Speaking of Psychology: Time going too fast? How to slow it down, with Ruth Ogden, PhD

Why does time fly when you’re having fun—and slow to a crawl when you’re not? Ruth Ogden, PhD, talks about how our experiences and emotions influence our sense of time, why time seems to go by faster as we get older, why changing to Daylight Saving Time feels so disruptive, and why the COVID-19 pandemic did strange things to many people’s sense of time.

Ruth Ogden, PhD, is a professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores all aspects of how people experience the passage of time. She is particularly interested in understanding why time passes more quickly during some activities and more slowly during others, and how significant changes in life and society affect temporality.

Kim Mills: Everyone knows that time flies when you’re having fun and that it can slow to a crawl when you’re not. But why is that? Why does an hour spent watching the clock in a boring meeting seem to take at least twice as long as an hour chatting with friends over coffee?

Today we’re going to talk to a psychologist who studies time perception about how our experiences and emotions influence our sense of time. Why does time seem to go by faster as we get older? Is there a time clock region in the brain? Are humans the only animals with a sense of time? Why did the COVID-19 pandemic do such strange things to so many people’s sense of time? How does culture affect time perception? And if time seems to be speeding by too fast for you, is there anything you can do to slow it down?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Ruth Ogden, professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K. Her research focuses on how humans perceive the passage of time. She’s published dozens of peer-reviewed studies on topics including the effects of digital technology on time perception, how pain affects our sense of time, daylight saving time and time perception, and much more. Her work has been featured in media outlets including BBC Radio, CNN, NPR and The New York Times. 

Dr. Ogden, thank you for joining me today.

Ruth Ogden: Thank you very much for having me.

Mills: Let’s start with my question from a moment ago. Everybody’s heard the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun,” and most of us intuitively know that’s true. But why does time feel like it’s going faster when we’re having fun and slower when we’re bored or anxious or unhappy?

Ogden: So our sense of time is really heavily interlinked with our emotions, and research around the globe shows that generally speaking, time passes more quickly when we’re happy, it passes more slowly when we’re sad. And the reason for this seems to be that the area of our brain that is responsible for processing emotion also plays a really important role in processing time. And this area is called the insular cortex. So what happens is that when this area gets activated due to emotion, really extreme emotions a lot of the time as well, like fear or joy, then this activation distorts the way in which we experience time.

But it’s not just that area of the brain that’s responsible for changes in our perception of time, it’s also how much attention we pay to time. So generally when you’re happy, you’re having fun with your friends, you’re doing something you enjoy, time really isn’t that important and you don’t monitor it, and that helps it to fly. During the bad times when you’re sad or when you’re stressed, you tend to focus more on when that period’s going to be over. So you’re thinking about more and that contributes towards the slowing of time that we see.

Mills: Time seems to speed up as you get older—to a child at the beginning of a school year, it feels like fourth grade is going to last forever. But as an adult, a whole year goes by in a blink. Why is that?

Ogden: People consistently say that time passes more quickly as they get older. We don’t quite know why this happens, but it’s such a universal finding that it seems obvious that it does. So there’s a few ideas around. One idea is that we’re not constantly processing time. The brain is a limited object or a limited organ. So when we’re not processing time, what we have to do is use memory as an indication of how long something lasted. So we might look back on a year and if we’ve got loads and loads of new memories that are really rich in emotion and detail, then that tricks our brain into thinking that that year was long. If we’ve got a year where not much has happened, everything has been super routine, then it tricks our brain into thinking that year is short.

So as a child, your life is just full of new experience. You’re learning, you’re playing, you are finding your way around the world, and it’s full of rich memories. As an adult, life is far, far more routine. As we get even older, our memory starts to fail. And we think that this might contribute towards the sense that time is speeding up as we get older. However, some recent research that I’ve just completed suggested it might just be also about expectations. So we remember time in our childhoods as slow. We remember the summer holidays as long. Whereas as an adult we feel like we don’t have enough time. We’re all super busy all the time. So the fact that we’re constantly trying to keep up, the fact that we constantly feel like we need more time, contributes towards this sensation that time passes more quickly as we age.

