I thought I had a handle on time. Just a few weeks ago, a day contained 24 hours, each of which contained 60 minutes, and all of those had 60 seconds in them. Not so now that some nefarious superpower is running a sick Salvador Dali experiment on clocks. Whole days have been appearing and disappearing like pop-up ads. Others, I’m certain, last entire weeks. Just this morning I set down my coffee for a second, and then it was late afternoon.
You want to get this over with
Let’s say you’re over the quarantine and desperately want to get back to real life. Constantly thinking about when shelter-at-home restrictions will be lifted is not helping. “Get involved, do something, find a project, find a hobby,” Poole says.
You want to savor this time
Among those lucky enough to be healthy and well-fed, there can be a sense that this is a unique and special period — one in which we can slow down and savor hours spent with family or working on an important personal project.
You want to remember this time
Time perception occurs in two ways: in the moment, and when you look back on it. One way to make a period of time seem as if it lasted longer is to fill it with novel experiences so that the brain bothers to encode a lot of them for later recall (this may be one reason adulthood seems to pass more quickly than childhood).
You want to stretch your time out
Whether time is moving slowly or quickly, it may still seem like you don’t have enough of it. The feeling that you have all day to do whatever you want is called “time affluence,” and there are, Poole says, three ways to increase yours.
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