Eternity in a Moment – How to Dilate Your Perception of Time to Find Calm in a Hectic World

It was a revelation to me, discovering that meditation simply meant “intentionally directing attention, often with the aim of achieving an altered state of mind.”

In other words: there are so many forms of meditation that it would be inaccurate to describe it simply as “emptying the mind” or “being more mindful.” 

What this means is that I’ve been practicing my own forms of meditation for decades. 

You will encounter people who gate-keep meditation. Telling you you’re doing it wrong unless you’re doing it their way. 

That meditation is about breathe work. Or about stripping away your mental conditioning. Or about detaching from thoughts.

These comments aren’t wrong, per se. But they miss the point: there are many different types of meditation but they all involve some form of active concentration.

To clear the mind you essentially choose what NOT to focus on.

To strip away mental conditioning – you direct your attention away from those conditioned thoughts and beliefs.

There’s a huge difference between Acem meditation, transcendental meditation, mindfulness, religious meditation… everything from the methods, to the goal, to the experience vary. The common ground? They all involve intentionally directing your focus. Whether that means focussing ON a mantra or your body or your breath or your thoughts or choosing NOT to focus on your conditioning, your thoughts, your physical presence…

Which means that everything those commenters said can be true while “directing focus” remains the essential goal of meditation.

Bodybuilding, powerlifting, calisthenics, kettlebell training are all very different. But they are all expressions of strength training.

Which ultimately brings me to my point: that, in a way, we all meditate all the timejust not by that name. If you actively clear your mind or actively decide to ruminate on a subject – you are meditating.

And an example of this from my own life is what I sometimes call “Bubble Time.”

Engaging “Bubble Time” is something I’ve been doing for a long time, which is why it doesn’t have a cooler name. But it essentially boils down to the choice to take a moment and stretch it out to feel as long as possible.

To actively manipulate my own perception of time and thus to achieve a sense of “time dilation.” Not in the “quick reflexes” sense – but rather as a way to find peace in an increasingly fast-paced world.

Turns out, I’ve been meditating for decades.

How to Alter Your Perception of Time

But how is it possible to alter your perception of time?

Well, our experience of time is very much related to our attention and focus. And by using the same type of intentional focus that we use during meditation, we can therefore manipulate how we experience time.

We all know this to be true, intuitively. We know that a “watched pot never boils” and we know that “time flies when you’re having fun.”

When you’re distracted and having a great time, time seems to flash by in the blink of an eye. And when you’re holding your son’s nosebleed at 3am waiting for 15 minutes to pass, it seems like it takes forever. For some reason this example is front of mind…

There are lots of reasons we experience this. For one, when we are bored we are more likely to check the time and that gives us more points of reference when trying to assess the passage of time. Our only way of measuring time once it has passed is to refer to our own memories. If we’re distracted and having fun, it’s much harder to gauge that time and therefore it seems compressed.

Novel experiences can also contribute to this, which is why a “packed day” feels longer in retrospect. Events that are assigned less importance are less likely to be stored as distinct memories, which means that days that follow the same routine and blueprint result in less information being stored.

In this sense, time perception is more a trick of encoding and memory than anything else. And the interesting conclusion that follows from this is that if you try to fill your life with more novel experiences, you will functionally have more life to recall.

Although let’s also remove the rose-tinted glasses for a moment. Because it’s equally true that a stressful day packed with unpleasant events will also be remembered as being long.

And that’s the problem – because this describes most days for many of us. “Filling our lives” by filling out our memories is not just about quantity – it’s also about quality. And when you have had weeks of important meetings, boilers breaking, kids getting sick, car MOTs, financial woes, and whatever else… it can feel like you’ve packed 10 years into a few weeks.

It’s exhausting and it fries the nervous system. That’s when you need a break.

So, how can we achieve the opposite? How can we stretch time out as long as possible so we can take a moment to breathe – to live in the moment between stressful events so that we can experience some semblance of calm and peace?

Maybe to get a moment to be creative, to enjoy a beautiful view, or to actually plan and get into the headspace where you become proactive rather than reactive.

To get a little Bubble Time.

How to Activate Bubble Time

One of my favourite comic stories of all time is a bit of a hidden gem called Iron Man: Hypervelocity. In this story, Tony Stark is on the brink of death and so he uploads his personality to the Iron Man armour becoming Tony Stark 2.0.

Tony Stark 2.0 is not Tony Stark. Apart from anything else, he now has the ability to literally reprogram his own brain and change his personality and cognitive functions as needed. Late in the story he realises that he can effectively “overclock” himself in order to experience time faster – to double the amount of thoughts he has per second and thereby strategise and react at twice the speed of a regular human.

Then he doubles it again, and again.

There are spoilers ahead if you want to read the story. But at the end of the book, he sacrifices himself to save the world and is moments from being engulfed in an explosion. In a bid to outrun the detonation, he ramps up his brain over and over. Each perceived second becomes two seconds, four seconds, eight seconds.

