The Psychological Secret to Longevity

The Atlantic

24-07-2025

Your subjective sense of things going slowly, and then speeding up, is real. But you can also control it. Illustration by Jan Buchczik
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W hen I was 9 years old , Thursday was my favorite day of the week, for one very special reason: I had my beloved weekly French-horn lesson. I remember thinking that Thursdays felt as though they came only about once a month. Some five decades later, Thursdays still have a special significance for me—as the day my Atlantic column comes out. But unlike the way I felt so many years ago, I now feel as though Thursdays occur about every three or four days. The weekly thing seems to come around much sooner than every week. What gives?
This phenomenon of time seeming to speed up with age—or, for that matter, slow down under the influence of boredom or frustration—attracts a good deal of wonderment. The jarring juxtaposition of clock and calendar time with the subjective experience of time's passing can make life feel like a poorly dubbed movie. You may simply have assumed that your sense of time was unreliable, but the truth is more complicated—and interesting. An entire science and philosophy of perception explains this warping of time. Whether time speeds by or crawls along, a grasp of this concept can help you make the most of your life.
Read: Being powerful distorts people's perception of time
W e tend to think of time as a dimension of physics, but philosophers have much to say about its mysteries. A principal target of their skeptical scrutiny is whether time manifests objective linearity. The French philosopher Henri Bergson, for example, introduced the idea of time as a truly subjective unit of experience. A minute is not 60 ticks of a hand on the clock but rather a quantum of your individual existence. The size of that quantum depends on what you are doing: It is very small when you are sleeping; it is very large when you are waiting in line at Starbucks. We need artificial, objective measures of time—clocks and calendars—to manage many aspects of a functioning society, but clock time is no more 'real' than the map on your phone is the actual road you are driving on.
Bergson's 19th-century compatriot Paul Janet argued that the size of a unit of time is primarily a function of age, because a person's perception of time depends on how much time they have themselves experienced. In other words, time truly does speed up as you get older. In 2017, a group of psychologists working from estimates that people gave of how they perceived the passage of time at different ages showed that most of us do experience this sense of acceleration. Many researchers believe that time perception shifts in a logarithmic way, and some social scientists have found evidence supporting this idea: In one 2009 experiment, study participants reported that the next three months seemed to them in that moment like three months, whereas when they were asked to contemplate a period of 36 months in the future, that felt like less than six months in today's terms.
I have created my own equation that provides similar modeling of 'experienced life' (EL) at different ages. You need to specify your current age (a) and your expected age at death (n). Then the subjective years of life you have left is 1 minus EL multiplied by n.
The numbers it generates are a bit discouraging, I'll admit. According to actuarial tables, given the good health I still enjoy at 61, I have even odds of making it to 95. That seems overly optimistic, given my family history, but I would certainly take an extra 34 years on the planet. Unfortunately, according to my formula inspired by our French philosopher friends, most of those 35 years are 'fake' because I have already experienced 91 percent of my life, which implies that I have only about eight subjective years left. If I live not to 95 but to 80, I have just five and a half years to go. No more waiting in the Starbucks line for me! (Or so you might think; more on this below.)
Age is not the only reason that experienced time might be compressed. Another is your circadian rhythms. In 1972, a French explorer named Michel Siffre spent six months in an underground cave in Texas, living with a complete absence of natural light, clock, and calendar. Gradually, his 'days'—periods of being awake and asleep—began to stretch, sometimes to as long as 48 hours. When he emerged, he believed that he had been in the cave for only two or three months. If you struggle to get to sleep at night, your time perception might be a less extreme version of Siffre's. Researchers have found that some people have a natural circadian rhythm of more than 24 hours, meaning that days feel a bit too short and that these people are chronically not sleepy at night. If you lived in a cave, your life would have fewer days than those measured out in standard 24-hour chunks.
