How To Slow Down Time - The Holiday Paradox

- Ali wanted to dive into the research behind what we know about our perceptions of time. In this video, Ali talks about the different ways time is distorted for us, the holiday paradox, and three actionable and evidence based things to slow down time. - A study of novice skydivers in the Journal of Behavior Research and Therapy shows that time is distorted when a bunch of people complete their first ever skydive. It shows that subjective time can be distorted by strong emotions and boredom. - One way to slow down time is to learn something new. Brilliant, the sponsor of today's video, is an interactive platform where you can learn maths and programming and AI. - Speaker A explains that time in the moment and remembered time work in opposite ways. They need to strike a balance between these two sorts of time perception. Then they talk about how to create more memories to make it feel as if you've expanded time and idea. - Routines are very repetitive and don't contain a lot of novelty, so they don't let us create as many memory anchors. So the key takeaway is to seek out novelty as much as possible. - Speaker A recommends to everyone to take more photos and to have a proper camera to take photos. Speaker C is anchors of mindfulness. Speaker D is time pressure and time dilation.

Alright, so last year I did a lot of traveling and it felt like time really slowed down. I was doing so much stuff in the space of just a few months and I actually remember a lot of what happened. But this is very different to my life in London, where every day seems to sort of blend into all of the others. And when I look back over the last few months, it feels like time passed super quickly and I actually can't remember much of it. So I wanted to dive into the research behind what we know about our perceptions of time. Why does it speed up or slow down or even sometimes feel like it's come to a complete standstill? And are there ways that we can learn to really feel time passing and really make the most of it? Because if you've built a life you love, then you really don't want it to go by in a flash. So in this video, we're going to look at, firstly, the different ways time is distorted for us. Secondly, something called the holiday paradox, which is going to help us understand how we perceive time. And thirdly, we're going to go through three actionable and evidence based things that we can all do to slow down time so that we experience more of life. Oh, and by the way, if you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author. And when I was in med school, I did an extra degree in psychology. And I love researching this stuff and trying to figure out what are the evidence based things that we can do to build a life that we love and just generally enjoy ourselves more and feel more happy and fulfilled. Part one, time distortions. Okay, so there's this cool study called how time flies, a study of novice skydivers in the Journal of Behavior Research and Therapy. And the researchers here wanted to find out how time is distorted when a bunch of people complete their first ever skydive. Now, before these people jumped out of the plane, they were asked how scared and excited they were on scales from zero to 100. Then they got ready, they put on all the gear and they went up in the plane and did the sky dive. And afterwards they had to estimate how long they thought the whole experience lasted. Basically, the people who were more scared thought that time slowed down, but the people who were more excited thought that time sped up. So what this research shows us is that firstly, it's good to do things that scare you because it slows down time. But secondly, that the way that we experience time is subjective. There is objective time, which is objectively how long something took but then there is subjective time, which is how long we perceive the thing took. And subjective time can be distorted by a bunch of things. So firstly, subjective time can be distorted by strong emotions, like when you're happy or excited, time seems to pass pretty quickly. But when you're scared and about to jump out of an aeroplane, time passes really slowly. Secondly, boredom can affect the subjective perception of time. So obviously, time slows down when you're bored, waiting in a line at the supermarket or whatever. And thirdly, when you're in a state called flow, you often don't even notice the passing of time because you are in the zone. You're in your flow state. You're working on something that is sufficiently engaging and sufficiently challenging. Okay, so we know that emotions affect the subjective passing of time, but what about age? Like, if I look back on my childhood and I think of the long summer holidays, I get the sense that time passed really slowly back then. But as I'm getting older, I have this sensation that, like, time is speeding up. But I want to show you what the research actually tells us about this. So here's a question for you. How fast did the last ten years pass for you? And you have this scale that you can rate your answer to this question on from minus two to two. Now, this is exactly what researchers asked people back in 2005 in a questionnaire for 500 people between the ages of 14 and 94. And they were looking at how our age influences our subjective perception of time. Now, in answer to this question, how fast did the last ten years pass for you? This is what the graph looked like. So if we look at the graph, we can see that generally as people get older, there seems to be a bit of an increase in the speed of perception of passing of time. Like, if we look