Authors: Claudia Hammond
However, the concept of flow presents us with a paradox. When you are experiencing flow, time does seem just to disappear. Hours can pass and you don’t notice them, so if time going too fast is your main issue then you might not want to spend your days experiencing flow. On the other hand there is evidence to suggest that flow increases well-being, so perhaps once again our perception of the speed of time is less of a problem than we think.
Holidays are occasions where we often make a conscious effort to try to live in the moment. We have worked for months to afford a break from the routines of home and office, and we want to make the most of it. But how often have you found yourself wandering around somewhere on holiday imagining what a great place it would be to visit on holiday and how you might spend your days? Then you remember that you already are on holiday and should be enjoying it right now. On a break in Spain I decided to investigate how long I could truly appreciate the here and now – putting thoughts of the past and concerns about the future to one side. The answer is: not very long, even though I deliberately chose to immerse myself in a moment of profound serenity and beauty.
Here is my experience: I am staying in a lovely bed-and-breakfast outside a village in the hills of Southern Andalucía. It is a simple, though stylishly restored old farmhouse, with a small infinity pool that possesses one of the most spectacular vistas in Spain. In one direction I look up to the little
pueblo blanco
clambering up and over the escarpment. Behind the white-washed houses is a craggy sierra silhouetted in shades of purple against the aquamarine of the sky. I look out on a dry, deep green valley of olive trees and vines, behind which is a range of rolling hills, studded with white wind turbines, turning in the soft breezes like Quixote’s windmills. Beyond the hills is the Mediterranean with the oblong dots of impossibly slow-moving tankers and then the Rock of Gibraltar standing sentinel over the narrow straits. Far in the distance is the shimmering haze of the mountains of northern Morocco – with their promise of a whole other continent.
Yes, I am treading water in this little pool in a Spanish garden while staring out over Africa! If I look down, this stunning view is reflected on the surface of the water, and if look to the side there are well-watered lawns, olive trees, lime trees and psychotropic orange datura flowers, buzzing with insects and dancing with birds.
This should be the perfect place to luxuriate in the sensory overload of now. Why would I want to look at or think about anything else other than this moment in all its gorgeous fullness? It isn’t as if I have any particular worries or concerns at this moment. Life is as good as it can be. All I have to do is to make the most of it.
So, leaving the swimming pool, I lie back on a sun bed
and try to take it in, to appreciate it fully, to avoid any distractions or lapses into memory or speculation. And yet after a few minutes I am reaching for a book. I choose a guidebook of Spain, so at least I am not being transported too far away, as I might be by a novel, perhaps. I find myself reading about this very place – the descriptions of the guidebook writer helping to validate my immediate experience. But why do I need someone
else
to tell me what I am feeling right now? What can his descriptions add to my own senses? And yet, somehow, it helps to confirm me in my happiness that I am here, now. Then, without being able to stop myself, I start looking at all the other lovely places there are nearby. That lake, this gorge, this village, that hotel – and before I know it I am planning where to go later. Already this moment on the sun bed is turning into the past, is being ecstatically memorialised, is becoming a gushing anecdote for home, accompanied by photos – ‘We stayed in this lovely place. It was amazing!’ – and I am projecting myself into future plans. I am thinking of lunch and whether we should walk up to the village afterwards. Then there’s dinner. Someone’s told us the food at this place is very good. Or we could eat at the hotel up the road with the famous restaurant. There is a pleasant anticipation in this, but all sense of the now, with all its possibilities, is lost.
When the philosopher Alain de Botton talks about travel, he says that however rich and enjoyable the experience is, it is somehow ruined by the fact that we bring ourselves along for the ride. I would argue that it is not just ourselves that we bring along, but our past and our
future too. And however much we are enjoying the now, we can’t stop thinking about what we have left and where we are going next.
Even if you can find an activity that provides you with flow, there might not be the time or opportunity to do it very often, so an alternative is to practice mindfulness. Earlier I discussed using it to fill the time on a broken-down train. It is a form of mental training where you learn to stop your mind hijacking your attention and sending you into the past and future when you don’t want it to. Instead you learn to focus your attention. The advantage of mindfulness is that it is a method of bringing your mind into the present wherever you are. It makes time pass more slowly, but also more pleasantly. Although mindfulness has been practised for centuries as part of Eastern spiritual traditions, recently there’s been a growing interest from professionals within the fields of clinical psychology and neuroscience. It has been found to be particularly useful for controlling the wandering mind when people are feeling depressed or anxious. In trials of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy Mark Williams, the Oxford clinical psychologist who is a leading figure in this field, found that an eight-week course consisting of a two-hour session each week halved the recurrence rate in people who had previously experienced more than three episodes of depression.
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Encouragingly, he found it particularly effective in the people whose depression was proving hard to treat.
However, it is a skill that can be used by anyone. The idea is that you learn the ability to focus your mind
whenever you choose to. You will want to select your moment carefully. If you’re taking a gondola trip through Venice, the last thing you want to do is focus on your breathing and how your body is feeling. But at other moments it can make you feel much calmer and stop thoughts from the past and future from crashing in on what you are doing. Trying it for just 20 or 30 seconds a few times a day can make a difference and crucially there’s a growing evidence-base for the practice. As well as the documented improvements in people with depression, measurable changes can be seen in the insula in the brain, which senses the state of the body and your emotional state. Differences are also observable when it comes to the parts of the brain controlling attention.