Mills: You mentioned an area of the brain where time perception seems to happen. Is that the only thing that happens in that part of the brain?

Ogden: No. So that part of the brain is a really essential area for maintaining what we call homeostasis. So homeostasis is our ability to sort of keep a level calm biological state. So it’s the thing that controls your flight or your fight reaction to any situation. So the insular cortex will activate when homeostasis is disrupted. So when we’re under threat or when we are in danger, because we are ill for example, and it will try to regulate our nervous system to improve our chances of survival. So the reason that the anterior cortex is so important in emotional distortions to time is because of this flight-fight mechanism.

So if any of your listeners have ever been in car crash, for example, they might have experienced that sensation of time really slowing down up until the point of impact. We think this is because of the activity in the insular cortex. So your flight or fine mechanism takes over. This creates a huge increase in activity within this area and this distorts our sense of time.

People often wonder why we would want a sense of time that changes. Why would we not want to have a clock in our brain that always gives us a super accurate representation of time? Why is it helpful to have a sense of time that changes? And we think, we’re not sure, but we think it’s probably something that’s developed over our evolution. So maybe if you think back to times when people were living in caves and there were a lot of predators that affected the chance of survival, having that little bit of extra time when you’re under threat to make a decision was likely one of the factors that influenced whether you survived or whether you died. So this has provided some sort of evolutionary benefit that aids survival.

Mills: I mentioned in my intro the question of whether humans are the only animals that experience time. And I ask that because I have a dog and basically every day at about 4:30, she knows it’s time for dinner. How do other animals know that? Do they perceive time?

Ogden: So I think it’s a super interesting question and it gets to the heart of what time is for us. So for humans, time is this emotional contextual experience that is built out of our environment and that’s why it distorts going faster or slower in different situations. But our ability to know when something is going to happen—so like when it’s 4:30, it’s dinnertime, could partly be driven by our biological clocks. So the rhythms in which we eat, and this would apply to other animals, but we know from behavioral research that was conducted in the 1950s by Skinner and colleagues, quite famous behavioralist psychologists, that even rats, even goldfish and pigeons can be taught to time. So they did clever little experiments where they gave rats treats for pressing a lever at a particular point in time after a light had come on. Rats really rapidly learned to do this. So there’s something in animals that enables them to judge basic situations. Whether they feel the passage of time like we do is a different question that I don’t think anyone knows the answer to.

Mills: Not yet. So how do you study time perception in humans in the lab? What kind of experiments can you do?

Ogden: So one of the things that I’m really interested in my lab work is why do we get emotional distortions to time? What’s the relationship between our body and our brain and our experience of time? Why is it that time slows down during car crashes? So obviously we can’t put participants in car crashes. Nobody’s going to let us do that. So we use VR technology to put people in situations which will create a sense of peril.

So one of the recent studies that we’ve done is we’ve had people walk across an ice bridge, a virtual reality ice bridge that’s suspended between two very high mountains and the bridge crumbles as people walk across it and sometimes they fall. And whilst they’re doing this test, they’re wearing heart rate monitors so that we can look at how their body’s responding to the stress, and then they give us some information about how they felt time passing afterwards. And what we find is the people who have the biggest arousal response, the biggest increase in heart rate, the biggest increase in sweating, these are the people who feel the greatest distortion to time.

Mills: So does it vary from human to human that we don’t all have the same kind of time perception?

Ogden: It varies hugely between people. So there’s lots of different factors that can influence our experience of time. One is the variety of mental health conditions. So ADHD and autism are known to influence the way that we experience time or the level of importance that we place on time within our day-to-day lives. Things like depression and chronic pain are known to slow our perception of time down. So the bad times, the painful times feel like they last a very long time, but what really influences how an individual experiences time is their wellbeing and the culture that they grow up in. So we all grow up in a culture that tells us something about time, the order things are done and whether the past is behind us or in front of us. And when we look around the world, we can see that different cultures represent time very differently to one another.

