Why Time Feels Like It Speeds Up as You Get Older

Remember how summer holidays used to stretch forever when you were a child?

Six weeks felt like an eternity. The wait until Christmas was agonisingly slow. A year was a vast expanse of time.

And now? Months blur together. Christmas arrives shockingly quickly. Entire years seem to vanish in what feels like weeks.

You’re not imagining it. Time genuinely feels like it speeds up as you age. And there’s solid psychological and neurological research explaining why.

Regardless of age, both young adults (ages 20-22) and older adults (ages 69-75) agree with the idea that “time passes more quickly as people get older” and that “time passes more quickly now than before.”

It’s one of the most universal human experiences. And understanding why it happens doesn’t stop it—but it does make it less unsettling.

The Proportional Theory: A Year Gets Smaller

One of the most straightforward explanations is simple maths.

For a 5-year-old, one year represents 20% of their entire life so far. That’s a huge chunk of their existence.

For a 50-year-old, one year is just 2% of their life. It’s one-fiftieth of everything they’ve experienced.

By the time you’re 80, a year is barely 1.25% of your life—sixteen times faster, proportionally, than it felt when you were five.

This is sometimes called “log time.” As we age, a year becomes a smaller fraction of our entire lives up to that point, so it seems to pass faster.

If you’re 33, a year is 3% of your life—meaning time passes almost seven times faster than it did when you were five.

This theory makes intuitive sense. And it feels about right, doesn’t it? As an adult, years do seem to fly by in a way they never did in childhood.

The Novelty Theory: We Remember What’s Different

But proportionality isn’t the whole story.

There’s another crucial factor: novelty.

In childhood and early adulthood, we have many fresh experiences and learn countless new skills. Everything is new. First day of school. First friend. First time riding a bike. First holiday without parents. First job. First relationship.

The brain encodes novel experiences much more richly than it does everyday, ordinary experiences. It’s like novelty is stored in HD, but for experiences we’ve had several times, the brain just encodes a faint trace.

As adults, our lives become more routine. We experience fewer unfamiliar moments. Psychologists call this the “holiday paradox”—from childhood to early adulthood, we have so many vivid memories that, in retrospect, those years seem to have lasted longer.

We gauge time by memorable events. And fewer new things occur as we age to remember, making it seem like childhood lasted longer.

As cognitive psychologist Martin Conway points out, we most vividly remember experiences from between the ages of 15 and 25—a time of firsts. Our first sexual relationships, first jobs, first travel without parents, first major decisions.

Our early years are relatively overrepresented in our autobiographical memory and, on reflection, seem to have lasted longer.

The Holiday Paradox: When Time Feels Different

Here’s something strange: time feels different depending on whether you’re experiencing it or remembering it.

The “holiday paradox,” coined by psychology writer Claudia Hammond, describes how a vacation seems to fly by whilst you’re on it—but later, in retrospection, it feels like it lasted longer than it really did.

A novel experience may feel like it’s flying by, but you’ll have a deeper impression of that time and likely have a bundle of unique memories tied to it that give stretch and substance to that time gone by.

Conversely, when you’re in a familiar routine—same commute, same office, same evening routine—days blend together. Each one is largely indistinguishable from the last.

This is why when you look back on a period of routine life, it feels like it passed quickly. Your brain didn’t bother encoding much because nothing particularly memorable happened.

Neural Processing Slows Down

Professor Adrian Bejan offers a fascinating neurological explanation based on the physics of neural signal processing.

He hypothesizes that, over time, the rate at which we process visual information slows down, and this is what makes time “speed up” as we grow older.

This is because the size and complexity of our brains’ neural networks increase as we mature and continue to age. Electrochemical signals must traverse greater distances and span more pathways, thus slowing signal processing.

Moreover, aging causes nerves to accumulate damage that creates greater resistance to the flow of signals, further slowing processing time.

