Why can an hour-long meeting feel endless, while a week-long holiday disappears in a flash? Why do the moments we want to end seem to last forever, while those we want to hold on to disappear far too quickly? And when was the last time you did absolutely nothing?
We are living in an age of extreme time poverty. Busyness has become synonymous with success, empty time is perceived as wasted time, and the hours that we do find are swallowed by our screens. The result? Many of us feel desperately short of time, stuck in a hurried and distracted loop.
But what if we could make the bad times feel shorter and the good times longer?
We tend to think of time as a fixed and universal experience, sixty seconds is sixty seconds. Yet our experience of those seconds, minutes and hours are anything but. Time can in fact stretch, shrink, race and crawl according to what we are doing, thinking and importantly feeling. Once we understand why, we can begin to change our relationship with it and take time into our own hands.
In Free Time, Professor Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time, takes us inside the fascinating science of time perception to reveal how our brains construct our experience of time. Exploring how emotions, digital technology, work, holidays, ageing and culture shape our internal clocks. Ogden shows us how we can make difficult moments pass us by quicker, hold onto the good times for longer and carve out time that is truly free.
Free Time will transform the way you think about time, revealing how understanding its psychology can help you reclaim your most precious resource and live a richer, happier life, now and in the future.