at the 14 to 19 year olds, their sort of average is between zero and one. So they feel like the last ten years passed from, like, neutral to fast. Whereas if you could look to like, age 50, you know that at the average is sort of one point something, which means they felt time passed fast rather than neutral. Interestingly, you can see that it's sort of levels off beyond about age 50. So it seems like 60, 70 and 80 year olds don't think that the last ten years passed any quicker, which is kind of good. But there does seem to be a general slow increase in the perception of passage of time as we get older. So why does this happen? Why do we have this feeling that as we get older, time passes by a little bit faster? Now, one theory around this is around the percentage of our lifespan. So for example, if you are ten years old, then one year is a whole 10th of your life. But if you're 50 years old, one year passing is only 2% of your life, and so 10% versus 2%. You would sort of imagine a ten year old would feel the subjective passing of time slower than someone who's 50. And actually, one other way to slow down time is to learn something new. And a great way to do that is by using brilliant, who are the sponsor of today's video. Brilliant is an interactive platform where you can learn maths and programming and AI. They've got thousands of lessons and their focus is on learning by doing rather than just by consuming. I've been using brilliant now for the last five years, and they've been supporting the channel during that time as well. They've got a first principles approach to learning, which helps you build understanding from the ground up. And it's all crafted by an award winning team of teachers and researchers and professionals from places like MIT and Caltech and Microsoft and Google. In many more cool places. Brilliant helps you build your critical thinking skills through problem solving, not just memorizing things. So while you're building real world knowledge on specific topics, you also become a better thinker. The new courses on programming are particularly good. They'll help you get familiar with a language like Python so you can start building programs on day one with their built in drag and drop editor, if that sounds good and you'd like to try out everything that brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, then head over to brilliant.org Ali Abdaal or click on the link in the video description and that will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much brilliant, for sponsoring this video. So that's one possible solution to this conundrum. One is something interesting, and that is the holiday paradox. So I want you to imagine that you're going on holiday for a week and you are at the airport ready to leave, but there has been a big delay on your flight, so you end up having to wait at the airport for like 3 hours. Now, in that moment, especially if your phone is out of battery, time is going to feel like it passes really slowly because you're just stuck at the airport with nothing to do and you're really bored and all you can think about is how slow time is passing. Eventually, though, you board the plane, you get to your destination, and for the rest of the holiday, time seems to pass really quickly because you're not thinking about time and you're always doing something new. Now, this is where things get a little bit interesting and a little bit complicated, because there's actually two different types of time perception. There is in the moment time perception, and then there is remembered time perception. So in the moment, the airport delay feels really long, and the holiday itself feels really short. But then when you get back home and you look back on your holiday, the airport delay, which felt very long in the moment, actually feels very short. And the holiday, which felt very short in the moment, actually feels kind of long in retrospect. And this is what we call the holiday paradox. And this comes from a book called Time Warped, unlocking the mysteries of time perception, written by the psychologist Claudia Hammond. Okay, so why do we have this holiday paradox? Why is it that sometimes the perception of time in the moment is different to the perception of time when we remember it? And the theory here is that it's all about memory. So when it comes to retrospective or remembered time, it's our memories that help us judge how fast or slow we thought something happened in the past. So uneventful periods of time without a lot of change pass really slowly in the moment. But then when we remember them, it feels really short, because in terms of memories, we didn't make that many memories. But on the other hand, if you're doing something very stimulating and there is a lot of change and a lot of novelty, that absolutely flies by in the moment because there's a lot going on, it's very exciting. But then when you remember it, it feels very long because you have all these novel memories. And this might explain why, as we get older, it feels like time is passing by faster. Because generally, when we're younger, we are doing a lot of new things, we are learning new stuff, we're developing new skills, and we're creating lots of new memories. But then, as an adult, most of us tend not to do that many new things. We tend to get into our routines. We tend to have the same job for extended period of time. We tend not to have those novel new experiences. So what the holiday paradox tells us is that time in the moment and remembered time work in opposite ways, where expanding one makes the other one feel shorter and vice versa. So essentially, we need to strike