We sometimes feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything we want to do, let alone find time to relax. Work and social obligations, as well as our basic needs for sleep, food, and exercise, can quickly add up and make us feel like time is always passing and we're always trying to catch up. Even though time is limited, it doesn't always have to feel that way. According to new research, our mood can change how we see and feel time, which can make us happier and more generous.
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| how to make time stand still |
There may have been times in your life when you felt like time stopped. Maybe it was when you saw the Grand Canyon for the first time or when you knew you were falling in love. When this happens, people often feel awe, which is a feeling caused by a sense of vastness (in size or importance) and the need to change the way they see the world to fit this new perception. In a paper that will be published soon, researchers Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker looked at whether the emotion of awe, compared to happiness and neutral states, might make people feel less rushed and, as a result, more willing to volunteer their time, choose experiences over material things, and be happier with their lives.
Three experiments were done by the researchers to test these hypotheses. In the first experiment, people started by unscrambling sentences like "not available enough time much" so that everyone would start at the same time-pressured baseline. Next, the participants were given either a commercial that made them feel awe or one that made them feel happy. The commercial that made people feel amazed showed waterfalls and whales on a city street, while the commercial that made people feel happy showed a parade with rainbow confetti and people having fun. The last thing the participants did was fill out a survey. The survey included a measure of how they thought about time, with questions like "Time is endless" and "I have a lot of time to get things done." As expected, the people who were in a state of awe felt like time was bigger than those who were made to feel happy.
What's the point of having a broad sense of time? In the next two experiments, the researchers tried to answer this question. In the second experiment, people wrote about a time they felt awe (in the awe condition) or happiness (in the happiness condition) (in the happiness condition). The way people thought about time was measured by how impatient they were, and then their willingness to give time or money was measured. Awe made people less impatient and more willing to give their time to help others, but not more likely to give money (which is less relevant to time). A statistical test of mediation showed that people were more willing to give their time when they were in awe because they felt like they had more time.
In the last experiment, people read either a story that made them feel awe or one that didn't make them feel anything. After that, they filled out questionnaires about how they thought about time, how happy they were with their lives, and whether they would rather buy experiences or things (e.g., Broadway tickets or a watch). Again, awe led to a broader view of time, which made people feel happier with their lives and more interested in experiences rather than things.
These results suggest that doing things that make us feel amazed is one way to feel like we have all the time in the world, even if we don't. It's easy to get caught up in the routines of daily life and miss out on amazing opportunities, some of which might be right in front of us. For one thing, the fact that we are here can be enough to make us feel awe (see this previous post). The researchers say that awe may not always be helpful. Sometimes it's good to feel like time is running out so we can get to work when we need to. But most of the time, I think we could all use a little more fear.
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