The Decibel - Why time feels like it’s speeding up – and how to slow it down

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Many factors of modern life can make time feel like it’s moving faster than it actually is: hustle culture at work, a productivity compulsion at home, over-programmed kids – they’re all attempts to get as much as possible out of our time and keep up with the frantic pace of life. But life also has moments where time feels like it’s slowing down, or even stops. We know that time can’t actually slow down or speed up – but why does it feel like that?The Globe’s time use reporter, Zosia Bielski, speaks to The Decibel about why our perception of time can change, what it is about this particular moment that’s making us feel so pressed for time and how we can take back control of the pace.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Time is a weird thing, especially when it comes to how we perceive it. Sometimes, time can feel painfully slow, like when you're on hold waiting to speak to a customer service rep. But more and more, people are noticing the opposite. Time feels like it's speeding up, and life is passing them by in a flash. Today, the globe's time use reporter, Zosha Bilski, is on the show. She'll tell us about why our perception of time can change, what it is about this particular moment that's making us feel so pressed for time and how we can take back control of the pace.

Throughout the conversation, we're also going to hear from other people. They'll talk about how grief, illness, and new motherhood shape their experience of time. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hi, Zosha. Thanks so much for making the time today. Thanks for having me, Cheryl. So I see what you did there. Yeah. Thank you very much. So social, one thing to get out of the way early is that when we talk about time speeding up, it's not physically speeding up, right? Like we're talking about the feeling of time moving faster and slower. So do we know scientifically what's happening there? So exactly, you hit the nail on the head that we're not talking about objective time. We're talking about subjective time. We're talking about subjective time. our sense of time, our feeling about time, our perception, time perception.

We're not talking about, you know, literal time. We're not at a time warp. It's about how we feel about it. Yeah. Which is, turns out to be quite subjective. So in terms of what's going on in our brains, when sort of time speeds up from sort of a scientific point of view, this relates to sort of two parts of our brain that tie into this experience of time perception. So when we're talking about a retrospective sense of time, looking back on a period of time and considering whether it went by quickly or slowly, that's related to the brain's hippocampus, which retrieves information from memory. So researchers have found that, you know, time intervals feel longer to us when we have more memories and past experiences to retrieve.

So that's the retrospective sense of time. Now, when we're talking about how time feels right now, how it feels today, how it felt this morning, how it feels now, that's a different part of the brain. that's related to the insular cortex, which is nestled deep inside the brain. The insular cortex is responsible also for processing things like bodily signals and cues, like when we feel hungry or cold. So you've got two different time perceptions happening and two different parts of the brain regulating those experiences. And that it kind of ties into something that this pioneering American psychologist, William James, differentiated between sort of our sense of time as it passes right now and then our sense of time when we look back on it.

And those experiences can actually be in conflict with each other. So why did you want to look into this idea around people feeling like time is speeding up? Because I hear that a lot nowadays, that it feels like things are going so fast. So why did you want to look into this? So when I sort of carved out this time beat, that's a frustration that I heard over and over again in conversation with people about this. Why do I feel like time is accelerating? How is it Christmas again? And I wanted to sort of take a deep dive on that question and actually talk to people who study not only time perceptions.

but fast pace of life, you know, talk to people who come at this from a number of different angles to sort of answer the question of why does time feel different points in our lives, at different points in our week, and what plays into the sense of time speeding up or momentarily slowing down. And a few sort of themes came up again and again, these complaints about stress, burnout, and not having, you know, virtually any relaxing time or meaningful time with family, friends, neighbors. And the theme here was that this sort of was a hell of our own devising, sort of tied into the Protestant work ethic, the way we sort of drive ourselves, but also the way we talk about busyness, the way we busy break, the way we have this productivity compulsion, both at work at home, and this idea that we're really uncomfortable with real rest and leisure time, time that isn't productive or instructive. So, again, a real sort of angst around time flying by, having very few precious free hours. So that's sort of at the core of my work for the next year. And time speeding up definitely was a complaint that came up again and again in these larger frameworks. And there's actually some stats around how Canadians think about time. What does the data say about our sense of time?