So in North America and Europe, we’re so used to thinking of time as like a bullet. The past is behind us, the future is in front of us and we’re trudging forwards no matter what happens. If you go to New Zealand for example, and talk to people from the Maori, you might hear a different tale. So they might say that they walk backwards into the future facing the past. This is also true in other indigenous cultures.

So how we think about representations of past, present, and future and how we think about time more generally are really heavily influenced by the way in which our culture represents time. Do we see it linearly? Do we see it circularly? And I think that thinking about this as really important. We live time pressured lives. None of us really have enough time or very few others do, and we’re stuck in this very production orientated culture. If we want to radically change how much time is available to us, then we probably need to radically think about how we represent time. There isn’t just clock time, there isn’t just the arrow of time moving forward. There’s lots of other ways that we can think about time.

Mills: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people felt that the lockdowns and disruptions did strange things to their sense of time, and you did some research on that. Can you talk about that? What did you find?

Ogden: To give you a bit of background on the research, I was a mom of three children. My youngest child was about 3 months old, I think, when the COVID pandemic started. And I remember when the schools closed and thinking, you’ve got to be kidding me, there are not just 24 hours in the day. This is like a wholescale lie. There are more. To say that the days dragged is the most phenomenal understatement. And I obviously I’m naturally very interested in time and I started to think, well, is it just me or is a change in our perception of time one of the effects of changing societies as a result of COVID, so lockdowns and stay at home orders. So I did some surveys in the U.K., in Brazil, and in Iraq looking at how people experienced time during COVID. The results were really, I thought quite fascinating.

So only about 20% of people felt like time was passing normally during COVID lockdowns, 40% of people felt like time was passing really quickly and about 40% of people were like me and they felt like time was passing really slowly. And I was interested in really like, well who are these people for whom time is passing quickly and how can I become one?

It was people who were doing okay. So one of the things we looked at was how satisfied you were with your social interactions, how anxious and depressed you were, how stressed you were. These were all key factors that predicted how we experienced time during COVID. So the people who were struggling less and were getting lots of social support were people for whom the pandemic passed more quickly and the people who were struggling more and were reduced in their social support were the people who felt the pandemic lasted a long time and the days were long and slow. And I think this really shows us that our experience of time is built by our environment around us. And when we have such a massive change in our environment like COVID, it naturally impacts on our sense of time.

Mills: How did you get interested in studying time?

Ogden: I got interested in studying time when I was a second-year student at university and I actually had a very minor car crash on a country lane near my mother’s house. And I very distinctly remember that sensation even now of it all slowing down for me and it really fascinated me. And at the time I was lucky enough to work with a professor called John Whedon at Keele University in the U.K. and he took my career forward and spurred my interest. So it was really just from that one moment that I thought this is fascinating and we need to know more about it.

Mills: So here in the US we’re in daylight saving right now, and I know you’re studying how clock changes affect time perception. What are you finding in that research?

Ogden: The clock change is such a hotly debated issue. I mean it has been for years in Europe and the U.K., we’re constantly debating whether we should get rid of it. I know in the US Donald Trump has suggested that it’s something that should go. So there is lots of research that shows that the clock change has bad impacts on our physical health. So you get increases in heart attacks on the day after the clock change, you get more car accidents and things like that. But there’s very little research on how it impacts our wellbeing. So we did some studies in the U.K. looking at people’s experiences of time and their wellbeing before and after the clock change. What we found generally was that the clock change seems to really impact people who are women. So people who are responsible for their home life, their children, they find the clock change extraordinarily stressful, particularly the one where you lose an hour.

