How to slow down time.
And what a Laotian bar playing episodes of Friends on repeat has to do with it.
You might be wondering what the above photo is, and what it has to do with slowing down time, and why I’m even talking about time.
Obviously, we can’t really change the pace of time. We just finished the month of January which some people feel lasted for months on end. (I, however, always feel like time is flying and there’s never enough of it, January included.) But what if you could play with your perception of time, and expand it?
Back in 2016 I was backpacking around Southeast Asia by myself. For three months, I was doing something different every day, constantly on the move. Except those three months might as well have been three years. Both in the moment and looking back on it now, it felt like weeks were packed into days and months were packed into weeks. It’s felt like this huge chunk of my life when in reality, it was just a few months. (For context, Halloween was about three months ago, and that might as well have been yesterday.) I woke up every day not really sure what I’d be doing. I had no plan and no schedule. I might stay put in a town in Thailand for a few more days, or I might jump on a boat and find myself in Laos by morning. Everything was new — sights, sounds, smells, people, food. No two days were the same, ever.
Fast forward a few years. It actually hurts my stomach to think about it too hard, but think back to March 2020. Remember that horrific month? When COVID was spreading rampantly, the world was shutting down, cities were issuing stay-at-home orders. But remember how interminable that month felt? March 2020 was like the month that would not end. I remember reading articles about it, how so many other people were having the same experience.
And it turns out, this is an actual scientific theory, sometimes called the “oddball effect.” A 2004 study published in Perception and Psychophysics explored “time’s subjective expansion” by flashing the same repeated images on a screen, followed by one “oddball” image. Even though each image was displayed for the same exact duration, participants reported that they thought the oddball image was shown for longer. Researchers concluded that time’s subjective expansion was due to “the engagement of attention and its influence on the amount of perceptual information processed.” So when we’re putting our focus on processing new information, it can feel that time goes slower.
This makes sense for why March 2020 felt so much longer to some of us. Each day brought new information, new updates, new rules. Even though some of us were just stuck at home living what felt like Groundhog Day, we never knew what each day was going to hold and we were processing a lot.
And back in Southeast Asia, I was doing things like eating fresh spring rolls on Thai islands and navigating cities in Cambodia on motorbikes. In Laos, I found myself at a “Friends bar” one night (pictured above), which is literally just a random bar in Vang Vieng that plays episodes of Friends on repeat. (And there are multiple bars that do this throughout the town!) It was all so much for my brain to process, and so my perception was that time just felt…..longer.
So how do we slow down time when we have jobs to do and kitchens to clean and appointments to attend and dinners to make, day in and day out? I’m not sure. But I like the idea of trying to incorporate more new things in life — whether it’s driving a new route, finding a new place to take a walk, attempting a new craft, even just trying a different coffee creamer. I’m the world’s biggest creature of habit, however, who thrives on rhythm and routine, so shaking things up doesn’t always serve me. And I’m not sure if these will really slow down time.
But as these gray winter days continue to fly by, I’m kind of excited to try.