So Statistics Canada compiles these really insightful time use studies. They do them every several years, charting out how Canadians spend their time. And the last one was published in 2022, and in that year, Canadians complained about feeling the most pressed for time since the early 90s when the agency actually started tracing the problem. So obviously we're talking about a 30-year time span, and something's obviously afoot because people reported really being squeezed for time. Yeah. How does our culture contribute to that feeling? And you kind of talked about a little bit about how we are kind of stuck in this productivity loop. Can you get into that and why our culture kind of puts that on a pedestal?

So I think, you know, when I speak with authors, thinkers, even beyond this piece, it always comes back to the Protestant work ethic, which is really still, you know, is Ren Nassir, a therapist. She wrote toxic productivity. I spoke with her for a recent story about multitasking. She said, like, the Protestant work ethic is the paint on the wall. Like, that's what undergirds a lot of our work ethic. And so that's where we sort of tie work, achievement, productivity. to morality, being busy, being on the run, you know, having something to do, no idle hands. This is wrapped up in morality and sort of being a good person. And so, you know, the effect of that

is something I just referred to this productivity compulsion to produce, to meet deadlines, knock off to do list constantly. This is sort of all future oriented stuff. So you're not talking about the now. You're talking about, you're looking to the future to some standard you need to meet imminently or down the line. And so the connection here to time speeding up, as Mark Whitman, a researcher in Germany, whose studies felt time, explained to me, is that when you're sort of future-oriented all the time, time does seem to accelerate. Our sense of time seems to accelerate. But it's also the language we use. So Anne Burnett is another researcher I spoke with for the piece on time accelerating. She's an American professor who studied, she's retired

Now she studied communication and fast-paced of life. And she said the way that people talk about time literally sort of affects the way we experience time. Things like, you know, I feel like I'm on fast forward. I'm on a roller coaster and I can't get off. I feel like the year is zipped by. Burnett proposed that like when we talk this way all the time, we normalize this sort of pace of life. And that is sort of circular. It ends up kind of contributing to how we experience time.

And, you know, she laughed. She said, when's the last time someone told you they're like kicking back? that life is slow and relaxed and that they've had a really good long sleep. It's a foreign concept. And again, that ties back in with the Protestant work ethic, busyness being tied up with morality. Yeah. And these researchers were actually looked at Christmas letters to kind of get a sense of how our language has changed. Can you talk a bit about that? Precisely. It's a really kind of interesting laser sharp focus. When we ask the question, like, is time flying by faster now than it used to? You know, people talk about that in a general way. It's kind of,

nostalgia around it. But she actually did something really interesting where she charted people's language about time since 1976. And the way she did that was she collected these crazy, busy brag letters that people print up and fold into their Christmas cards where you tell your family and friends, who's done what this year. So she collected more than 2,000 of these things since 1976 and analyzed the language. Like she literally took a marker and would circle the words and phrases that reappeared. And so by 2013, she's finding that everybody's super busy. She told me, the preschooler's busy. Retired people are busy. Busy equals normal. She'd circle words and phrases that reappeared. So things like action-packed, on the run,

crazy. And then she went back to the 70s. And those letters are like hyper-specific. Someone details like a 30th wedding anniversary. Someone talks about a holiday in Alcapocco, wallpapering lessons. very, very specific, just slices of life. No one's talking about life being super hectic or time flying or like laying out their to-do list. So she really kind of charted how the language, how we talk about time, actually affects sort of our day-to-day reality. And she did that through a really weird slice, which is busy break letters.

I mean, it sounds like the letters from the 70s kind of show people taking in the very specific small details of their lives. Precisely. And again, none of that hectic language is there. And it's actually working on that story many years ago, changed the way I wrote my own Christmas letters, you know, where you would just detail a moment in time, what you're doing, what's out your window, which I found quite refreshing from here's what I ticked off this year. And can you believe it's Christmas again, you know? By doing that, did you find that time felt a bit slower for you? I did because I was sort of charting back to a memory or really kind of slowing down and taking in the moment around me rather than kind of humble bragging, right? is what that brag letter literally is.