So losing an hour creates increase in time pressure, it creates increase in stress. Parents in our study described how it takes weeks for their children to adapt to this experience. It also makes us feel like the day is passing too quickly because we’re losing the hour. When we think about the one where we gain an hour, so in the morning, we see similar effects. So similar, what this research tells us is that the just changing the clocks overnight, it’s a bit like jet lag, isn’t it? Only at a population level. Everyone is a little bit discombobulated, everyone finds it a little bit difficult to cope. When we think about why the clock change was brought in, this is often misunderstood. So people often think that the clock change was brought in due to farming, but in the U.K. it was brought in during the war as a mechanism of energy savings. So the idea would be that by changing the clocks, people would use less power and this would leave more power for the war effort. This is not a requirement anymore. And in fact, studies of energy show that the clock change actually increases energy use.

So I think what our research combined with the health research and the energy use research suggests maybe it is time to abandon this random change in time. Maybe we do need to have a wholesale conversation about who is impacted by this and what the benefits really are. Because I think at population level we’re struggling to see the benefits and the research is also suggesting that this might not be something that we need to do.

Mills: It’s interesting though that a single hour’s difference has that much impact. I mean, if I just decided instead of getting up at six every morning I’m going to get up at seven or five, I mean, would that change my whole world?

Ogden: I think this is a really interesting question, isn’t that? And I think that when the issue is imposition, so time is always used as a form of power. It’s like an invisible power that people don’t think about, when you are made to wait that’s someone using time as power against you. The clock change is essentially a form of power. So the government enforces a change in time on the population. So the example you just gave of, well, if I just stay in bed for an extra hour or I get up an extra hour earlier, is that going to leave me confused, it going to leave me discombobulated? Well, it may or it may not, but there will have been an element of choice on your part in that decision. So you might have been responding to your own biological need for more sleep or less sleep or excitement about an event. What happens with the clock change is that it is imposed upon us. We find that imposition very, very difficult to deal with. So the combination of different elements at play here, it’s the lack of choice and it’s also the impact on time and wellbeing that need to be considered.

Mills: Now you’ve looked at how extreme isolation affects time perception, for example, among astronauts on space missions or researchers in Antarctica. And intuitively people would think that isolation would make time go more slowly, but that’s not necessarily what you found, is it?

Ogden: Yeah, I mean it was surprising to us as well. So we were very lucky to be involved with the European Space Agency, the Argentinian Antarctic Institute, more recently SpaceX, looking at how extreme environments affect our experience of time. So every year, countries across the world sends scientists and citizens to go and live on the Antarctic continent for 12 months. So the European Space Agency sends about 18 people and they stay there, just the 18 of them at a base called Concordia for 12 months. Half of this time it’s dark, they can’t see anything outside, it’s freezing cold, the wind is terrible, it’s the most isolated place in the world. We were interested in, well, how does time pass for them while they’re there? Our instinct was that it would pass very slowly that they would be bored and it would feel like lots longer within a year.

But when we looked at the data that we got from them, it’s quite the opposite. The period flies by.
These people are extraordinarily busy. They are constantly doing research or other types of tasks. And I think that the fact that even in that type of environment you can make time pass quickly if you fill your days, if you have a structure, if you have a routine, if you give yourself objectives, that tells us a lot about how we can change our experience of time in our own normal day-to-day lives. So if you don’t like the way that time is passing for you, if you feel like it’s too slow, then there are things you can do to speed it up. Similarly, if you feel like you’ve not got enough time, then maybe there are things you can do to slow it down, perhaps changing your routine a little bit or changing the structure of your day.

Mills: You mentioned living in the station in Antarctica where you have to deal with long stretches of darkness, and I’m wondering about the people who live near Earth’s poles? Now we’re talking about big quantities, large numbers of people, not just small number.

Ogden: So I don’t actually know the answer to that question unfortunately, but I could hazard a guess. And I think that part of the way that we deal with change is through routine. We build societies that enable us to cope with change. So having been to Norway in the summer, the light is for a visitor intensely confusing. You come out at midnight, it’s still light. I found it bizarre, but there are structures in place to help. So everyone’s got blackout liners, you can still get to sleep. It’s not like you’re trying to sleep in the sun. You can make it dark. But I think that one of the things we can also look at within those types of cultures is how they manage the impact of this on mental health and wellbeing. So it’s very difficult to get hold of alcohol in places like Norway, partly to help to preserve and mitigate the impact of the constant changing of light and dark on the population.