a balance between these two sorts of time perception. If we want to feel like time is not passing too quickly in the moment, and we want to look back and feel like everything didn't just pass by in a flash, memory is our way of reliving our past experiences and re experiencing our time. And it follows them that the more discreet memories you have from a prior experience, that that experience becomes expanded in time. Oh, by the way, I've got a completely free resource, the journaling hub, that has a bunch of prompts, my favorite journaling prompts. I like to collect those. It's completely free. There'll be a link down below if you want to check it out. Part three, how to slow down time. Okay, so we're going to look at three ways that you can create more memories to make it feel as if you've expanded time and idea. Number one here is anchors of novelty. So, to understand this, we can look at this study from the American Psychological association that used a simple task to understand the relationship between routines and subjective time. So, here, the researchers randomly split a bunch of students into two groups. Group one was the routine group, and group two was the not routine group. And all they had to do was complete a simple task, which is they were given a bunch of these different rows of numbers, and in each row, a specific number was underlined, and the students just had to count how many underlined numbers there were. But the difference was that in the routine group, it was always the number five that was underlined, whereas in the non routine group, it was a different number in each row. Now, all of the students were given two minutes to do the number task. And afterwards, they were asked to estimate how long they thought they were doing the task for. And this is where things get interesting. The average for the routine group was 129 seconds. But the average for the non routine group was 168 seconds. And this 25% increase was statistically significant. So what this test shows is that when someone is doing something that's routine without much novelty. For example, the routine group always looking at for the number five, they feel like time has passed faster. Whereas when someone is doing something with a little bit more novelty and out of routine, that is counting different numbers each time, they feel like time passes slower. As we get older, we find ourselves going through the same routines every day. We often wake up at the same time, we wear the same clothes, we take the same route to work, we sit at the same desk, we buy the same food for lunch. And yeah, routines are great because they help us increase our productivity and get things done and mean that we don't have to think too much about the routine. Which is why, like Steve Jobs, wear the same outfit every single day. You know, that kind of idea. But routines are very repetitive and they don't contain a lot of novelty, so they don't let us create as many memory anchors. And so our time is going to feel much shorter in retrospect when we're following routines. So the key takeaway here is to seek out novelty as much as you can. And it doesn't really have to be big things. You could, for example, try learning a new skill, like a new musical instrument or something. You could experiment with taking different routes to work each day. In my case, I go for a walk in the local park every morning, and I normally just follow the same route because I'm a creature of routine. But you know what? I'm going to experiment with following a different route each time, maybe trying out different coffee shops, different restaurants, different places to work, for example. The more of these anchors of novelty we can add into our life, ideally without, like, blowing our lives up, the more we're going to feel like time is passing by in a more elongated fashion. Idea number two, anchors of reflection. So there is this guy called John Koenig, and he is the founder of the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. And this is basically a dictionary that has words to describe emotions that many of us feel, but those that are very hard to put into words. And one of these words is olika, which means the awareness of how few days are memorable. John writes, your life is a highlight reel. You'd like to think that every moment has potential, that there's something transcendent hidden all around. If you'd only stopped to seize the day, you could hold onto it and carry it with you. But the truth is, most of life is forgotten instantly, almost as it's happening. Chances are that even a day like today will slip through your fingers and dissolve into oblivion, washed clean by the tides. Okay, so what can we do about this? How can we prevent all of these different days from just dissolving into oblivion? Well, option number one is journaling, writing about what actually happened in your life, and crucially, your thoughts and feelings associated with it. There's loads of evidence about how journaling, expressive writing, especially doing it by hand, is really good for your working memory. But essentially, the more you write about this stuff, the more you have these anchors of reflection or these little memories that are associated with the thing. I personally use the app day one for journaling, and it's nice because today I'm filming this on the 24 July 2024. And I actually can look at my last three years worth of journaling entries, where this morning I was reading a journaling entry that I did on the 24 July 2021. And it's interesting to look at that because I have absolutely no idea what I was doing on the 24 July 2021. But I wrote about it