Time Bending: What Your Mind Does With Your Minutes & How It Affects Your Life.
By Hazel Gale, Cognitive Hypnotherapist specialising in performance.
Time is a fascinating thing. It can quite easily go too fast and too slowly at once. Feeling rushed is horrible, but so is that sense of things dragging out. Time is an integral part of our understanding of, well, everything, yet it’s completely intangible. We don’t really know what it means so we try to put it into easily understandable units: seconds, hours, years. Simple. But even that doesn’t work because one minute of waiting for the bus can feel longer than half an hour with good friends.
What we perhaps don’t realise is just how this can affect our quality of life beyond those boring stretched moments. I’d like to explore why it is that some people feel as though they’re hurtling uncontrollably towards an imminent death, whereas others have the sense that every day presents an abundance of opportunity.
And more importantly, what it is that we can do to readdress the balance.
Time distortion
“Time distortion interrupts our linear, temporal, sequential world in a way that has profound implications about the nature of so-called reality”
Stephen Wolinsky, Trances People Live: Healing Approaches In Quantum Psychology
So time is subjective, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. This ability that we have to expand and contract our experience of time can be understood as a psychological skill. It’s one of the tools acquired by the unconscious mind during its development over the initial years of a person’s life.
Psychoanalyst Stephen Wolinsky calls these tools “trance phenomena”. They include the various ways in which we are capable of (unconsciously) distorting our experience of incoming sensory information. That is, warping our perception of the world so that we each encounter our own, personal version of it.
As we develop, our young minds are keen to make life the most enjoyable, safe and nurturing it can be. So it makes sense that we would attempt to lengthen pleasurable events and whizz through the less happy moments.
Of course, this isn’t actually achieved because in attempting to resist an undesirable event, the opposite is realised. Consequently, we experience boring, painful or sad moments to drag on relentlessly, and the good times to be over in a blink of an eye.
Resistance
Why does it get flipped? It’s all about emphasis. We resist the things we don’t want to experience, but to resist something we have to focus on it, and by doing so we allocate it more airtime in our awareness.
What’s interesting is that this resistance and the subjective nature of time appear to be correlative. The more we resist something, the more emphasis we have to place on it, and the bigger a chunk of subjective time is seems to take up.
In contrast, unresisted events fly by because we don’t tense up in this way. Happy moments are less sticky in our psyche (and soma) because the unconscious doesn’t suffer any pain and so it doesn’t sense any danger.
In a nutshell, to a protection-focused system like the unconscious mind, painful means important.
Thus, we feel no urgent need to hold onto a memorable copy of the everyday good moments. It’s only the threatening things we have to retain information about in order to avoid anything similar in the future.
Wolinsky suggests that this process of resistance is a physical as well as psychological occurrence; that we somatically resist the unwanted experience by tensing our muscles.
Subjective time: a sports metaphor
I’d like to use an athletic analogy to explore this further. Let’s consider the 100m sprint.
The fastest sprinters are those who manage to remain the most relaxed — as in, they only use the muscles that are needed in any particular moment.
A generally tense state would be counterintuitive for a runner seeing as all the muscles would be working at once. This would include those designed to slow down or stop.
When you watch a slow-motion replay of runners crossing the finishing line, the skin and muscles of the exceptional athletes’ faces often ripple in the wind. These are the sprinters who are in flow. They’re in the moment. They’re relaxed. And they’re almost certainly having a better time than those losing the race.
Consider a line up of athletes in the starting blocks. Arguably, their perception of what’s about to come could dramatically influence their experience and their performance. Do they perceive this race as an enjoyable opportunity to challenge themselves and test their skill? Or, are they more concerned with not looking slow or foolish or out of their depth?
They’ll all experience a state of physical and mental arousal at this point, clearly, but do they process that feeling as excitement (positive anticipation) or fear (negative anticipation)?
The human race
Now let’s think of the 100m sprint as a metaphor for a stretch in someone’s lifetime. Those who resist the experience of it— those who see life’s events as competitions which they stand to lose — move more slowly, enjoy things less, and potentially experience less success. It’s as if they’re running into a perpetual headwind.
Those who don’t resist — those who see an upcoming challenge as a chance to grow and develop, regardless of the “competition” — are able to relax and move more fluidly. In contrast to the oppositional force of feared failure, this (breezier) outlook can back them up and propel them forwards.
The wrong focus
Retrospectively, our understanding of everything we’ve already been through will be affected by this time distorting function of the mind.
The more importance we place on resisted moments of struggle, the more those moments will seem to expand until they threaten to dominate the entire timeline of our existence thus far.
The unresisted and pleasurable events, on the other hand, are allowed to contract and recede from our memory because we can let them go. Looking back, these can seem to have been fleeting; inconsequential.
We’ve probably all noticed this at some stage in our lives. It’s this phenomenon which allows a single bad, sad or embarrassing moment to completely overwhelm our memory of the day on which it occurred. Looking back, the entire day, along with all its nicer bits, gets overshadowed by the negative emotion attached to that single low point.
The bigger picture
Now, if it really was only about one day, this probably wouldn’t matter that much… but the chances are that we’re unknowingly doing this with our entire lifetime.
It’s a paradox. In attempting to avoid fear/pain/hurt/failure/loneliness in our lives, we end up maximising those things. By assigning importance to the hard times we’ve been through in an attempt to steer clear of them, we unintentionally colour our whole perception of life to be, by and large, a negative, scary or sad experience.
Furthermore, as we tend to anticipate getting more of what we’ve experienced in the past, this increasingly negative view of life gone by will only cause us to project further misery out into our perceived future.
Put simply, if left untended this well-meant error could leave us with a sense of impending doom which can only grow at an exponential rate.
Abundance in the now
We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realise.
Thich Nhat Hanh
With the aim of training oneself to be present, mindfulness practices teach that time is only a construct. The past and future are only ideas. When truly “in the now”, these ideas cease to have any meaning or gravity because the present moment is infinite.
To be in the now is to accept each moment as equal, and as a gift. Whether that moment brings pain, challenge or elation, it always offers information about how to enjoy or make the most of the next one. On that basis, we can welcome any occurrence with open arms and embrace it fully as a moment of growth.
And so we can readdress the balance. By embracing life’s challenges, we avoid making the potentially painful moments so sticky. And simultaneously, by experiencing them fully, we can attribute more focus to the good times. This means we can recolour our perception of life to be rosier, and thus experience more happiness. Lovely!
Running the race from a start position of OK
I believe that the joy of being present is reserved for those who allow themselves to feel that they are OK… all by themselves… and just as they are now. If you’re enough as you are, then your next challenge is merely an exciting opportunity to be even better. Not a threatening prerequisite for future OKness.
It all comes down to being in a “growth mindset”; to making your primary aim in every moment to learn and develop. It sounds simple, but this idea can be a complete game changer (for more about this, check out: How To Be The Type Of Person Everyone Wants To Know).
So perhaps it’s only those who believe they need to win the race in order to be successful, happy, worthy (or whatever) who risk a painful distortion of their passage through life, and consequently end up missing out on the fun of taking part.
And maybe Usain Bolt and all the other exceptional people of this world have a secret. Perhaps they are actually in the starting blocks at the beginning of their respective races, and not just focusing on the finish line.
And if so, by joining them in the present moment, maybe we could all live life in that effortless, abundant and face-rippling state of flow a little more often.
Hazel Gale is a former world champion kickboxer, therapist, author of The Mind Monster Solution, and creator of Betwixt: The Story of You — the interactive novel that helps you master your mind.
