How to Slow Down Time

Focusing Your Attention

Focus on little details. There are a lot of theories about why time seems to speed up as we grow older, both subjective and scientific. The neural pathways we form as children are almost always new, as each experience is new. It's as if every little detail is significant. As we get older and more familiar with the world we inhabit, however, those little details don't carry the punch they once did. To reclaim some of the wonder of your youth, try to train yourself to focus on little things as much as possible. Take a short time each day to–yeah, literally–appreciate some flowers, or watch a sunset, or do a meditative task, like playing music or gardening. Engage all your senses to try to be fully present, even if the event is insignificant. The smaller, the better. While you're sitting in traffic, stay focused on the temperature, the tactile feeling of your body on the seat, the smells of the car and the traffic. How strange it is to be driving at all!

Focus on your breath. Breath-meditation is one of the easiest and most common methods of training yourself to slow down and become more aware. Center yourself in basic breathing rituals to be more present in the moment, and slow down time. Sit in a comfortable chair, upright, using good posture, and take a deep breath. Hold it, then exhale it slowly. Do this at least ten times while your eyes are closed. Feel the oxygen coming into your body, nourishing you, and feel it leaving your body. Move the air you breathe to different parts of your body as you meditate. Feel it working for you. After your ten controlled breaths are done, open your eyes and pay attention to details around you. If you are outside, look at the sky, the horizon, listen to sounds around you. If you are inside, look at the ceiling, the walls and any furniture. Be in the moment. If you don't like the idea of "meditating," just think about it as breathing. There doesn't have to be a lot of spiritual jargon wrapped up in it for it to be effective for you.

Try progressive muscle relaxation. Progressive muscle relaxation is a basic, but formalized way of relaxing your body without doing much of anything but focusing your attention on different places in your body, and pushing your presence into those places. It's a way of both relaxing and staying active, and can be a helpful way to focus yourself in a simple activity and slow time. To start, sit upright in a comfortable chair, focusing on your breath. Then pick a part of your body, starting either at your feet or you head, and tense a muscle. Try contouring your face, as if you just ate something sour, holding it for a count of 15 seconds, then slowly releasing it and feeling the tension melt away. Continue moving to different parts of your body, tensing muscles, holding it, and then releasing the tension slowly, until you've moved around all your body. This is an excellent way of centering yourself, being present in the moment, and relaxing.

Sing, play music, or chant. Another commonly used tactic of transcending time is to use a repetitive vocalization as a chant, to center yourself and to work into a kind of trance. This can be done by singing, chanting, or by playing music, and is done in lots of traditions, from Pentecostal Christians to the Hare Krishna. You can chant any single phrase, mantra, or fragment. Try chanting the Hare Krishna, or just sing Beyonce over and over: "I'm a survivor" is a perfectly effective mantra. If you play an instrument, you may be very familiar with the experience of losing track of time while playing a repetitive fragment or a series of chords. Just repeat the same three notes on piano, letting them ring out slowly, and sit with the notes, focusing on your breath. Time will slow. If you don't play, and aren't interested in chanting or singing, try listening to some soft ambient or drone-like music. Some excellent compositions for blissing out and slowing down time include William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, Jordan De La Sierra's Gymnosphere, and anything by Brian Eno.

Try just sitting. If you ask a Zen monk what meditation is, they will usually say, "Just sitting." If you ask what Zen is, again, the answer will probably be, "Just sitting." The big secret to meditation and to slowing time is that there is no secret to awareness. If you're feeling agitated and want to slow down time, just sit. Do nothing. Center yourself in the act of sitting, and just be. Try to only do one thing at one time. When you're sitting, just sit. When you're reading, just read. Don't read, and eat bagels, and text your friend, and think about the weekend. Just read.

