Feel Like Your Life's Moving Too Fast? Here's 1 Way To Slow Down Time.

Pursuing novelty can make the passing years feel like less of a blur.

As you’ve gotten older, you may have noticed the years seem to fly by faster and faster. And it’s not just you: Our perception of time does change considerably as we age.

Alicea Ardito, a northern Virginia therapist who works with older adults, said one of the most common themes she hears in her sessions is that her clients feel their life has gone by too quickly. “A phrase commonly used to describe this feeling is that life has passed by ‘in the blink of an eye,’” she told HuffPost.

It’s important to first understand why years feel like they’re speeding by for many of us. One reason is that, as we get older, calendar units like a year become a smaller and smaller proportion of our overall life, said Ruth Ogden, a psychology professor at Liverpool John Moores University in England who studies time.

“When you are 8, for example, one year is an eighth of your whole life, whereas when you are 80, it’s just an 80th,” she told HuffPost. “This contributes to the sensation of time passing more quickly.”

Another reason has to do with how our memories influence our experience of time.