Why does the time in the course of the life pass ever faster?

We cannot stop the time. Slow down however already. With relaxation the however nothing has to do.

Here a few shocking truths: Of Germany victory with euro vision the song Contest with Lena is not two, also not three, but already four years ago, the introduction of the euro already twelve, the case of the wall even 25 years. One hardly trots one moment long by the everyday life, already year passed. More badly still: The time seems to offense ever more rapidly, one becomes the older.

 What, already again birthday? Class reunion, because the Abi 15 years ago is? And I to mean passport not recently only extended? Psychologists found something out in a study, what helps to explain the phenomenon. They asked 500 participants between 14 and 94 years among other things, how quickly the last ten years had passed after their feeling. For teenagers this time interval had slowly elapsed, for young adults faster, for older still faster.

The scientists submitted further statements to the participants: “I often feel under time pressure”, “I have often not enough time to care me for important things” or also “I have much time”. The test people between 20 and 59 agreed more frequently the sentences, which are connected with time pressure. Most humans with profession and family are not quite clamped a miracle, at this age.



Our perception is paradoxical: Straight one then, if one experienced few, feels it afterwards in such a way, as if the time passed particularly fast. A monotonous working day, on which one only office stuff wafts settled, by conferences of claptrap and is stuck in waiting loops, seems to last sometimes eternally. In the evening one is surprised nevertheless, what one actually all the hours made over. “I am convinced of the fact that the memory says the time perception considerably certainly”, to Marc Wittmann of Institut for border areas of the psychology and psycho hygiene in Freiburg.


This text originates from the
TIME the knowledge 5/2014,
which is available at the kiosk.

Wittmann led the study for time perception with increasing age. “One experiences little new, exciting, remains for also fewer memories, and in the review the time interval appears shorter.” In its book felt time compares Wittmann the life with one vacation: At the beginning one explores the new environment, discovers unknown smells, courts and landscapes. The time seems to stretch far. But after a few days the new to the habit, one always looks after rising on the same cows before mountain backdrop, comes each noon with Luigi and planscht in the evening still another little in the lake. And suddenly is the vacation much too early past. In the life the many first time, which one experiences in the youth, remain clear in memory: the first kiss, the first party, the first own apartment.

Twenty years each morning into the same office and each evening before the television in the same living room, then the time passes as in flight. The older humans become the less open, are them tendentious for new, as admits from developmental psychology is. But the more new and emotional one deeply felt, the more is impressed in the memory in and the longer works one period afterwards. That means also: Everyone can brake the felt time, if it experiences again more first time. In the retirement that seems to succeed even automatically: The study of Wittmann showed that humans over 60 do not have any longer so strongly the feeling, the years flashed by only in such a way. In this age the life seems itself to entschleunigen. But so for a long time one does not have to wait.