And I think we even saw this in our own research about the hour change. So when we asked participants how they felt about the hour change, particularly the one in the winter where night comes in sooner, people really mourned the light. The light was really important to them and they really disliked the fact that the light just went overnight. So this hour accelerated the loss of light. I think the difference that we have in the very north and the very south of the planet is that this change is more gradual so we can adapt and we learn to adapt to it. And it’s when we have these really short changes, these sudden changes just like jet lag we find it very difficult to cope.

Mills: Now for those of us who feel like time is rushing by too fast, is there anything we can do to effectively slow it down or are we stuck with life speeding up as we get older?

Ogden: I don’t think we are. I think there’s quite a few things that we can do. So one of the things that I always recommend to people is that if as you are in your adulthood or you’re approaching your older age and you feel like time is flying by, be aware of the fact that this is a trick of your memory. Your memory is trying to tell you that you haven’t done as much as you actually have and you need to remind yourself of all the things that you have done. So I would say to people rather than having to-do lists, have I-did lists so that you keep a record of the things that you do, have a diary and look at it, read back over the things you’ve done over the year and you’ll realize that the year was long and rich. Even things like if you have a smartphone, just scrolling through the pictures, seeing the time pop functions on different social media apps to remind you, we all too readily forget many of the things that we do and we need to take the time to remember, and this helps us to feel like we’ve got a long rich life.

But I think the other issue that we face now more than anything is the feeling that we just don’t have enough time. We live these incredibly precious lives where we are always doing something, we’re always on our phones, we’re permanently connected to the worlds around us, and this makes it very difficult for us to find time for us. It’s changing what we think free time is and it’s making us feel like time is rushing by really quickly. So things that people can do are to think carefully about how they’re using your time. If you want to do this really formally, you can do something called a time audit where you go through your day, you audit the way in which you’re using your time, and then you identify places where you can gain time by changing the order of tasks or the way in which you’re doing things. But even if it’s not something as complex as that, try and think carefully about whether things that you are doing in your spare time in particular are making you happy. And if they’re not, try doing some new things that will, like new experiences, getting out there in the world. These are all things that are going to help you to feel like you’ve got some control over your time. And when we’ve got more control over our time, we tend to value it more and we feel like we are using it well.

Mills: I know you’ve written a little bit about the concept of, you mentioned making changes and I’m thinking vacation, how vacation is the kind of thing where you anticipate it, it comes, you feel like it’s been just sped right by, but then you look back and you say, wow, I mean I really felt like I was in Africa for 6 months when I was only there for 2 weeks. What’s going on in our brains that makes us think that?

Ogden: So I think vacation is just a fascinating concept and I think it tells us also a bit about what it’s like to be a child again. So you said it perfectly, you anticipate your vacation, you look forward to it, you count down the days, and that can make it feel like it’s really long away because time has slowed down because you’re paying too much attention to time. And when you get there and you have this sort of really fundamental change in routine, everything has shifted. You are waking up at different times, you’re doing different activities, and this can be full of rich memories and that can make your vacation seem like it was a long period of time. Or maybe it’ll just be sat on the beach every day doing nothing and that’s fine, but that might make it feel like when you look back on your vacation, it was a shorter period of time.

And I think that what often happens when we go on vacation is that as soon as we come back, it feels like it was years ago. For me, as soon as I’m back in my normal routine, I often think, Oh God, it felt like months ago that I went to such and such a place, but it was only a week ago. And this is part of the problem that as soon as we get back into our routine, we lose the sort of chronology that the order in which we’ve done things and that can make us feel like a recent event was very far in the past.