We'll be right back. So a famous time suck is, of course, screen time, right? How does that contribute to how we perceive time? How do our phones, the screens that are around us all the time? What do they do to our sense of time? So I think we all have this kind of mortifying experience. You know, you're in bed, you're about to go to bed. you decide to take one last, like, scan of your socials for whatever reason. And, you know,

you have no intention with it, but lo and behold, an hour's gone by. And, you know, you've been looking at cat videos and celebrity reels. And there's this feeling of like this black hole of time, you know, when you're sort of doom scrolling. And there's emerging research around how and why that happens. So right now, there's a large-scale European study called timed, which is looking exactly at this question, how to screen time and digital distraction affect or feeling of time. So European researchers in several countries are sort of taking a deep dive on this. One of the theories here is that there is no memory making with doom scrolling. Rarely is it really meaningful or really, really novel, like as an experience in your life,

there's nothing there to mark the time in a meaningful way, and so it vanishes. And there's also sort of a tie-in to boredom here. Consider, you know, you're waiting for a train, you're bored, it's uncomfortable, so you pull out your phone and then time moves again. Mark Whitman, a researcher in Germany, again, looked at this experience of what happens when we want to sort of accelerate time when we're bored. And so he and other researchers are sort of interested in what it means when we lose that capacity for boredom. Yeah, I want to pick up on that boredom thought because I was really thinking about how we've lost those moments, right? So you're waiting in a doctor's office for the doctor to see you or you're waiting online at the grocery store.

You can just pick out your phone and you don't have that boredom. The time does feel like it speeds up. But I have this memory when I was little. I'm a 90s kid, so I feel like many of 90s kids will understand this, where I was in the back of a car for a road trip, right? It's like four hours long. And I didn't have a screen. So I just had this time to look out the window and it was raining and just watching the droplets fall down the window and just making this game of which droplet would go down to the bottom fastest. And, you know, I was bored, but I made a game.

And the thing that I take away from that is that I have a memory of that, right? I don't have a memory of myself looking at my phone, even from 10 minutes ago. I have no idea what I was looking at. So there is something that you lose, right? Memory, I don't know. That memory sticks with me to this day. That's so beautiful. Like I could picture that so clearly in my mind.

And precisely, like that imprinted on you, you can move back to that time. And perhaps that holiday or that year felt slow to you or felt expansive to you. There was some memory making and meaning there, you know, versus like watching Dora the Explorer, whatever the hell kids watched in the 90s. I don't know. That probably would not imprint on you in the same way. Absolutely. And when my daughter tells me she's bored, I say, good. Take that in. Being bored is good. And it's a very uncomfortable feeling for us with these little screens of distraction in our hand. So I think that's, you know, a story for another day in terms of what will that inability to feel bored?

You know, what knockoff effects will that have for us? Hi, my name is Zoe Sky Jordan. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I had my baby Sylvie in March. Zoe is our producer, Mikhail Stein's cousin. I would say it's a different quality of time. It's not the same kind of time as when I was rushing around and had a million social plans, and it just feels, it's consistently busy, like, hums with, like, a busyness. Like, I could always be doing something.

but it feels fast and I also don't know how the mothers of a generation before like nurse and stuff without phones I know that makes me sound a bit hideous but like what are you doing when you're nursing if you're not like texting someone or or reading something or listening to an audio book like with your headphones that I don't know maybe I had like, maybe my mom had a walkman on, but like, there's a lot of downtime. So, Zosha, we all kind of experience a time warp collectively when the pandemic set in almost six years ago. What did you hear from experts about how our perception of time changed during the pandemic? So, you know, time use researchers had a field day through the pandemic because everything was, you know, there was upheaval in every sphere of our lives.

And there was so much data to collect on, like, very rapid social change, change at home, change at work. So anybody studying time really capitalized on that moment. And there's so much fascinating research still sort of trickling out from that era. So one person who was looking at this time was Anne Wilson. She's a social psychology professor at Wilford-Lurier University. And she has, among other things, studied how people reckon with the past and future. And she and her colleagues studied time in the pandemic and how people experienced it and what many people sort of described as a time warp in the pandemic. You may have heard it sort of described it. What is time anyway or sort of time put in

a blender through the pandemic? So Wilson and her colleagues surveyed more than 2,000 North Americans through the first and second anniversaries of the COVID-19 pandemic. And they sort of asked them in detail to describe their experience of time. The things that they heard were people describing time as hazy and surreal. They talked about feeling frozen or stuck in tar. Many experienced dull, stifling days that sort of felt endless, but then also looking back on the years, those years sort of felt zapped from their lives. They didn't have much to show for those years. So Wilson told me that people described like an elastic band or a yo-yo. They used terms like time warp and vertigo. It's very interesting to think about how time felt endless and yet it

disappeared, right? I think that's an experience of many people that we've had in the pandemic. I think about that too. And that in the moment, it felt like it just dragged and dragged. But then I look back and I'm like, that was multiple years of our lives. It's very wild. What do you think it was about the pandemic that changed the way we think about time? Well, again, it was a period of great upheaval. Pretty much every element of our lives was sort of turned upside down from schooling to work to home life. And I think for a lot of people, those days, again, felt endless. because there wasn't much to market.

