Most of us will recognise the following experience: you go out for a meal with a group of friends, and not long after ordering (say, within five minutes) some of them already feel the waiter is taking far too long to bring the food; others, even after waiting a good ten minutes or more, still feel it has not been all that long and see no need to chase the staff [assuming their inner "tolerance threshold" is the same]. What psychological mechanism, exactly, governs this "patience"? And how do these differences in "patience" go on to shape a person's behaviour and mental health? And what does mindfulness have to do with this kind of "patience"? It all begins with the idea of Time Perception.
Why does each of us perceive time differently?
"Time perception" refers to a person's cognition and judgement of how long a stretch of time is and how quickly it passes, and that perception is subjective. Take a simple experiment as an example: you hold a stopwatch, close your eyes and count thirty seconds in your head, and the moment you believe the time is up you press the stopwatch to stop it. Without a doubt, you will find that you can almost never make the stopwatch read exactly "00:30:00", because a person's "subjective time" and "objective time" inevitably differ — much as we cannot rely on any part of the body alone to measure temperature accurately.
"Scalar Expectancy Theory" is currently the most concrete and comprehensive account in psychology of our capacity for "time perception". According to this theory, we possess a pacemaker that is not quite precise and runs at a variable tempo (peacemaker), together with an accumulator. The units the "pacemaker" continually produces (usually with the "second" as the basic unit) are relayed to the "accumulator", which records the length of time that has elapsed.
Our working memory then continually compares the time units gathered in the "accumulator" against the time held in our reference memory, so as to ensure our judgement of the "accumulator's" time is as close as possible to the target duration stored in reference memory. Applied to the example above: once the "accumulator" has stored enough time units to amount to thirty seconds, and that quantity of units matches the thirty-second length held in reference memory, we subjectively judge that thirty seconds have passed and so stop the count.
Two further key factors, however, affect this judgement of duration. First, the pace of the "pacemaker" — how fast or slow it runs — is readily swayed by a person's emotions in the moment and by external stimuli; anger and other negative emotions, for instance, speed up the time units the "pacemaker" releases. Second, a gate (switch/gate) is set in the channel connecting the "pacemaker" and the "accumulator", and whether this gate is open or shut depends on how much of our attentional resources we are investing in "time" at that moment. This is easy to grasp: when you are busy with something else, for instance, your attention goes to the task at hand, the gate closes, and some of the time units released by the "pacemaker" are lost and never reach the "accumulator", skewing the judgement of time. The diagram below sets out the functions and processes involved when a person makes a judgement about time.
The time perception that makes a day feel like a year
Following on from the above, a person's ability to judge time always shows some gap from "objective time". An excessive gap, however, may be an indicator of a mental health problem. One such phenomenon is Time Dilation — the sense that real time is passing extremely slowly, as though it has all but come to a standstill. People who experience "time dilation" often have feelings like this: "I have clearly waited ages already, so how come only a few minutes have actually gone by?" In terms of the theory above, this happens because their "pacemaker" runs very fast; the person's inner time passes more quickly, so that for them real time seems to drag by very slowly (with a curious parallel to the "relativity" Einstein proposed), making feelings of impatience more likely to surface.
Put another way, the person has overestimated (Time Overestimation) how long time has passed in the objective world. Researchers have noted in the past that people prone to "time dilation" and "overestimating the passage of time" tend to display behavioural problems, such as pathological gambling, heavy drinking, substance abuse and internet addiction. On another front, according to Temporal Motivation Theory, people prone to "time dilation" and "overestimating the passage of time" tend to become more impulsive (high impulsivity), which stands in an inverse relationship with motivated behaviour (such as persevering to finish a piece of work or a project). In other words, such people are more likely to show low motivation and to struggle to find the drive to get going, and one manifestation of this may well be "procrastination (Procrastination)". (Note: "may well be" is used because this is precisely the topic of the author's current master's thesis.)
How does mindfulness affect time perception?
"Mindfulness practice (mindfulness meditation)" refers to a form of training whose chief aim is to cultivate mindfulness; through a state of complete, observant awareness it teaches us to embrace the present, so that whatever the thoughts in our mind — joyful or sorrowful, positive or negative — we can meet them all with equanimity. So how exactly does mindfulness improve our mental health? As it turns out, many people who practise mindfulness regularly find that time seems to pass especially quickly (Time Acceleration). One reason is that, through mindfulness, more of our attention is directed towards all our own sensations and thoughts rather than towards "time"; according to "Scalar Expectancy Theory", the gate linking the "pacemaker" and the "accumulator" tends to close, so that our inner "time" passes more slowly than the real world, giving rise to a subjective sense that time is flying by (Time Acceleration/Time Underestimation). As a result, we become comparatively more patient, calmer and less impulsive, which in turn strengthens our psychological resilience.
To sum up, "time perception" is an important indicator of our mental health. The content above has set out recent research on the relationship between mindfulness and mental health. You may like to make use of the mindfulness exercises provided by TreeholeHK, and to persevere in "cultivating" this calm, inner disposition.
References
- Droit-Volet, S., Chaulet, M., Dutheil, F., & Dambrun, M. (2019). Mindfulness meditation, time judgment and time experience: Importance of the time scale considered (seconds or minutes). PloS one, 14(10).
- Mioni, G., Stablum, F., Prunetti, E., & Grondin, S. (2016). Time perception in anxious and depressed patients: A comparison between time reproduction and time production tasks. Journal of affective disorders, 196, 154-163.
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological bulletin, 133(1), 65.
- Wittmann, M., & Paulus, M. P. (2016). How the experience of time shapes decision-making. In Neuroeconomics (pp. 133-144). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
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