So part of the reason that vacations can often feel like they were a long time ago, even if they were very recent, is that we all live these heavily routine lives. We like to think that we’re all individual free spirits, but the reality is very different. We’re highly routine, and this is part of the reason that COVID had such a massive impact on our sense of time. Our routines went out the window. When you’re thinking about holidays, you can try and make them longer by filling them with activities. So you can have this long list of things that you want to do, sites you want to go and see, create loads and loads of rich memories, and that might make your vacation period feel long. But the problem is you’re creating more time pressure for yourself. You’re making yourself feel like you’ve got lots of things to do, and that might conversely make it feel like the days on your holiday were very short and there wasn’t enough time. Whereas if you go and lie on a beach for a week, well, you might not remember very much from it, but at the time it was probably really nice and slow and you felt like you’ve got lots of time on your hands. So it’s always an issue of weighing up what you need and what you want from your time.

Mills: Now you’ve studied how increasing digital technology uses affecting our perception of time. What’s the link between digital technology and time perception?

Ogden: We now live in a world where we are permanently connected to everyone and everything all of the time. And one of the key things that digital technology has done is it’s fundamentally changed the way in which we boundary our time within our lives. So if you think back to a pre-digital era, you had work time and you had personal time, and these were completely separable both in time, but also in space where it was in the office, home was at home. Now we live in this very, very hybrid environment where work can take place anywhere at any time, and that means that it often intrudes on our home time, and this is only possible because of digital technology. So we see these really eroded boundaries between work and home as a result of digital technology. But digital technology is also changing what we do with our time and how we feel about our time.

It’s making us change the way in which we use free time. So we have this tendency now to fill every single moment that we get in our lives with a form of activity, and that form of activity is usually looking at our phone. So going to the toilet, you take your phone with you, falling asleep at night, you take your phone with you, sitting on the bus, you take your phone with you and you look at the bus, you don’t look outside. So digital technology, our research shows is creating these really dense forms of existence where every little bit of time that we have is filled, any time that we save due to digital technology. So we’ve got to remember that technology is sold to us as something that will save us time. Any savings that we make, we reinvest in work or we reinvest in time on technology.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I love technology. My kids don’t have screen time limits or anything like that. I have a very positive attitude towards that. But what it does mean is that we need to think carefully about the type of content that we’re watching. Is that content making you happy? If you are scrolling through TikTok all the time, our research shows that you are more likely to think that this is a waste of time, not just TikTok, any short term video service. Why is it a waste of time? Well, partly because you are not having your needs met. It’s just good enough to keep you interested, but it’s not quite good enough to fulfill your psychological and your emotional desires.

The other issue that we have with digital technology is that we spend far longer on it than we really want to. So one of the key things that digital technology does to our phone, particularly scrolling on social media and things like that, is it enables us to forget time really quickly. So you might pick up your phone and think, Oh, I’m just going to have a 5-minute scroll. I’m just going to play a game for 5 minutes. And then all too frequently you look up and it’s been half an hour, an hour, so on and so forth. So digital technology captures our attention. It stops us processing time. This means we spend more time on it than we intend to, and that means that we’re even more time pressured than we were before. So technology affects us in a myriad of ways, and I think that we as society really need to navigate how we manage that going forward for our health and for our wellbeing. How do we preserve time for ourselves that is outside of the demands of work, this is outside of technology so that we can maintain our own health?

Mills: Just to wrap up, what are you working on now? What are the big questions you’re trying to answer?

Ogden: So the big questions that I’m trying to answer at the moment, I work on a very large Wellcome Trust funded project, looking at time and global health. So when global health emergencies end, how do we feel about time afterwards? Do we feel like we are moving forwards? Do we feel like we’re stuck in the past? How does this impact our health and wellbeing? It’s one of the big questions that I’m interested in. I’m still interested in the idea that digital technology is fundamentally changing our use and experience of time, and we’ll continue to work on that going forward.

Mills: Well, Dr. Ogden, I want to thank you for joining me. The time just flew by. 

Ogden: Thank you very much for having me. It was great. 

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.