I still remember a comedian talking about, oh, I'm going for my stupid little walk now. We all did those. That's all that was left and lining up for the groceries, you know, that that's what was left to us. So when you talk about memories or novelty, sure, of course, there is the memory of this sort of traumatic time, but in terms of memory making and novelty day-to-day life,

life really did shrink. So people talked about those days being endless. But again, when they looked back on them, had vanished into thin air, years had vanished into thin air. And I think that goes back to William James, the psychologist I mentioned earlier, who said that, you know, we can have conflicting ideas about how time passed in the moment and again, how we look back on it and sort of reassess it retrospectively. And that's a prime example of that. But more broadly speaking, I think certainly those stupid little walks in the pandemic, one thing I learned speaking to families

through that time was they realized just how over-subscribed they'd been, how over-programmed they were, how over-programmed their kids were. And again, that calendar, the empty calendar, was a real lesson for them. And many vowed to sort of pull back on the activities once it all ended. But I think, you know, we've talked before about like we sort of have snap back to the status quo. But those were the intentions at the time. Those were the observations that people made about their time. And the promises they made about their time, it remains to be seen. if those are sticking. Yeah, but what I'm getting out of this is that, like,

we kind of needed markers, right, to kind of place this in a certain time during the pandemic. And we didn't have those. Precisely, it was just like one long Zoom call, right? Yes. One long food delivery order. Like, there were very few markers, and the markers were new.

I'm Charmaine Brooks, and I live in St. Albert, Alberta. After Charmaine's mother died, time took on a different kind of quality for her. Time seemed to not matter. It felt more holistic. And I know everyone's experiences grief very much different. And I think it's because I was experiencing an unbounded time of her. I wasn't just grieving who she was when she died.

I was grieving something bigger than that and something that didn't have a time constraint around it. And it was this huge gaping, that experience of having her there. It was just gone. And so that was really interesting to explore and try to understand it. And I really couldn't. It's only in the last year or two that I've really been able to get my head around what was going on. Like it almost feels like I have a relationship with the memory of my mom in a really whole way.

she's here in a different unbounded way. Can we talk a little bit about how age fits into this? Because, you know, as I'm going through my life, and I think many people can relate, that time feels much faster as you get older. What's going on with that? So I think on a basic level, it makes sense that time passes more quickly with age.

One year of your life is a much smaller fraction of your life after 70 than when you're a toddler, when one year is half of your life. So on some level, it's just like basic proportions. But the researcher Mark Whitman, who researchers in Germany, also talked to me about age and cognition. So with age, the brain does tend to process less information and stores fewer memories. And again, when you have fewer time markers to look back on, a year can fly by more quickly. So this is sort of a natural process with aging.

Okay. Is there something we can learn from our youth that can help us feel like we can slow down time about? bit, like when time felt so much more expansive. Yeah, I mean, think about those childhood summers. They just went on forever and ever. I think that's what a lot of us are chasing to one degree of success or another. Now summer goes by in two seconds, I feel. Exactly.

Exactly. It's tragic. So, again, researchers sort of point to novelty. So when you're a kid, everything is new. Everything is novel. Everything is awe-inspiring. And so you're imprinting more events in your memory. And so time feels more full and expanse.

with more of these markers. And so one of the arguments here is try to infuse your time with as much novelty as possible. That in turn sort of leads to memory making, meaning, reflection. It infuses our time with markers that we can sort of look back on. And if we do feel like time is flying by more quickly, we can sort of reassess that and go, but look at this and this and this. All of this happened in the course of a year. Now you have something that's marking the time in a new way.

And it also, it makes you kind of like ritualistic and precious about like all those little milestones. Everything feels so big. And everything is for the first time. Like I went to this cute little village town. And I like I walked through it differently because I was there with Sylvie. I wanted her to experience it. And I wanted to experience it with her at a different pace. What else do you hear from experts about how to take more control over our time and help it slow down?

