Adventure is a State of Mind
Have you heard the joke about the man who asked his doctor, “How can I live to be 100?” The doctor responded, “Give up everything you enjoy.” The man asked, “Will that really make me live longer?” “No,” the doctor responded, “but it will feel longer.”
Do you want to live longer?
I don’t have a magic pill. But if you want to expand time and feel like you have more life, travel can do exactly that.
What Percentage of Your Life?
Do you remember as a kid waiting for your birthday to finally arrive? Or Christmas? Or the last day of school?
As a child, time sometimes seemed to just draaaaaag on forever, didn’t it?
How about now? I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m just adjusting to my new age when the next birthday rolls around.
And my poor plants don’t get watered as often as they should because I could swear I watered them just a couple of days ago when it’s probably been closer to two weeks.
It’s not our imagination. The sense of time passing really does speed up as we get older. One reason for this is that we’ve had more of it, so each minute of time becomes a smaller percentage of our life. For example, if you’re four years old and waiting for your next birthday, one year is 25 percent of the life you’ve lived so far. That’s a lot of life between birthdays.
But, if you’re 60 years old, a year is less than 2 percent of your life. Blink your eyes and you might miss it.
We can’t do much about the proportional experience of time, but luckily, it’s not the only thing impacting our perception of how fast time is speeding by us.
Our Brain and New Experiences
There’s another reason why time seems to speed up as we get older. Our brains are hard wired to notice and retain new experiences and sensory input from those experiences. When we’re young, almost everything is new, so we’re constantly noticing and subsequently remembering our childhood experiences.
In his book Learning to Love Midlife, Chip Conley explains as we get older, fewer and fewer of our experiences are novel. For example, if you’re a baseball fan, you probably remember a lot about your first visit to a professional team’s stadium. It’s unlikely, however, that you remember much about your 17th visit.
Our brain’s primary job is to make sure we survive, and it is an efficient tool. New experiences can mean danger, so our brain pays attention. But once we’ve been through an experience enough that it becomes routine, our brain doesn’t see the need to expend much energy on noticing and remembering what is happening. At that point, autopilot often kicks in. You know, the thing that happens when you drive home from work without paying any attention because you’re thinking about other things or talking to someone on the phone.
And as we remember or “encode” fewer and fewer memories from our routine experiences, our brain perceives this as time moving faster. I think of it kind of like using the forward button when listening to music on your phone. If you skipped forward every time a song started in which you knew all the words, you could fly through hours of music in just a few minutes, especially if you were listening to your favorite bands.
Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.
Robin Sharma
Travel and the Experience of Time
If routine speeds up the perception of time and novelty slows it down, then there is no better way to feel like you are slowing down time and living longer than by traveling, which is almost by definition the experience of new things.
The author, Tim Ferriss, calls this “time dilation” and describes in this video how a hiking trip in the mountains of New Mexico expanded his experience of time:
When we seek out a travel adventure, whether it is an hour away or across an ocean, we are stepping out of our routine and experiencing new things… and potentially expanding our experience of time.
Obviously, depending on the type of trip, the level of novelty will be different. For example, if you travel to a new state and visit a national park and a museum, you’re going to be seeing many new things. But you could also choose to only eat at chain restaurants and stay at chain hotels, in which case you would be experiencing little or no novelty during those parts of your travels.
Conversely, you could travel to another country where everything is so new to you that you can’t read the signs and don’t even recognize some of the foods. In this case, almost everything you do and experience will involve a great deal of novelty. Even the sounds and smells as you walk down the street may be so unfamiliar that your brain pays a great deal of attention to them, and you are left with indelible memories for the rest of your life.
Do We Always Need to Go Somewhere New?
Newness makes us mindful and it’s usually fun. It’s a similar experience to falling in love!
Traveling to someplace we’ve never been is obviously full of new experiences. But even if we’re returning to someplace we’ve been before, we can add newness and, consequently, a sense of wonder to our travel adventures.
Just because you’re returning to a location, it doesn’t mean you’ve seen everything there is to see. I’ve been to Paris five times (so far!), but every visit has included a new museum, a new place to stay, and most importantly… new restaurants!
Traveling with different people will also change your experiences. This occurs, in part, because of their interest in different things, which will likely result in you doing different things. But we also have an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of others when we travel with them, so even repeated experiences may feel new when experienced with different travel companions.
The Power of Mindfulness
Mindfulness and paying close attention to an experience is actually what helps us encode it and remember it, and consequently, feel like we’re slowing down time. This occurs most easily with new experiences, but all of us have the power to do the same with any experience, even if it’s something we’ve done hundreds of times.
Mindfulness is a superpower!
Mindfulness is paying attention to a moment so that you are fully present and aware of what is going on around you. It involves paying attention to all of your senses. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel?
Let’s say you’re eating your favorite meal at your favorite restaurant. It isn’t new, but if you mindfully eat the meal, paying attention not only to the taste, but to the feel of the food in your mouth, the sight and smell before you take a bite, the sounds around you in the restaurant (or the sound of your chewing), you are likely to slow down time and remember this moment much more vividly than you would otherwise.
In being mindful, you trick your brain into feeling as though it is having a new experience. In fact, meditators sometimes refer to mindfulness as “beginner’s mind.”
I probably don’t need to point this out, but if you want to be mindful and truly experience the moment, put down your phone. If you’re looking at your phone, you’re obviously not being mindful of the moment.
And “put down the phone” in your mind, as well – if you’re thinking about how to share the experience on social media to get the most likes, you’re probably not fully experiencing the moment either. Instead, if you want to slow down time, focus on your senses and truly immerse yourself in the moment. Savor every drop of life you can get out of it, and you’ll feel like you’re slowing down time and extending the life you’re living.
Living Longer With Travel
I’ve previously written about how travel is healthy for your brain. A healthier brain may increase your actual life span, but even if it doesn’t, travel can slow down time so that you have the experience of living longer. Don’t we all want more life in our lives?
How can you use travel and “time dilation” to live longer? What new experiences can you have? Alternatively, how can you add the experience of newness to your routine, including living your life more mindfully?
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