90 Mildly Interesting Before-And-After Photos That Show Just How Much Things Can Change

Comparing things and looking at ‘before and after’ photos might be fun, interesting, and satisfy your inner scientist, but it can also be deeply bittersweet and even uncomfortable. The fact is, you might become strongly aware of the rapid passage of time, and everything that entails: changing relationships, your own mortality, beloved locations and buildings being changed, missing out on the things you used to love, etc.

Time spares no one, and what matters is the relationship you have with it. And while you can’t stop the passage of time, you can, actually, slow it down or speed it up. At least from a subjective perspective. The secret lies in what you do with your daily routine, what you focus on, what you feel, and how much you embrace novelty. At least, according to recent psychological research.

According to Ian Taylor, at Loughborough University, the author of ‘Time Hacks: The psychology of time and how to spend it,’ rethinking your relationship with time can help you feel more fulfilled, less pressured, and less bored.

He explained to ‘New Scientist’ that, from his point of view, time is a subjective perception that acts as a framework linking people’s memories of the past with their hopes and ideas for the future. This, from his perspective, is what makes people’s lives coherent.

“Our sense of time is not simply a function of the brain, it’s a complicated interaction between our mind, body and our feelings. Psychologically speaking, this internal clock speeds up or slows down depending on what else we are using our brain’s resources for and how much attention we give it,” Taylor told New Scientist.

“We know that our emotions and motivation have a strong impact upon how we perceive time. We find in the lab that, if we make people angry or sad, their perception of time slows down. If you make them happy, it speeds up. There is a reason people say, ‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’ However, emotions cannot just be grouped as positive or negative. You also need to consider their intensity, known as level of arousal.”

Higher intensity emotions tend to make time feel slower.

So, for instance, you take two positive emotional states like feeling excited and feeling calm.

Their level of intensity is different, and you’d feel as though time slowed down in the former case, but not the latter.

This shift in perception can act as a survival mechanism in life-threatening instances to allow you to think clearly.

With all of this in mind, you can, in fact, try to slow or speed time up for yourself.

“You give people a picture of something desirable, like a tasty-looking cake, time feels like it passed quicker than if they’re looking at something non-desirable,” Taylor explained that the experiences that we want to avoid make time seem subjectively slower.

Meanwhile, if you want to speed time up, you need to strive for something that you want, and stay occupied with things that you enjoy, value, or desire.