So a few patterns reemerge, and there's a host of Canadian research on each of these patterns. So Carlton researchers have looked at time in nature, how our perception of time's duration actually slows in nature. And they point to, again, things like novelty and awe, what you might encounter in that kind of environment, versus sort of in a busy urban environment, you know, where people are sort of racing to work and the next deadline and task. So time in nature is something that comes up time and again. And then researchers have actually, like, again, taken people for walks along a river versus a subterranean tunnel and asked them to gauge how long the walk was. And those in nature perceived that time as longer than those, you know, in a subterranean tunnel, like the path in Toronto, for example. And they would sort of ask participants to gauge a minute the nature participant.

and the people kind of walking through an urban city environment and they get a stopwatch going and ask them to sort of put their hands up when they thought a minute had gone by. Again, the people who just had a walk in nature perceived time is slower than it actually was. So other people have looked at meditators. They've put them through brain scans and looked at what happens in their brains with meditation. So no surprise that meditators, you know, often sort of describe time as moving more slowly, that kind of talk about being in the present. And others talk about the importance of like letting in a little boredom on that train. People who study boredom and spontaneous thoughts talk about boredom allowing the mind to wander, which again can lead to reflection, making connections about your experiences, your memories, and all of that again, where there is meaning made, memories, that sense of time lengthens. So it's something to think about when you're tempted to reach for your iPhone like everyone else on your rush out.

subway car. Yeah, don't reach for your iPhone. Watch the raindrops people. Or just stare uncomfortably at your fellow passengers. That too, that too. So, Shosh, it sounds like the advice is really to cherish the moments, even the little moments in our lives, get out in nature, taking our surroundings, right, and live in the present. Is that kind of what we're supposed to be doing in order to get our time to slow down? I mean, it all sounds sort of kumbaya, but I mean, even researchers who are studying time, they're finding the same patterns. You know, They're finding time in nature, allowing in boredom, time for reflection, meditation, novelty, a vacation, doing something new day-to-day. Predictably, these are the experiences that people will say time and again, slow their sense of time.

And then there's all the other stuff that we do that we're sort of locked into, right? Our work routines, our to-do lists, our screen time, sort of all the ways we live currently. really conducive to sort of time accelerating. Zosha, what have you heard from readers about how they're thinking about time? So I heard from a lot of readers who had a lot of life experience, maybe had dealt with grief, maybe we're currently dealing with illness, and there was definitely a sense of really sort of stressing the importance of slowing things down and getting out of the grind,

all the things that sort of steal our attention and accelerate time. One of those readers who wrote in is a man named Paul Rolfe from Toronto. I'm 83 years old. So I've been around a long time. I'm the youngest of eight children originally. And all have told me that as you get older, you know, time goes more quickly. So it speeds up. And right now I'm kind of in a limbo where I don't really feel like it's speeding up

because I'm just starting a process that a lot of people call a journey, I suppose, through it chemotherapy. Time does march on. And on the other hand, this situation does give one. a different perspective, certainly on the value of time, which I think I've always, it's always been important to me. So now it's brought forward to the, to my front stoop, so to speak. Paul spoke about how this change in his life has brought time into focus. You know, another adage that I tried to live up to is, is Carpe Diem.

So I'm very happy that I've done the things I've done in my life. And, you know, right now I go out on the street on Bloor Street and see the people walking down the street and, you know, I value that. You know, don't take time for granted. And here's Charmaine with one last thought. It's made me not as preoccupied with time, you know, and when we're having special moments or every day, moments, you know, and I just made tea with my daughter because she's working at home today

and we got to see some birds on the feeder doing some crazy things during a blizzard. That time, like that all of it is valuable and rich. And we shouldn't just fixate on, like, especially with Christmas coming, right? Christmas Day, it's got to be all these, all our expectations. And it's, it can be really deflating because we do that, right? We pour so much. of ourselves into thinking about this anticipated time that may or may not be all that we want. Socha, thank you so much. It's been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you for having me, Cheryl. That was Zosha Bielski, the Globe's time use reporter. We also heard from Paul Rolf,

Charmaine Brooks, and Zoe Sky Jordan. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Alyssa Wheeler is our Brooke Forbes fellow and associate producer. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.