Psychology Today
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How To Stop Time
Author: Kaja Perina
What actually makes life longer and better?
The natural world gives us a template for starting over, seemingly from nothing. It’s called spring. As humans, we tend to believe that externals must align in order for us to begin again. We miss the fact that we’ve got the raw materials of experience, desire and skill, no matter how seemingly new the challenge.
In this sense, starting a new project or pivoting “should” get easier with age. It rarely feels that way, though. Some of this might have to do with how we experience time, the newness of everything ratcheting up in youth.
Time is not uniform, it’s measured in increments of novelty, in experiences that are encoded more richly than are day-to-day activities. Once we’re teens, we recognize the subjective acceleration of time. To seek out novel experiences at any age is to slow time by chiseling it into shapes ever more beautiful, and to mark it more deeply.
The brain depends on novelty, creativity, and engagement to maintain its own function over time. In “How to Think Your Way to Eternal Youth,” we examine the moves that can measurably alter how the brain ages.
Of course, not all beginnings are chosen. Opening oneself to love after loss or heartbreak is one such do-over. It is common to approach a new relationship with trepidation, as we explore in the cover story, and yet those who admit the possibility of pain and give themselves to the experience anyway are often the ones with fewer regrets, even if the relationship does not work out.
And beginning again in love does not necessarily mean finding someone new. In “Is It Ever Too Late for Couples Therapy?” we ask the questions we’ve heard most from readers about whether it is possible to move forward in a meaningful way, and with a therapist’s help, in the same relationship.
Not all renewal is visible. The tree in your front yard looks the same as it did in photos from last year, and it probably looks the same to the naked eye. But you know that every leaf, every cell, is reborn.
Credits: TCA, LLC.