Breaking Your Routines

Change up your routes to regular places. Have you ever had the experience of getting into your car and automatically driving to work, when you meant to run to the store? Repetitive actions form pathways in your brain that make it much easier to go on autopilot, performing the same task without realizing what you're doing. Those actions can speed by. So, the trick is to learn to shake up your routines to make your brain experience new things as often as possible. try to take as many different routes and methods of getting to the different places you need to go. Ride a bike sometimes, drive other times, walk other times. Find the best route for each and the worst route for each, and take all of them in between.

Do the same activity in a variety of locations. Some people like to work at the same desk every day, for the same number of hours, doing the same activities. Consistency does have the effect of making time fly by. But if you want to slow it down, force yourself to go elsewhere to do tasks that you need to do repeatedly. Don't study in your room at your desk every night, but go in a circuit. Try different rooms in your hours, try the library, try studying outside under a tree in the park. Study everywhere. If you're a runner, don't run in the same place more than once or twice. Always explore new neighborhoods, new parks, new trails. Don't let routine become routine.

Do things that scare you. In a recent study, a researcher asked riders on a scary thrill ride to describe how long the ride took, to plunge a couple hundred feet in a few seconds. Every participant overestimated the amount of time by roughly 30%. When we experience moments that make us nervous, moments that make us scared, time seems to drag on in a palpable way, even if it doesn't really. Try easy jump-scares, or digging out the occasional horror movie if you want to give yourself some jumps without engaging in actually risky or frightening activities. Scare yourself from the safety of your living room. Don't engage in dangerous behaviors, but take calculated risks and put yourself out there. If it scares you to sing in front of people, take your guitar to an open mic and make yourself do it. It'll be the longest 15 minutes of your life.

Explore. The world is a strange and beautiful place that too often we limit to a tiny skull-sized kingdom. We're at home, then we go to school or work, then we come home, and watch TV. That's a good way to make time fly by. Instead, force yourself go exploring. Explore your own neighborhood, your own world, and your own head. How many different places can you buy a toothbrush, a sandwich, or a pair of sneakers in your own neighborhood? What's the cheapest? Where are the weirdest? Find out. Explore your own abilities as well as your surroundings. Can you write a narrative poem? Challenge yourself. Can you play banjo? Try. Learning new things helps us reclaim that beginner's mind, which works slowly. This is the joy of exploration.

Do fewer things in a day. If you want to slow down time, your goal should be to take on fewer tasks each day, and to experience each one of them fully and more completely. If you want time to slow down, slow down yourself, and slow down your rate of consuming. Most people carry around a couple hundred hours of music on their computer, or their phone, and the instantaneous experience of access makes it hard to slow down and experience those songs. If you don't like the first thirty seconds, you can skip 'em. Try sitting with a song you really like, and listening over and over, instead of listening to an hour of Pandora. Even if you're doing something small, like reading or looking at a book, don't try to cram the whole thing into your brain at once. Don't built up a huge stack of books at your bedside. Sit with one for a month. Sit with one poem for a year. Really experience it.

Stop multi-tasking. The more you divide your attention into multiple tasks, the more difficult a time you'll have in staying focused on what you're doing, centering yourself, and slowing down the way that you're perceiving time. When you do one thing, just devote yourself to that thing until you're done with it. Multi-tasking is usually done to "save time" for other things. We think, "Hey, if I can make dinner and watch House of Cards and call my sister, I'll save time later," but at the end of the day, you'll hardly remember what happened on the show, the dinner will be scorched, and your sister will Instead, focus on doing the one thing you're doing well and rightly. Make it take a long time. Make it go slowly. When you cook food, pay attention to each ingredient that you chop up. Do it right.

Practice systematic recall, daily. At the end of each day, try a little exercise. Remember one thing you did today and describe it in as specific a detail as possible. It might be the look your friend gave you after you told a hilarious joke, or a sign you saw in someone's yard, or a particular cloud formation. Be specific, and be detailed. After you do today, try to do yesterday. What was something, different from you you recalled yesterday, that you remember from yesterday? After you do that, go to last week. Go to a month ago. Ten years. Your childhood. try to progressively draw up specific and detailed memories from different points in your life.