation can help, as can just being out in nature without keeping your mind busy by stressing out with a screen in front of you.

This person planks.

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#14
post #11

I don't know how true it is, but the reason I've heard that routine makes it seem like time goes faster is because your brain condenses similar experiences. If you have a lot of similar days, your brain will interpret them mostly as the same day, making it feel like you don't know where the time went.

[deleted]

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#15
post #11

I don't know how true it is, but the reason I've heard that routine makes it seem like time goes faster is because your brain condenses similar experiences. If you have a lot of similar days, your brain will interpret them mostly as the same day, making it feel like you don't know where the time went.

Yup, when you constantly do new things time does seem to last a lot longer! Great way to make a 6 day holiday feel like 2 weeks!

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#16
post #2

Meditation can make subjective time slow down, both in the negative, being bored way, while struggling to enter absorbtion, but also in the opposite way - and that, to a degree that is otherwise unimaginable. Almost like stepping out of time into timelessness.

Can you explain more? This is such a foreign concept to me but I'd love to try and understand.

I turned to mindfulness/meditation as a tool when I was about to burn out. My brain seems sensitive in general to any kind of stimulation I should add... At my fourth or fifth attempt at a so called “body scan” my mind just “dropped” - it was as if everything went silent and I could not decide whether I was asleep or wake.

The best way I can describe my experience in this state, that I’m able to reach from time to time, is like being in between frames of film - I’m in the dark part after one frame, not reaching the next, and everything is just still.

Controlled but yet completely uncontrolled and a few minutes feels much much longer, but nothing makes me want to leave.

After the first time it happened I ran out to my wife and yelled “holy expletive! Now I get what this thing is about!”.

It really made a change for me and it makes my brain/mind feel about the same as it does after a run. Fresh.

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#18
Just do new things. Go to new places, talk to new people, try new things. It can be as simple as not taking the same route to work/grocery store/etc every time. Mix it up.

Some claim that time feels quicker as you get older because each passing minute is a smaller and smaller portion of your life(e.g. summer for a 6 year old is 5% of their life, whereas it is only half a percent of the life of a 50 year old). But I don't buy that.

Time goes quicker as you get older because people get stuck in the same routine, and it is quite easy to compress memories together when you do the same thing every day. So, go explore, every day, even if it is just mental exploration through books or music, and time will surely slow down.

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#19
An individual's peak alpha frequency can determine whether two closely spaced flashes of light will be viewed as a single flash. People with faster IPA (individual Peak Alpha) have a faster frame-rate, a faster sampling frequency [1].

In principle, one might use TACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) or other rhythmic stimuli to entrain IAP and boost one's frame rate. Present work shows that TACS can lower the frame rate, making people more likely to fuse flickers than distinguish them [2].

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.089771v1....

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0176...

Re: How can you make subjective time go slower?

#20
post #2

Meditation can make subjective time slow down, both in the negative, being bored way, while struggling to enter absorbtion, but also in the opposite way - and that, to a degree that is otherwise unimaginable. Almost like stepping out of time into timelessness.

Mindfulness can likewise be used to slow down subjective time.
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