WHY TIME (SOMETIMES) FLIES

The hours can whoosh by, crawl, or come to a standstill based on what you're doing—or even just thinking about.

- BY DEANNA PAI

TIME SEEMS TO PLAY tricks on us. A happy afternoon doing something enjoyable—going on a hike, meeting a friend for coffee, getting a spa treatment—feels like it's over in a blink, while spending 10 minutes on hold with the cable company takes eons. It turns out our perception of time is constantly changing, influenced by what we're doing, who we're with, and even what we see.

But let's back up for a second. While time can be measured by the hands on the clock (or the numbers on our smartphone), our perception of it is something else entirely. “Everybody’s sense of time compresses and dilates like a rubber band throughout the day,” says Martin Wiener, PhD, a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist and an associate professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “It’s stretching and compressing from moment to moment.”

Our perception of time concerns a matter of seconds and maybe one to two minutes—after which it gets into the realm of planning ahead or daydreaming about the future. It’s different from our circadian rhythm, the 24-hour system that dictates things that happen subor unconsciously, like feeling sleepy at the end of the day.

What shifts your sense of time

One thing that can seriously skew your sense of time is if you're focused on it. “If you have people doing a task and you ask them to pay attention to the passage of time, the passage of time seems to last longer,” says Wiener. “It stretches out before you.” (Grandma was right that “a watched pot never boils.”) On the other hand, if a distraction pulls your attention away so you're not actively thinking about the present moment, time seems to compress, or pass by more quickly.