When you were a child, summer vacation seemed to last forever. Now, the months slip by almost unnoticed. It’s one of life’s strangest sensations—the feeling that time speeds up as we age.
However, it’s not time itself that changes; it’s our perception of it. Understanding why time feels faster as we age comes down to memory, novelty, and attention, and how those factors shift over a lifetime.
The Brain’s Clock and the Role of Attention
Your brain doesn’t have a single “time center.” Instead, multiple regions, including the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and prefrontal cortex, work together to measure and interpret duration. This internal clock depends heavily on how much attention you devote to the passage of time.
When you’re deeply engaged in a new experience, your brain is flooded with sensory information. Each moment feels longer because it’s packed with novelty. But when life becomes routine, your attention drifts, and fewer new memories are formed. The result: time feels compressed.
This explains why days packed with new sights and challenges seem to stretch, while repetitive weeks vanish in a blur. The fewer “temporal markers” your brain encodes, the shorter that period feels in hindsight.
Explore How Memory Really Works (and Why It’s So Unreliable) for a quick look at how the brain stores details.
Novelty and Memory: The Youth Advantage
As children and young adults, everything feels new: first schools, first friendships, first heartbreaks. These fresh experiences create dense clusters of memory. The hippocampus, which processes new information, fires constantly, slowing our subjective sense of time.
As we age, novelty decreases and life becomes more predictable. We operate on autopilot, forming fewer distinct memories, so time seems to accelerate. Neuroscientists call this the proportional theory: as each year becomes a smaller fraction of our total life, it naturally feels shorter.
For example, to a five-year-old, one year is 20 percent of their life, which is an eternity. To a fifty-year-old, it’s just 2 percent. Combined with fewer new experiences, this compresses the perception of time dramatically.
See What Happens to Your Brain When You’re Bored to understand how low stimulation blurs time.
Emotion, Routine, and the Compression of Time
Emotions also stretch or shrink our experience of time. Fear and excitement trigger the amygdala, heightening awareness and slowing perception. Calm routines, by contrast, generate fewer emotional spikes and less vivid memory formation.
This is why vacations feel long while they’re happening. They’re filled with novelty and emotion, but seem short once you’re back home. During the experience, your brain is recording detail after detail; in hindsight, it condenses them into a single memory, erasing the sense of duration.
Repetitive routines, like daily commutes or predictable workdays, further dull the brain’s timekeeping. When fewer unique “anchors” exist to distinguish one day from the next, entire months can seem to disappear.
Read Can You Train Your Brain to Be Happier? for habits that add memorable “anchors” to your days.
How to Slow Down Your Sense of Time
While we can’t literally stop time, we can stretch our experience of it by making conscious changes:
- Seek novelty. Try new activities, routes, or hobbies. New experiences reignite the hippocampus and create more lasting memories.
- Practice mindfulness. Paying attention to the present moment increases time awareness and slows subjective experience.
- Break routine. Even small changes, such as rearranging your workspace or exploring a new café, refresh your brain’s perception.
- Savor moments. Gratitude and sensory awareness deepen memory encoding, making experiences feel longer and richer.
Engaging your senses, emotions, and curiosity turns the blur of passing days into distinct moments your brain remembers, and remembered time feels longer.
Consider The Hidden Psychology of Gift Giving to see how meaningful rituals create vivid memory anchors.
The Gift of Perspective
The feeling that time accelerates isn’t just a quirk of aging. It’s a cue to live more intentionally. The more we engage with life, the slower it feels.
By filling your days with novelty, purpose, and presence, you can reclaim the elasticity of time and rediscover the same expansive wonder you felt as a child.
