December is synonymous with Christmas and Christmas seems to start in September… but before we know it, it’s already December. Why does the last third of the year pass so quickly and how can we “slow down time”?
How is it already December? What happened to 2025? And how do Did we suddenly go from being at the beach to putting up Christmas trees?
To understand why our perception of time seems to bend and distort, we need to first understand how our brain measures time.
As Hinze Hogendoorn, professor of visual time perception at the University of Queensland (Australia), explains in an article in , the term “time perception” is, in reality, a bit misleading, because time itself is not “out there” to be perceived.
When we perceive a color, a sound, a taste or a touch, specialized sensory organs detect something in the environment: the wavelength of a particle of light that enters the eye, the frequency of a sound wave that enters the ear, the presence of different chemicals in the mouth and nose, or the pressure of an object against our skin. But there is no equivalent for time — there is no “particle of time” for the brain to detect.
How brains deal with time
Our brains don’t perceive time — they infer it. Like the ticking of a clock, the brain estimates the passage of time by following the change.
But unlike a clock, the brain has no tics regular to count. To infer how much time has passed, the brain simply adds up how much has happened. If you fill a gap of time with exciting things, that gap seems to last longer. In the laboratory, an intermittent image presented briefly appears to last longer than a static image of the same duration.
This is also why witnesses of highly intense events (such as car accidents) often report that time seems to slow down.
In fact, in a well-known 2007 study in PLOS ONE, research participants fell backwards into a net from a height of over 30 meters.
When they were later asked to estimate the duration of their terrifying experience, they reported durations more than a third longer than they indicated when evaluating another person’s fall.
A Intense activation of first-hand experience amplifies attention, which in turn leads the brain to store dense, rich memories of events as they unfold.
Then, when you need to estimate how much time passed during the event, this unusually dense recall of ongoing events prompts the brain to overestimate the amount of time that has passed.
Does time… fly?
To understand what happened between when we were at the beach and suddenly it’s Christmas, we also need to distinguish between measuring time retrospectively (how much time has passed) and prospectively (how quickly time is passing now).
As every child knows, time spent waiting at the dentist passes much more slowly than time spent playing with a new toy. But why?
Again, a key part of the explanation is The more attention you pay to time itself, the slower it seems to pass.
The old saying goes that time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be fun. Whatever you are paying attention to just needs to distract you from the passage of time.
Keep your mind busywhether for work or leisure, and time will slip away. On the other hand, try looking at a clock for just five minutes and you will feel how interminable it seems unless you let your mind wander. Boredom slows down time drastically.
Routine makes the years go by
This disconnect between the prospective and retrospective perception of time also explains the saying “the days are long, but the years are short”a phenomenon that tends to increase as we age.
When we are young, many things are new: we go to school for the first time, we get into our first relationship, we start our first job. All these new events form a rich reservoir of memories that the brain uses later to conclude that a lot has happened, so a lot of time must have passed.
On the other hand, as we get older, many of our daily tasks become more routine: taking the kids to school, going to work, making dinner. As previously new parts of our day become routine, become less interesting. Boring tasks make time slow down, creating the impression that the days drag on.
Paradoxically, however, as these routine tasks are less exciting and new, leave fainter, less vivid memory traces. When our older brain then looks back to infer how long it has been since the beginning of the year, concluded that nothing much happenedso it doesn’t seem like that long ago.
Of course this conflicts with our conscious knowledge that it is already December, and We wonder how the year flew by.
So how do I slow down time?
Slowing down time while you are living it is very easy, although completely unsatisfying: just get bored. Go wait at red lights. Count to ten thousand in your head. See paint drying.
On the other hand, slowing down time retrospectively is a little more difficult. Essentially, you need to ensure that when you get to Christmas, you have a whole year’s worth of memories to show for it.
One way to do this is to prevent memories from fading, and the best way to do this is to relive them.