When we are young, each second of actual time is packed with many more mental images relative to our older selves. Like a slow-motion camera that captures more frames per second, time appears to pass more slowly when played back.

As Bejan puts it: “People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth.”

We know something happened because we see change. And the slower our brains process visual information, the fewer “frames” we capture per second—making time feel like it’s moving faster.

The Peak Age for Time Acceleration

Research by Marc Wittmann and Sandra Lehnhoff, who surveyed 499 participants aged 14-94, found something unexpected.

The perception of time speeding up—at least over the span of the last decade—peaks at age 50, then remains steady until the mid-90s.

Questions about smaller intervals of time (hours, weeks, months) didn’t change with age. It’s the longer periods—years and decades—that feel faster as you get older.

People aged 20-59 were most likely to select statements referring to “time pressure”—the notion that time is speeding by and that one can’t finish everything they want to do.

This age range corresponds with professional and family duties, resulting in the feeling that you can’t keep up with life’s demands.

Younger people were more likely to describe time with static metaphors (“time is a quiet, motionless ocean”), whilst older people used swift metaphors (“time is a speeding train”).

Chunking Memories Makes Time Fly

Research by Landau and colleagues found that chunking memories leads to the perception that time flies.

When our brain groups similar experiences together—all those Tuesdays at the office, all those weekends doing the same things—it stores them as a single chunk rather than individual events.

This saves cognitive energy. But it also compresses time. A year of similar Tuesdays feels shorter in memory than a year filled with distinct, memorable events.

This is why significant life changes—moving house, changing jobs, having a child—can temporarily slow down your perception of time. Everything’s new again. Your brain is encoding in HD. Time stretches out.

Time Pressure Affects Everyone

Whilst age is certainly a factor, the notion of “time pressure” contributes significantly to our perception of time across all age groups.

And it’s cross-cultural. Studies among German, Austrian, Dutch, Japanese, and New Zealander participants all showed similar results.

When you feel like you’re racing against the clock—juggling work, family, responsibilities, endless to-do lists—time feels like it’s slipping away faster.

The busier and more stressed you are, the less mental space you have to actually notice and encode what’s happening around you. Days blur. Weeks vanish.

What You Can Actually Do About It

The good news: although time speeding up with age is common, it’s not inevitable.

Seek Out Novel Experiences

You can slow time down by keeping your brain active, continually learning skills and ideas, and exploring new places.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Travel to somewhere you’ve never been. Try a new hobby. Take a different route to work. Change your routine. Learn something unfamiliar.

The more new experiences you have, the more your brain encodes—and the longer that period of time will feel in retrospect.

Be Present

When you’re fully engaged in what you’re doing—not multitasking, not thinking about tomorrow’s meetings—time expands.

This is why meditation and mindfulness practices can alter time perception. When you’re paying attention to the present moment, you’re encoding more information, which makes time feel slower.

Reduce Routine Where Possible

Routine is efficient. But it makes time vanish.

Breaking up sameness—even in small ways—gives your brain something new to notice and remember.

Reflect on Your Experiences

Journaling, photography, and deliberately reminiscing about your day all help encode memories more richly.

When you actively think about what happened, you create stronger memory traces—which makes that period of time feel more substantial when you look back on it.

The Bottom Line

Time feels like it speeds up as you age because:

• Each year becomes a smaller proportion of your total life
• You have fewer novel experiences to encode
• Your brain processes information more slowly
• Routine makes days blend together
• Time pressure makes you feel like you can’t keep up

All of this is normal. Universal, even.

But it’s not fixed. You can slow time down—not objectively, but subjectively—by introducing novelty, being present, and creating memorable experiences.

The years will pass either way. But how long they feel, and how much you remember from them, is partially within your control.

As philosopher William James wrote in 1890: “The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.”

He was right. But he also understood that the richness of our experiences determines how we perceive that time.

Fill your life with new experiences, moments of presence, and things worth remembering. Time might still speed up—but at least it won’t feel empty.

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