With summer session A concluding this week, the solstice behind us and “June gloom” a distant memory, summer’s bittersweet halfway point has returned. Whether its arrival crept up on you slowly or suddenly depends on how you individually experience the passage of time. Some months sluggishly crawl, while others — often the best and brightest— vanish without notice.
Summer is no exception. It’s a season attached to high expectations and competing priorities. These scarce months supply rest and relaxation in abundance, while offering a narrow window to relish the liberties of an intermission from standard routine. For many Gauchos, the quarter can never last long enough. With 56 days until the start of fall classes, we’ve compiled a list of four neuroscientist-approved strategies to slow down time and savor the second half of the summer.
Psychology of time
Albeit corny, the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun” is no hyperbole. Time is a contextual experience shaped by your environment: accelerating through joy and dragging during stress. This flexibility in our perception of time once offered an evolutionary edge — for early humans, a slowing sense of time opened a longer window to think critically and decisively during life-or-death threats. This same cognitive illusion lingers today in mundane moments of disaster, like watching your phone slip from your hand towards pavement in slow motion.
Our shifting sensations of time are linked with both emotional experience and novelty, three processes associated with one distinct brain region — the insular cortex. This elusive lobe is responsible for processing emotional, interoceptive and environmental stimuli. Such neuroanatomical overlap creates an intersection between the perception of time and self.
Thus, emotional experience is a key contributor to the notion of time’s passing. The insula regulates the limbic system’s “fight-or-flight” response when homeostasis is disrupted by emotion — often during danger, illness or extended stress. As your body floods with physiological changes, such as accelerating heart rate or shallow breathing, the insula works harder to detect these interoceptive signals and monitor the body’s internal state. Elevated activity level within the insular cortex during emotional periods distorts the perception of time, since both congruent processes occur in the same region.
After the insula identifies interoceptive signals, they’re sent to the amygdala for processing. High activity in the amygdala flags an event as significant, and enhances memory encoding in coordination with the hippocampus.
This accelerates the formation of emotionally vivid memories, increasing our sense of novelty — another key contributor to how we experience time. The more new experiences we condense within a period of time, the slower it seems to pass. Years rich with emotional experience are perceived as long and dense. Others spent with few meaningful moments feel fleeting. A clear example is how long school years felt in elementary school, each packed with novel experiences, compared to later years which blur together.
With an understanding that temporal processing is personal and subjective, we can adjust our emotions and experiences to slow summer’s perceived passing. Here are four suggested strategies to help.
1. Lower your expectations…
Harsh, I know, but our obsession with time causes it to accelerate with cruel irony. College students often suffer from “time pressure,” a hyperfocus on the passage of time coupled with business which consumes our attention and reduces present enjoyment, making us crave more time and obsess over its passing, which begins to feel much faster. This cyclical thought pattern can suck away the summer months as we monitor how much we still haven’t gotten around to.
To reduce stress around the summer’s speed, we recommend taking a step back from your bucket list. When you alleviate pressure off yourself and remember you’re already doing enough, you increase your bandwidth to savor the satisfaction of daily moments. This will increase positive emotional sensation and interoceptive activity, increasing vivid formation of positive memories, and slowing your perceived passage of time.
To reduce stress, you may consider radically shifting your mental representation of time. Shift away from the western image of time as a “bullet” — the past behind us, the future ahead of us and the uncontrollable trudge forwards — and consider alternative representations. The Māori indigenous people in New Zealand, for example, imagine the passage of time like walking backwards into the future, a conception associated with reduced stress. There are more ways to measure your summer than the calendar and clock.
2. Make little moments count (then recount them!)
You don’t need a trip abroad to enjoy your summer — actually, it might be better to skip vacation altogether! Research suggests that the frequency of small joyful moments is much more important than their magnitude. Banking on a single getaway for months causes you to hyperfocus on time’s passing, whereas seeking brief moments of happiness several times a day increases neural activation in the amygdala. In “romanticizing” small moments, you’ll form positive memories at greater density, occupying your insula, allowing the summer to pass more slowly.
Wear the perfume you’ve been saving for no reason! Walk dogs with your neighbor! Buy a fresh piece of your favorite fruit! Compliment a stranger! Consider literally stopping to smell the flowers — and before you forget, write the moments down. We tend to underestimate how much we accomplish within a year, so reflecting on small moments of joy supports memory formation and reduces time pressure. Psychologists suggest recording quick journal entries, but alternatively, try taking a photo every day or calling your parents to share a daily highlight.
3. Switch up the routine!
As we settle into repetitive tasks, we pay less attention to them and let our minds wander as months pass with little notice. Adjusting the structure of your day as often as possible can make time move more slowly.
Changes to your routine can be significant — signing up for a Rec Cen class, fostering a dog, alternating your route home from work — or seemingly minute — changing the language on your phone, switching your salad dressing or brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand — as long as you make an effort to retrain your brain.
Alternatively, if you’re dying to get back to campus, increasing structure and routine will help summer speed by faster (attempt at your own risk).
4. Ask whether your free time is really free
Unfortunately, this might mean “putting down the damn phone.” But hear me out! Digital technology erodes how we boundary personal and professional time. Once clearly separated by time and location, technology allows school, work and social intrusions to invade your mental space 24/7. Furthermore, filling every free moment with online activity risks reducing life satisfaction and mindfulness — the time we “save” with technology is redistributed to keep us perpetually busy.
On occasion throughout the second half of your summer, challenge yourself to be mind numbingly bored. Stare out a window on the 24X, sit in the sun and kick at the dirt, let your mind wander. Gradually, your boredom may become a doorway to discovering a new hobby, interest, relationship or skill. In reclaiming your attention, you’ll grow comfortable in stillness, gain control over time and begin to catch glimpses of summer’s warmth in every month of the year.