Perception of time accelerates not just with age and circadian rhythms; it can also speed up—or slow down—depending on what you are experiencing at any given moment. This phenomenon is called tachypsychia. Neuroscientists have shown through experiments with mice that when levels of dopamine are elevated because of excitement and engagement, time passes more quickly in the brain; when dopamine is depressed because of boredom or anxiety, time goes by more slowly. In other words, time really does fly when you're having fun.
An extreme form of tachypsychia involves time seeming to freeze—when a few moments seem like minutes or hours, and you remember them clearly for years afterward. This can be a positive experience, such as a 10-second roller-coaster ride, or negative, such as a car accident that your brain processes in ultra-slow motion. One hypothesis for this tachypsychic phenomenon is that during these extremely intense moments, you lay down memories very densely in the brain, which makes a moment's experience seem to endure an unusually long time.
Read: Why a healthy person's perception of time is inaccurate
A ll of the philosophy and research of experienced time yields this bitter irony: The more you enjoy yourself, especially in the second half of life, the faster time passes. So how can you alter this effect and live, subjectively speaking, longer? One answer is to spend more time tapping your foot impatiently in the Starbucks line, especially the older you get. Also, be sure to get into a lot of car accidents. ('Officer, I ran all those red lights because I am trying to live longer. I read it in The Atlantic.')
If the boredom or trauma strategies don't suit you—and I don't recommend them—here are some better ways to get greater value from your scarce time.
1. Meaning is greater than fun.
An important principle of time maximization is memory, as the accident example suggests: The denser your memories from an experience, the longer it seems to go on in the moment and the better you recall it later, in all its rich, imprinted detail. You don't have to leave this to chance—and especially not to an accident. Research suggests that your memory is enhanced by significant, emotionally evocative activities, which implies that a truly long life favors the pursuit of deep meaning over simple fun. I find this true when I recall a spiritual experience such as walking the Camino de Santiago with my wife in a way I can savor—whereas a beach vacation that lasted the same number of days on the calendar went by very pleasantly, but without leaving much trace of its significance. I think of one as lasting, in every sense; the other, as fleeting.
2. Savor the moments.
Part of seeking meaning is to be strategic in your choice of activities and partners. But another part of the task requires you to be purposeful and present in your life. I have written before about the art of savoring life, which psychologists define as the 'capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences.' This means paying full attention to whatever you are doing now, instead of thinking about whatever might come next. To expand my perception of time while savoring, I try to include not just the positive experiences but also negative ones—rather than trying to eliminate them as quickly as possible. Although that practice can be hard at first, it ends up making me feel more fully alive.
3. Avoid routine.
I have moved home a lot in my adult life—about 20 times in the past 40 years. (No, I am not in a witness-protection program.) I also travel almost every week. One reason for this is that I'm allergic to routine. Some people like a predictable commute to work and seeing the same people and things every day, but I am not one of them. This restless bias of mine does create some transaction costs, but the constant novelty has the benefit of giving me denser memories and thus the sensation of a longer life. Researchers have run experiments that show that when people pursue familiar activities, time goes by more quickly, whereas unfamiliar experiences slow time down. Routines put you on autopilot, and that makes savoring difficult and its rewards elusive. You might not want to go so far as to move house, which is certainly stressful, but you can do a lot to change up your environment, your daily habits, and the people you see.
Arthur C. Brooks: How to be your best despite the passing years
O ne more point in closing: The most important principle in managing your time well is not how much of it you have, or how long you can extend it, but how you use each moment of it. We tend to act as though our lives will go on forever, so we waste time on trivial activities (scrolling) or participate in unproductive ones (meetings). This is not a new problem. The Stoic philosophers of antiquity recognized it well, which is why they used the adage memento mori ('remember you will die') to guide their meditations. By focusing on nonbeing, they argued, you will appreciate being more fully. That consciousness, whether your life goes by quickly or slowly, will help you use your time well.
On that note, I am pondering the fact that one Thursday will be my last column. But this is not it, which makes me happy. Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the host of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast. To receive his weekly column 'How to Build a Life' in your inbox, sign up here.