Why Time Seems to Speed Up as You Get Older

Ask anyone over thirty about a summer holiday from childhood and they will describe something that seemed to go on for months, while the year they have just lived through has somehow folded itself into what feels like a long weekend. It is one of the most consistently reported experiences there is, and it has very little to do with nostalgia or with paying less attention than you used to.

Your brain measures time by what it has to show for it

There is no organ in your body devoted to keeping time. So when you look back and try to judge how long a stretch of your life took, what you are really doing is taking a rough survey of how much distinct material got laid down while it was happening.

Childhood is unusually rich in that material, because so much of it is happening for the first time and your brain is recording constantly. Adult life tends to be the opposite, since once you have settled into a job, a home and a route between the two, a great many of your weeks resemble each other closely enough that very little survives to tell them apart.

Which produces the odd contradiction most people notice without being able to explain it. A dull week feels endless while you are living through it and then disappears entirely in hindsight, whereas a fortnight away can fly past and still feel enormous six months later. Time as you experience it and time as you remember it are running on completely different measures.

The explanation you have probably heard is the weaker one

Most people, if they have thought about this at all, have landed on the proportional theory: a year is a fifth of your life when you are five and only a fiftieth of it when you are fifty, so it occupies a smaller share and feels correspondingly shorter. The idea has been around since the 1800s and it makes intuitive sense.

It probably contributes very little. The trouble is that the effect shows up sharply between, say, twenty-five and thirty-five, where the proportional difference is far too small to account for how strong the shift feels. The encoding explanation handles that period much better, because the mid-twenties onward is usually when life settles into the kind of routine that leaves nothing behind to measure.

What flattens a year

The things that compress your sense of time are mostly the things that reduce variety:

• Taking the same route, doing the same work and spending your weekends the same way for months on end
• Going long stretches without travel or any real change of environment
• Days automated to the point where you arrive somewhere with no memory of the journey
• Hours of scrolling that leave nothing behind, since an evening on a phone generates almost no material to measure
• Marking nothing, because when no day is distinguished from any other, none of them stand out later

That last one carries more weight than it sounds like it should. A large part of what makes a year feel substantial is simply having identifiable moments inside it, and without them the year still happened but you have no way of taking its measure.

A day works differently to a year

Everything above concerns time in hindsight, but time as you are living through it runs on attention instead. When you are absorbed in something demanding enough to hold you, hours vanish without your noticing, which is the state usually described as flow. When you are bored or waiting or watching a clock, that same hour is unbearable, because your attention has nowhere to go and keeps landing back on the passing of time itself.

The two systems pulling in opposite directions is what creates the familiar holiday pattern, where the days feel unhurried while you are in them precisely because you are paying attention, and the week feels vast afterwards because you encoded so much of it. An ordinary week manages to be tedious and forgettable at the same time, which is the worst of both.

When it is not really about age

Your sense of time also shifts with your mental state, and this is well documented. Depression tends to slow time down while you are in it and hollow it out afterwards, so the days drag terribly and the months that follow seem to have held nothing at all. Anxiety often does something similar, because attention narrows onto what is happening inside you rather than around you, and far less of the world gets recorded as a result.

A sharp change in how time feels is therefore worth noticing. If a year has gone missing and you cannot account for where it went, and that comes alongside flat mood, pulling back from people or a sense of simply going through the motions, the explanation probably has less to do with turning forty than with what has been happening in the meantime.

What actually slows it down

The remedy follows directly from the mechanism, which is to give your brain more to record. Deliberate variety does most of the work, since a different route home, an unfamiliar place or an activity you have never tried all generate the kind of material that routine never will. Learning something with a genuine difficulty curve works particularly well, because effortful novelty gets encoded heavily.

Beyond that, it helps to mark occasions rather than letting them slip past as ordinary days, and to photograph things and write them down so you keep the cues you would otherwise lose. Mindfulness practices are relevant here for a fairly mechanical reason, in that they increase the proportion of your life you are genuinely present for, and you can only encode what you actually attended to.

None of it stops the effect entirely, but the compression is not fixed, and a year with variety in it will feel substantially longer looking back than one without.

If time has been disappearing alongside low mood or a sense of disconnection from your own life, that is worth talking through properly. Our psychologists work with depression and low mood at our St Kilda clinic and via telehealth, and you can book directly without a referral.