Did you know stress changes your sense of time?

It’s a rare day that I meet someone who feels like they have enough time.

We can blame our lack of time on all sorts of things – the speed of technology, the constant onslaught of information, the overloaded schedules. We live in a culture of more more more, faster faster faster, hurry hurry hurry.

Did you know – cortisol increases the sense of time speeding by.

It’s called time perception.

Try this game:  Have some click a stopwatch and when they stop it, you guess how many seconds you think went by. How close were you?

Actual time is the objective number on the stopwatch.
Time perception is the number of seconds you think went by.
Time distortion is the difference between the actual time and the perceived time.

There are three ways time often gets distorted.

Time slowing down:

I was once standing at the kitchen counter about to set a Pyrex glass measuring cup on the island, when it slipped from my grasp. A jolt of adrenaline going through me as I tried to capture the handle.

What only took seconds seemed to move in super slow motion: the handle sliding through my fingers, the cup plummeting to the floor, the point of contact on the hard tile, the shattering into thousands of tiny pieces that spread across the entire kitchen floor into the next room.

It. Was. Spectacular.

I can recall every second of that event especially all the glimmering pieces scattering everywhere (no one was hurt). It was the action of the hormones, particularly adrenaline, that recorded more details of the event in my brain, giving me a feeling time slowed down.

Time (almost) stopping:

There are two instances when it feels like time almost stops: the feeling of falling in love and the feeling of being in flow.

Imagine you are spending time with the new love of your life – the whole day stretches before you. You are so completely in the moment together that you don’t pay any attention to the clock ticking. Oxytocin is one of the hormones involved here – it’s called the bonding hormone.

Now think of a time when you were immersed in a project, hobby (Zentangle, anyone?), or work task that you thoroughly were enjoying. All your concentration was focused on the task at hand, tuning out distractions, following your creative inspiration, totally losing track of time.

This is called flow. When you’re in flow, time also seems to (almost) stop.

Time speeding up:

Ahh, now we come to the crux of time – the sense of speeding up.

Everyone knows, we only get so much time. We all get the same 24 hours in a day. But what if you could influence time to slow down a little bit?

Turns out, our stress hormones give us the sense of time speeding up or going by too quickly.

Cortisol, while needed and helpful, is very easily thrown out of balance in our modern day. The body can secrete too much when we are not responding well to constant daily stressors, and over time, we can develop cortisol resistance, where our cells simply say “nope, can’t handle it – I’m not letting any more cortisol in” which stops it from doing its job.

Rather than the slow down effect of sudden or severe trauma or fright, this is more of a feeling like anxiousness, overwhelm, frantic panic. Too much to do and not enough time to do it. Time is running out and there wasn’t enough to begin with.

Do you have a long history of busyness, overwhelm, an impossible to-do list, and a strong sense of not enough hours in a day?

You can and do have at least somewhat an influence over this.

It is certainly a good idea to pare down (or eliminate?!) your to-do list and to say NO to more things.

In the meantime though, this quick, little exercise can become a life saver, or do I mean “time” saver?

Let out a long exhale.
Say in your head or out loud “Let time unfold.”
Take another long breath.
Then resume the task at hand.

The goal is simply to take your overwhelm level down one notch. Yeah, it’d be great if it made you all zen and peaceful for the rest of the day, but let’s stick with simple – in the moment – just for right now.

Breathe. Let time unfold. Breathe.

Now you try!

Source links:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235082087_Effects_of_Stress_and_Relaxation_on_Time_Perception
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26945451
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/extreme-fear/201003/how-the-brain-stops-time