Fear slows down our perception of time, helping us to act fast to divert disaster and when you are engaged in many things or your attention is free to wander and acknowledge the many things happening around, you suddenly realize time is going past it's normal rate or perhaps even faster. We can emulate this feeling or calm in the face of fast paced action and danger through turning an intense focus inwards in practising meditation. By shutting our external stimuli, closing our eyes and concentrating on taking deep breathes, we can slow the world down and stave off stress. You can control your perception of time like that if you want.
On the other side of the equation, when we are happy and exuberant, we are noticing what's happening around us and the world speeds up. You can get a thrill when you are really chasing something, you have got an idea and you are nailing it down and it's exciting and you are on this quest to finish it, you can get really excited and focused and time can speed up. Time tends to fly when you are having fun. We would like to think that mood leads to the impression of time so when I am feeling happy then time goes faster.
With mood and time intertwined in this way, it's no surprise that mental health conditions and mind altering substances can impact how fast the hours fly past. Depression for example slows down our perception of time, while individuals with Schizophrenia experience it eratically rather than as a constant. Dr. Hinze Hongendoorn from the University of Melbourne, School of Psychological Sciences, says certain drugs also give the illusion of time expanding and contracting. Obviously, alcohol can cause us to black out and lose nights of our lives we will never remember but drugs with hallucinogenic properties can bend our minds in strange ways.
As we get older, individual days can seem longer, while years accelerate and zoom past. When you are young, you are constantly encountering new, interesting, novel situations. Everything is exciting and you are curiously discovering everything so, there's a whole lot of salient events happening. That happens less when you are older.
Nice article