in my journal. I took a little photo, and in my journal I talked about how, you know, we were just about to hire some new people and how I was really worried. I was also taking dating seriously. And I met this girl who I really liked that I'd been on a handful of dates with, and I was trying to convince myself not to be too attached to the outcomes and all that kind of stuff. And that's the thing with journaling, that it doesn't, it often doesn't feel useful in the moment because you're like, oh, what's the point of writing about? It's like, ah, I already know what happened today. But when you look back on the stuff, then it's incredible to be like, oh, that's what my life was about. This is, this is what was going on. And it really just helps you appreciate the passage of time a little bit more. There's also a really good technique called Homework for Life, which is from Matthew Dix, who's written the book story worthy, which is really good. And essentially, the idea of homework for life is that it is a daily journaling habit where at the end of each day you just ask yourself, what was the most story worthy moment that happened in my life today? Now, I followed this for about three months in like 2020, back when I read the book. And I still have all of these different, like, homework for life bits where when I look at that period of my life and I look through my homework for life entries, I'm like, oh, I remember these days I remember a lot more because I just wrote down just a single one liner about what happened that day. The other really good thing that I always recommend to everyone is take more photos. We all have incredible phones in our pockets. You can take photos with your phone. You can also get a, you can also get a proper camera if you would like. I got this one recently, fits in my pocket. I have this one that flash floats around this one, you know, all second stuff. You don't need fancy cameras. But one thing I generally do recommend to people is that there is something really, really nice about having a proper camera that's not just your phone that you can use to take more photos. Because if you're like, walking around with an actual camera and you're like taking pics with it, then those pics get added to your Google photos or your Apple photos. They get geo tagged with location, they get tagged with the date. And then, you know, I've been doing this shit for the last, like, 15 years, just taking one or 15, like, ten to twelve years, taking photos of absolutely everything with a proper camera. And now my Apple photos. Features featured memories are incredible. Like, every single day, I see that on this day seven years ago, this is what happened. And it's so nice to look back on. It's one of my favorite things to do when I'm on the toilet is just flick through whatever apple photos has surfaced for me that day. And then idea number three is anchors of mindfulness. So, when you ask people who are very experienced in meditation questions about how they perceive time, they generally say that time feels slower in their everyday lives. And actually, this study in 2015 took a group of 42 people with an average of ten years of meditation experience, and I asked them questions like, how fast does time usually pass for you? And they compared their answers to 42 people of the same age and sex, but who didn't have any meditation experience. And they found that the meditation experts experienced less time pressure, more time dilation, and a general slower passage of time, which is pretty cool. Now, we don't yet have evidence to show what's actually happening inside the brains of these people who do a lot of meditation and how this changes the way they perceive time. But what we think is happening is, again, all to do with memory formation. And this idea of mindfulness, at the most basic level, basically means increasing your focus on the present moment. So being fully aware of your bodily sensations, being aware of your emotions and what's happening within your body, being more aware of the environment that you're in, and the one thing that you're currently doing, and generally, the things that we focus on is what we create memories of. And so if you focus on these things and you are more present on the present moment, that in theory, helps create more memories, which help to expand your perception of time. And so the key takeaway here is to consider practicing meditation or mindfulness in some way or another. Obviously, there's loads of apps that help with meditation and mindfulness, but it could be something even simpler, like going for a walk without your phone with you or without your headphones with you. It could be something like yoga, which is sort of meditation plus movement. Or it could just be that when you're doing something, really giving your entire attention to that thing that you're doing, rather than multitasking and distracting yourself with eating your food while watching a YouTube video, while scrolling TikTok on the other hand, and, you know, all the stuff that we tend to do, those tend to create a lot fewer memory dividends than just focusing on one thing and one thing at a time. If you've gotten to this point in the video, firstly, thank you for watching. Secondly, I'd love to hear in a comment down below, what is one action point you're going to take as a result of watching this video? And if you like this video, you might like this video about how to guarantee that you'll regret your life, which is a video about all the things you should do to make sure that you look back on your life with regret. So, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. Bye.