Stop the clock! How to slow down timeby having fun

Time flies when youre... ina boring routine, according to research, which shows that new experiences can alter our perception of time

- By Miriam Frankel

It's the time of the year for endless cliches. From "tis the season" to "new year, new you", there's nowhere to hide from tired old phrases. One of my favourites is "Christmas comes around quicker each year" - which ignores the fact that one year equals one trip around the sun.

There's often a kernel of truth in a cliche, though. A recent study by Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues showed that the vast majority of people in both the UK and Iraq really did experience Christmas (or Ramadan) approaching more rapidly every year. This may be down partly to festive decorations appearing ever earlier in the season.

But it's also a result of how we perceive time psychologically.

The feeling that time is speeding up can be particularly stressful around the time of the new year. It can leave us feeling out of control, fixating on all the things we failed to achieve. But it turns out that it is possible to slow down our perception of time.

Human time perception is deeply odd. Time can speed up or slow down depending on what we're doing. And it can shrink or expand when we look back at it. Marc Wittmann from the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany calls this subjective experience "felt time", as opposed to the more objective "clock time".

What's more, how we experience time in a certain moment isn't necessarily how we experience it when we look back at it. Everybody knows that time flies when we're having fun and drags when we're bored. But when we look back at boring periods, filled with routine, the days blend and blur in our minds. This distorts our sense of duration, making the period feel shorter. "When looking back, nothing happened," said Wittmann. "This has been shown in several studies: the more routine people report, the faster time passes in retrospect."