OPINION: Don’t let summer slip away: the psychology of time perception

Summer Session II begins Monday, meaning summer vacation is almost halfway over, with fall classes starting in just under two months. A common complaint about summer vacation is that it simply ends too soon. While unfortunately there’s little we can do to alter the hard reality of the calendar, there are a number of factors that can influence our perception of time, including attention level and emotional state.

A 2010 paper from the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics presented an overview of many studies on the topic of time perception. The author highlights a few intriguing results: that multitasking decreases perceived duration, that paying more attention to timing versus other tasks produces more accurate and longer perceptions of time, and that anticipating an event increases the length of time experienced in the lead up to it.

In addition to the truism that devoting attention to a productive activity tends to make it faster and improve the output, these studies provide evidence that being mindful of the present can actually increase our perceived duration of enjoyable events. Meanwhile, attending to multiple sources of information — read: checking your phone every minute — can literally make the good times pass you by faster.

There’s nothing quite like getting lost in a good book or TV show, and it’s clearly unreasonable to be intensely focused on every moment, but regularly trying to minimize distractions can be a good habit to develop when trying to make the most out of a limited period of time.

The paper also notes a suite of more recent studies that examine the relation between emotion and time perception. The main finding is that high-arousal emotions such as fear or excitement tend to increase our perception of time. One paper showed participants film clips that were either scary, sad or neutral and found that those seeing the scary clips perceived time to last longer.

These results don’t suggest an obvious way of incorporating this emotional impact into daily life, as being constantly terrified or constantly ecstatic would almost certainly have a negative impact on your stress levels. However, it’s interesting to note that how you feel can influence your perceptions of time, for instance when taking an anxiety-inducing exam versus relaxing at the beach, so you can have a better idea of how to manage your time.

This brings up a larger point about how we plan our schedules as students. When looking at a calendar, it’s really easy to think that two events will seem equally long. As these studies demonstrate, this may not always be the case. College students have a great deal of control over their schedules — from classes to extracurriculars and social events — but this control can’t be effectively exercised if we don’t take into account our subjective perceptions when scheduling time for different activities.

More research will continue to better inform us on the way we experience the world. Psychology and neuroscience can lead to better insights into the workings of the mind — findings which we can utilize to better adapt our lifestyles to our thought processes. As students and as humans, it’s incumbent upon us to learn more about ourselves and the ways we perceive reality.