What matters, real or perceived time? To me, it would be perceived time.She proceeds to use an example about sleep, that is, when a subject believes that he or she has gotten enough sleep, that belief can influence the way the person's day will proceed.
I've tried it, and she's right: what we believe about time and how we use it is a lot more flexible than we tend to imagine. Here are a few other examples (from my life, because that's what's accessible to me):
- When I think about a task and it taking a certain amount of time, it will expand or contract to fill the time that I have decided it will take. This phenomenon explains how, senior year of college, I managed to write a philosophy paper in an hour and get an A on it.
- This morning, as I was running on a treadmill, I decided that I could run for a mile at a certain pace--well, as I got past the 3/4 mile mark, I felt like I was barely going to make it. However, I'm pretty certain that if I had made myself run 2 miles at that pace I could probably have done it; my mind was convinced that the 1 mile was all I had in me. I'm going to test the 2-mile hypothesis out on Friday.
- What about the well-documented experience of calling an old friend and it feeling like no time has passed since you last saw her? Or (as I did this year) going to your college homecoming and just picking up with friends seamlessly. Thinking long and hard, no pun intended, about exactly how long it has been since you've seen someone can make it feel a bit daunting to reconnect, while leaving the question of time aside can make the experience easy and natural.
You can probably think of more applications to this principle (the flexibility of perceived time). The point is, you're in control of how you perceive time and how you internalize your beliefs about the speed that something is occurring or the length of time it may take. You can make it easier on yourself by shifting your mindset about time and how it affects you.
No comments:
Post a Comment