Does he escape the explosion? We don’t find out. This is the cliffhanger that we end on and we must make up our own mind about how the story ends.

But I feel that it implies something much more interesting. I don’t think this was intended by the text but I think a much more interesting question we could ask is: does it matter? Because in that moment, Tony Stark 2.0 has achieved immortality. By endlessly dilating time, he can ensure that he never experiences the next second. In my head canon he never experiences the explosion.

This is something I intend to explore in an upcoming issue of MovementPunk.

And it also begs the question: could we do something similar? With our standard-issue wetware?

Extend time to the point that we experience an internal Hyperbolic Time Chamber? (Dragon Ball reference for you non-nerds).

Well, maybe not to that extent. But there are similar mechanisms that we can manipulate.

For that, we turn to “pacemaker accumulation theory.” This theory suggests that an internal “pulse generator” gives us an additional measure of the passage of time. And this is modulated by arousal and dopamine – meaning it is heavily influenced by excitement and novelty, too.

This is more akin to checking your internal clock in order to sense the passage of time. And a watched internal clock… never boils?

Interestingly, this also suggests that while waiting on hold might seemingly take forever in the moment, it will actually only take up a very small part of your autobiographical memory. To put it another way: the longer something seems to take right now, the quicker it will often be forgotten in retrospect.

This is named in the literature, by the way, as “prospective” timing versus “retrospective” timing. How long something seems to take in the moment versus how long it appears to have taken in retrospect.

Which is the “true” amount of time experienced?

As always, I believe that we need both types of experience. And instead of dreading those long empty moments, we should instead make the most of them. These moments give us the opportunity to actively choose to make moments move slowly.

To just exist for a moment.

I had been intuitively doing this for years. I remember before a job I didn’t want to go to, I would wait for ten minutes if I arrived early and try to stretch those ten minutes as long as possible.

Likewise, I realised that I could just take five minutes to completely, mentally relax. While washing the dishes I could choose to see it as an oasis of calm on a busy day. Or while getting the bus or the train.

Today, I use it another way. When I lie in bed next to my wife and go to sleep I feel her presence, I imagine the kids in the room next door, I feel how comfortable I am and I bask in the knowledge that there are at least 6 hours of unfilled time stretching ahead of me. With no responsibilities. Free to fill with thinking and imagination. Where the next thing I know will be unconsciousness.

Eternity in a moment.

So, what are the tricks you can use to engage this mental state?

The first easy trick, I find, is simply to watch the time. As they say, a watched pot never boils. And simply watching a clock tick is a surprisingly meditative process that calms the mind and seemingly stretches the perception of time.

Again: a watched pot never boils.

But maybe that’s actually a good thing.

Again, to use the correct terminology this strategy is leveraging the “attentional gate model” – which is, in turn, closely related to the pacemaker-accumulator theory. As Zakay and Block noted – the more attention you allocate to time itself, the more “pulses” will be counted, and so time appears to dilate.

See? It’s meditation!

You can also try setting a timer or a stop watch, if you are allowing yourself a specific set amount of time. Even just one or two minutes of “bubble time” can be very rejuvenating.

You can also use external cues as timers, in this way. For example you might have bubble time for as long as it takes the kettle to boil.

I also like to use mantras. I tell myself:

“For this set duration of time, I have nothing I need to do. Nowhere I need to be. No responsibilities. No stress. Those things exist outside this bubble of time.”

Other times, you will find that the set and setting take care of themselves. On a long car journey for example. Or when you are falling asleep, as I mentioned before. At this point, it is more about reminding yourself to fully appreciate that moment of solitude. To fully experience that freedom from “outside time.”

The same thing can happen if it happens to be raining outside and you have nothing to do for an evening. Maybe you plan to be productive later but you could give yourself until you’ve finished your tea to watch the rain.

And remember to breathe and relax. Breathe deeply and relax the body to calm the nervous system. This calm state will only further the feeling of time dilation while ensuring that your body gets everything it can from it. At the same time, the breath itself can now serve as a kind of pacemaker.

Again, this is looking an awful lot like mindfulness meditation but with the explicit objective of slowing time.

Paying attention to other external cues, like the temperature and the air can also have a similar effect. Filling the moment with more information. And research, in fact, supports the idea that mindfulness meditation can cause subjective time dilation (Kramer, Weger, and Sharma 2013). Research by Marc Wittmann and Sylvie Droit-Volet even suggests that those who meditate regularly see lasting changes in their perception of time.

And another technique we can borrow from mindfulness is to create an imaginary space – similar to a happy space. Our own hyperbolic time chamber.

I like to imagine myself standing on an endless stretch of shallow water, extending infinitely in every direction.

For eternity.

For a moment.

Oh, and reading fiction. Reading fiction is good, too.