Have you noticed time moving at different paces depending on what you’re doing?
That loooong meeting you’re not really engaged in feels like it takes centuries, while the hours you’re catching up with a friend seem to fly by in an instant.
The trip you’re really excited for takes forever to arrive, and the deadline you’re dreading sprints into your present in no time.
Sound familiar?
As humans, we have this fascinating function (okay, maybe it’s not objectively fascinating, but I sure am fascinated!) known as time perception. Our time perception is a unique compilation of cognitive, behavioral, and biological processes, all of which give us our overall sense of time passing.
Think about the last time you tried to focus on a task while tired, or hungry, or too caffeinated, when you were stuck sitting or standing for too long, or when you were distracted from the task at hand due to something else going on in your life. All of these factors may influence how you experience time in those moments.
To call time perception a function is actually a bit of a simplification. We don’t fully understand all the processes and neural mechanisms that impact time perception, but we do know there are a lot of things at play that determine how we perceive time.
I won’t go too deep into all of this, and to be honest, I’m not completely up to speed with all the research and findings out there. However, I do want to bring up a few more points related to the cognitive side of things to get you thinking about your own time perception (and we’ll go into more detail later).
Our experience of time is entirely subjective. You and I could experience the exact same event over the course of the same amount of time, and have completely different understandings of happened.
How we think about our experience is a key component to our overall understanding of the experience.
I suppose what I’m thinking about here is a bit of metacognition. How are we thinking about ourselves in time as we are experiencing this time?
Often, I don’t think we pay attention to the autonomy we have to shift our time perception.
While in a meeting where I’m feeling distracted, I can choose to sit there being distracted, feeling like the meeting is dragging on, and not really contributing or taking much from it.
Or, I can put some time awareness into play to check in with myself.
Why am I feeling distracted? Does it feel like the information being discussed is not relevant to me? Do I feel unimportant in this meeting, like I can’t speak up? Or, maybe I’m distracted because I’m worried or excited about something else going on in my life.
Once I check in in that way, I have a decision to make: do I choose to stay distracted and disengaged, or do I shift my focus?
I connect this to Anese Cavanaugh’s IEP method, where we have the ability to check in on ourselves to make sure our energy and presence are intentional, to make sure we are showing up as the person we want to be so we can make the impact we want to have.
Time perception, ultimately, is the result of our interaction with ourselves (internal) and our environment (external). While we often go through out days not consciously thinking about everything that influences how we perceive time passing, building an awareness and an ability to check in enables us to cognitively impact our perception of time and what we’re doing with it to better align with how we want to show up.
In short, it’s the practice of being present with ourselves. Time is going to pass no matter how we perceive it. And we’re going to have experiences we’re not thrilled to attend, experiences we wish could last forever, anticipation that keeps us giddy, and deadlines that arrive too soon. Instead of letting all of this whiz by, we can check in to make sure we’re navigating intentionally.
I want to leave you with the question I posed earlier: How are we thinking about ourselves in time as we are experiencing this time?
Are we mindlessly living throughout it, or are we taking measures to be aware of how we are in it, and the agency we have over how we are showing up?
Do you have thoughts about this? I’d love to hear them! What are some recent instances in your life where it would’ve been helpful to check in with yourself about your time perception and how it was being influenced?