Having read the impressive research, I decided it was time to take a lesson myself. My teacher was lecturer and therapist Patrizia Collard, and since I feared my commitment might waver if I had to invest extra time in practising, her task was to train me to do it on my morning walk to the station. I walk up the same, rather dull street of boxy houses where the only thing to occupy my mind is the bafflingly high prices they sell for. According to Patrizia this slightly dreary road is the perfect place for mindfulness. First she told me to ground myself, to stand still and feel my connection with the ground. I had the choice between seeing myself as an oak tree, a mountain or a sumo wrestler. Or you can think of anything else that is broad, strong and stable. I became aware that my feet were connected to the ground. Then, breathing slowly and deeply, I noticed how I began to feel calmer. We focused on the in breaths
and the out breaths and then started walking. She suggested breathing in with the first step and out with the third, but this meant walking slowly, which would make me late. So it’s best to experiment until you find your own speed and work out how footsteps correspond to the breaths.
Once the breathing was co-ordinating neatly with my footsteps, I was to take in the environment, paying attention to the objects around me before selecting something pleasant to look at. I chose a tree, and noticed the surprising number of different shades of green and yellow there were amongst its leaves. Meanwhile the breathing rhythm is supposed to continue, but that takes some practise. Then you ask yourself how your body is feeling right now. Are there aches and pains? Are your shoulders hunched? Yes. Can you relax them? Maybe. Are you frowning? Probably. Smile to relax the face. ‘A smile is like champagne in the body,’ she told me. Now go to work, she said, and you’ll arrive thinking, ‘I’m ready for this day.’
I have to confess that I don’t remember to do it every day, but when I do, it does make a difference. The idea is to arrive at work feeling calm and focused, instead of making the journey on auto-pilot, while troubling your mind with all the things you need to do that day.
PROBLEM 8: PREDICTING HOW YOU
’
LL FEEL IN THE FUTURE
When it comes to imagining the future, copious research on the Impact Bias has illustrated how poor we are at predicting our emotions. Luckily the reasons for this are clear, which means there are ways of overcoming it. If an
event is happening next year, imagine instead that it is happening next week and ask yourself how you would feel about it then. We have a tendency to focus only on the most extreme features of an event, so if for example you are trying to imagine what life would be like for you if you changed job, remember to consider not only the job itself but all the other features that will affect how happy you feel in that job. Will you have more or less control over your own time? Once the excitement has worn off, which elements of the job will bring you satisfaction? If it involves a pay rise, is there something you will do with that money that will make a difference to your well-being? Who will your colleagues be? How does the atmosphere there compare to that in your current job? And then remember that your life outside work will still affect you. How much of that will have changed too? Will the journey to work be easier or harder? Will you still be living in the same place?
Surprisingly you might not be the best person to assess how much you’ll enjoy this new job. If you really want to know how you will feel about a future event, Dan Gilbert, a psychologist who has done a great deal of the research in this area, recommends abandoning your imagination altogether. Simply ask someone who already does that job how they find it. What are the best and worst parts of it for them? He concedes that people rarely like this advice. Why believe the view of one person who might be nothing like you? But his research does show that, a year later, even the assessment of a stranger proves to be more accurate than our own predictions.
It is also governments that need to take note of our difficulties in imagining how we might feel in the future. To persuade us to make adequate pension provision, we could be encouraged to imagine in detail how we would manage life on a small pension not in 30 years’ time, but next week. Such an approach would reduce the effect of the tendency to believe that in the future we will have somehow have more money and that we need not worry. This could succeed in persuading – or scaring – more of us into saving more for our old age, thereby reducing the impact on the public purse and the social costs of large numbers of elderly people living in poverty.
Policymakers are inevitably concerned about the public reaction to their proposals, but the psychology of time perception suggests that, should they choose to, they could be bolder. The public response to a proposal will be strongest when it is first announced. Cognitive processes will cause people to focus on the main features and the initial impact a policy will have on them. Research on the Impact Bias tells us that in the future people are likely to feel less strongly. When the ban on smoking in public places was first announced, many smokers were unhappy about it, and used public forums to denounce the policy. But after it was introduced not only did it reduce hospital admissions for heart attacks, as had been hoped, but many smokers found they didn’t mind as much as they expected to. In Ireland, for example, the support for the ban among smokers went from only a third up to almost two-thirds a year after the ban. Politicians and policymakers can learn from the psychology of time that media storms and public
outrage can quickly blow over. If they hold their nerve and trust to sound evidence-based decision making, they can be ambitious.
IN CONCLUSION
‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’
Soren Kierkegaard
‘Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.’
Tennessee Williams
‘I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.’
Albert Einstein
‘The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.’
Marcel Proust
A great philosopher, a great playwright, a great physicist and a great novelist, each fascinated by the peculiar nature of the experience of time. There is no doubt that time can appear to warp; that it passes painfully slowly when we feel afraid or rejected, or that it seems to speed up when we are enjoying ourselves or as we get older. The reason for this warping is that our minds actively construct our subjective experience of time through a combination of processes involving memory, attention and emotion. Usually these
factors create a smooth, ordered impression of time passing. But only one factor need change for time to appear to skew. If we focus intensely on our present situation or on time itself, whether through boredom or fear, the hours appear to stretch. With the repetition of routine and the creation of fewer new memories, the years appear to flash by. In both the present and the future, it is memory that is fundamental to our experience of time. We forget much of past, we telescope events, we misdate them and we have the impression that – as we get older – time is somehow accelerating. We become accustomed to a certain number of memories fitting a certain time-frame, and when life provides something different our sense of time is knocked off-kilter. This warping of time is amplified by the Holiday Paradox – the fact that we simultaneously hold in mind prospective and retrospective estimations of time passing. When these correspond, time seems to flow normally, but when the equilibrium is disturbed and these two perceptions fail to tally, time feels confusing.