675,000 Hours - How a fulfilled Life slows down your time.

“Another year has passed; time is flying more and more every year.”

 Stop.

 If that's what you're thinking, then this text is for you! Isn't it a shame that time seems to just run through our hands, and we sometimes look at this perception with melancholy, resignation, or even regret as we celebrate each New Year and birthday?

 We think that's just the way it is, the older you get, the faster time passes.

Right and yet so wrong.

No, you can't stop time from progressing, nor can you turn it back. But you can change the speed of time for yourself. Sound like dark magic or esoteric gibberish? Absolutely not! Here's a little food for thought for you to ponder now at year’s end, including some tips on how to experience time more slowly, more consciously, and with more fulfillment.

An entire lifetime—that's 60, 70, 80, or 90 years, if you're lucky. That certainly sounds like a lot of time. Especially if you're young and reasonably healthy. So why think about what you do with your time every day—there's so much of it! Well, at least until it's no longer there.

“I don't think about it every day!” quickly becomes, “I don't think about it every month!” and then, “I don't think about it every year.” And finally—you have never even thought about it at all. Time suddenly is gone.

So let's take a moment to step off the fast-paced merry-go-round of routine. Let’s distance ourselves from the secure feeling that there is plenty of time for everything we're not doing right now.

Let's take the number 77: many people in the Western world live to be 77 years old, or older.

 That's 675,000 hours.

77 summers.

Eight decades.

At the beginning, the first two decades or so are filled with childhood and youth, school, training or college; at the end, possibly one or two decades with limitations and illnesses.

I don't know about you, but I find these figures far more evocative than the vague “77 years” that we so easily brush aside every day. How many hours have you already used up? How many summers are gone?

Now that we have reached the point where we are consciously thinking about time, let's look at why it seems to pass so quickly and what we can do to slow it down.

It's not just our own feeling that time seems to pass more quickly with age. Science has proven that our perception of time changes throughout our lives. As a child, didn't an hour always seem to go on forever? And—oh my gosh—the summer vacation! They just never ended! Especially in retrospect, this time was long and hopefully filled with some great experiences such as free time, ice cream, outdoor swimming, or vacations.

One reason for this perception is that we are born with a bunch of blank pages in the book of life. As children, and even as teenagers, we undergo new experiences almost every day. We learn to walk, speak, write, meet new people, go to unfamiliar places, and encounter objects that are strange and exciting to us. As a young person, we experience an incredible density of important and novel events, all of which must be processed by the brain. And so, we perceive this time during this period as very long.

Conversely, as adults, many things have become routine. The job, family life, shopping, household chores, bills.... Of course, there are also significant experiences such as vacations, a wedding, a new apartment...but no longer with the frequency that was the case in our childhood. Time becomes emptier, our brain no longer has to process so many new things—and time starts to run faster.

Chronobiologist Till Roenneberg from the Munich Institute of Medical Psychology once said that our brain does not measure time like a clock. Instead, it processes new and important events. It then uses the density of these new experiences to estimate a period of time. If we experience a lot of new things, the brain perceives that we must have needed a lot of time to do so much. If we hardly experience anything new, the brain interprets that we must have needed only a short time to do everything.

I don't know about you, but I used to have these anomalous feelings of time, especially after vacations, when I was working full-time. First the vacation seemed intense and long, then suddenly it was over. Then at the end of the year I only remembered (to put it bluntly) two short weeks of travel and 50 weeks somewhere at work. Granted, my work didn't exactly fulfill me back then either—which brings us to a very important realization:

We can slow down time by filling it with things that mean something to us, things that give us purpose, things that make us curious, teach us something new, or bring us a sense of happiness and satisfaction. Something that signals the brain with the message of “Hey, I'm having an experience right now, I'm doing something other than my day-to-day routine. Save this experience as slow time!”  Rather than signaling the brain with, ”Hey, I've been waiting eight hours to get through this work day, so save this as  a half-second.”

Of course, it's utopian and stressful to want to force new experiences or happiness every day. Life will always contain unpleasant episodes and necessary routines, from work and utility bills to doctor's appointments and annoying people, to both small and big worries in your head.

Nor is life about constantly going on 52-week trips around the world, teaching yourself seven new languages, taking up fifteen new hobbies, and seeking pure fulfillment in every second of your job, your relationship, or a trip.

The trick is to make sure we don't get bogged down permanently. That we consciously break from our routines from time to time by trying something new, treating ourselves to something totally unfamiliar, learning something novel, attending different events, or just giving new people a chance to meet us. Maybe take a spontaneous evening walk in a park or forest, watch a YouTube tutorial teaching yourself something, go to a totally new type of event, try out an unknown recipe every Sunday, go somewhere you've never been before, reconnect with an old friend. Or on a larger scale: start a new hobby, do a second—or third—apprenticeship, sell the house, move to a different city or state, go on a big (pilgrimage) hike,...

I've been a freelance copywriter for seven years now, work remotely, travel a lot, hike a lot, and have an unusual and occasionally turbulent long-distance relationship with my husband in the USA. Yes, sometimes it's totally overwhelming. But the last seven years have felt like an entire lifetime to me. Like more than the entire previous 25+ years. Sometimes I have to slow myself down. Just sit and sip a cup of tea and give my brain a chance to process what’s happening. Sometimes it is almost too much, but most of the time it's just right.

I no longer plod blindly through everyday life with an empty head just trying to endure life somehow. I consciously cruise to new shores, go out of my comfort zone, and seek experiences that fulfill me and remain as special memories. Ninety percent of the time I'm content, balanced, and happy (the other ten percent I'm probably annoyed by seemingly useless bureaucracy or stuck on yet another internet problem hotline ;p). But for seven years now, I haven't said on New Year's Eve: “Wow, the year went by so quickly!”

I say: “Wow, it feels like last year was ten years long again—how nice!”

675,000 hours of life! I hope to remember most of them consciously—and with a smile.

Find more inspiration about life and time here:

• Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda—Five things we need to start doing right now!
• Go get Cigarettes – and don’t come back
• All the Stars in the Sky: To the Death of a Friend – Why you should never wait!