As the calendar edges toward New Year’s Eve, a familiar feeling sets in: How is this year already over? January feels like it happened to someone else. Spring flashes by in a blur. Summer dissolves into autumn, and suddenly the year is packing its bags. The older we get, the more this sensation seems to intensify — time accelerates, weeks compress, and life feels like it’s running just ahead of reach.
This isn’t just a poetic complaint. Many people experience a heightened awareness of time’s passage, sometimes from a very young age. Moments pass, seasons change, and nothing stays still for long. This awareness can be beautiful, but it can also be uncomfortable, even painful.
You Can’t Outrun Time — But You Can Savour It
So what do humans do when faced with the unbearable truth that time keeps moving no matter what? They try to outrun it, control it, or escape it.
Some turn inward, becoming trapped in cycles of rumination or intrusive thoughts. Others chase perfection, believing that if everything is done just right, time might pause — or at least feel safer. These strategies can offer temporary relief. When the mind is spinning or hyper-focused, attention is pulled away from the present moment. In that mental cloud, the ache of time passing can feel muted.
But it doesn’t last. Eventually, these coping mechanisms create more strain than solace, and a deeper truth emerges: time cannot be stopped. But it can be experienced differently.
How to ‘Slow Down Time’
Presence: Entering the Moment Fully
One of the most reliable ways to slow the subjective experience of time is presence. Presence means tuning into the senses — noticing what is happening right now. The feel of air on skin, the sound of footsteps, the subtle shift of light through the day.
Presence also means being willing to feel what arises in the moment, including grief. Joy and grief often arrive together. Watching leaves change colour, for example, can spark delight and sadness simultaneously — a bittersweet recognition of beauty and impermanence. Many people instinctively try to shut down the grief, but in doing so, they also dull the joy. Opening fully to both expands the emotional experience of time, making moments feel richer and more spacious.
When the heart opens instead of contracts, time doesn’t disappear. It deepens.
Creative Expression: Marking Time
Sometimes presence naturally flows into creative expression. Writing, drawing, making music, or even cooking a meal with intention can act as a way of marking time. These acts encode experience into memory. While they don’t literally slow the clock, they create reference points — moments that feel distinct rather than blurred together.
Not every moment needs to be expressed outwardly. Sometimes quiet presence is enough. But when expression does arise, it gives shape to time and helps transform fleeting moments into something lasting.
One Thing at a Time in a Multitasking World
Modern life rewards speed and multitasking. Many people pride themselves on how much they can fit into an hour, a day, a week. But multitasking fractures attention. When focus is constantly split, time feels thinner — like it’s slipping through the cracks.
Doing one thing at a time is a radical act. Eating without scrolling. Walking without rushing. Listening without planning the next response. When attention is whole, moments stretch. Even mundane tasks take on a different quality when they’re not rushed to completion.
Creating Spaciousness
Over-scheduling is one of the fastest ways to make time feel like it’s collapsing in on itself. When more is packed into an hour than an hour can realistically hold, stress increases and time speeds up. Days blur. Weeks vanish.
Creating spaciousness — leaving gaps between commitments — allows the nervous system to reset. Even short buffers between tasks can make a significant difference. Screens, on the other hand, are notorious time thieves. A few minutes of scrolling can quietly expand into hours, often leaving little memory behind.
Slowing down can also mean choosing inefficiency on purpose. Yes, it’s possible to eat quickly, walk fast, tick boxes at lightning speed, but it’s not always necessary. Moving slowly, when possible, signals safety to the body. It allows the mind to settle. For many, this simple shift feels like giving time room to breathe.
The Power of the Pause
Pausing is one of the most accessible ways to change the experience of time. A conscious breath. A moment of gratitude before eating. A brief stillness before stepping through a doorway. These micro-pauses interrupt momentum and invite awareness back into the body.
Even a single inhale and exhale can stretch a moment open, grounding attention and re-aligning inner rhythm with outer time.
Psychedelics and the Elasticity of Time
Psychedelics offer a particularly striking example of how time perception is linked to consciousness. Many psychonauts report that during a psychedelic experience, time seems to stretch, dissolve, or lose meaning entirely. Profound insights, emotional breakthroughs, and life-altering realizations can occur within a few hours — yet feel as though they’ve unfolded over years.
This isn’t just anecdotal. In the 1950s and ’60s, when psychedelics were legal and widely studied, researchers began documenting these effects. A 1954 study titled Clinical Studies of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide found that out of 23 participants given LSD, 13 experienced what was described as “time disorder.” While experiences varied — some felt time drag, others felt it race — many reported a sense of “temporal insularity,” existing fully in the present, detached from past and future.
More recently, this topic has resurfaced in modern research. In 2018, cognitive neuroscientist Devin Terhune co-authored a double-blind, placebo-controlled study examining how LSD microdoses affect time perception. Forty-eight participants completed a “temporal reproduction” task after receiving either a placebo or 5, 10, or 20 micrograms of LSD. Those given LSD consistently overestimated how long a visual stimulus had appeared on screen — even though most did not feel subjectively “high.”
Interestingly, a 2007 study using psilocybin found the opposite effect: participants underestimated time intervals. Though LSD and psilocybin are similar in many ways, they interact with the brain differently. Both affect serotonin receptors, but LSD also impacts dopamine pathways, suggesting that time perception may be regulated by a complex interplay of neurochemicals.
What’s clear is that psychedelics reliably alter the experience of time — even if science is still unraveling exactly how.
Giving Time Back to Ourselves
As one year ends and another begins, the feeling that time is slipping away can feel especially sharp. But perhaps the answer isn’t to chase more hours — it’s to inhabit the ones already here more fully.
Presence, spaciousness, creative expression, conscious pauses, and even altered states of consciousness all point to the same truth: time is not just something that happens to us. It’s something we participate in.
And in a culture that constantly insists there isn’t enough time, learning how to experience it differently might be one of the most radical acts available.
