Lisa Maynard-Atem, 47, can barely remember what she had for breakfast three days ago, let alone what happened last year.
Halfway into 2025, we’ve had World War Three scares, deadly weather events, a whirlwind Trump presidency and high-profile court cases.
For people like Lisa, these happened yesterday. Or was it last month? Maybe 2016?
‘Time feels like it’s on fast-forward,’ Lisa, a branding consultant living in Manchester, told Metro.
‘It still feels like it’s 2020 when we were in lockdown. One minute, it was January and my younger sister was getting married. Next, it was March, and Boris Johnson was telling us to stay home
‘One night, I went to bed and woke in 2025.’
Time flies when we’re having fun and drags when we’re bored, as the sayings go.
But lately, it’s flying even if we’re having no fun. Is time going faster?
What is time?
Time is a very confusing concept, but generally, we can think of it in a few different ways.
We live in a four-dimensional world, width, length, depth and time. Time as a dimension neither flows nor ticks; it just is, and can be observed as things in our universe change.
Then there’s the time that clocks measure in seconds, minutes and hours. This is clock time, or objective time.
Finally, there’s mind time, also called subjective time, the time we feel passing.
How do we experience time?
We know how our brains deal with senses, like touch and taste, but how we sense time is a mystery, says Devin Terhune, a reader in experimental psychology at King’s College London.
Certain parts of the brain have been identified as possible stopwatches, such as the basal ganglia or cerebellum, ‘but their precise role in timing has not been clarified,’ Terhune says.
‘Research suggests that our variations in our experience of time may be due to variations in perceptual processing, such as our experience of salient or novel events or changes in sensory inputs.
‘So, a complex scene might be perceived as lasting longer than one in which there are very few changes.’
Stefano Arlaud, a researcher on time perception and metacognition of time perception at Queen Mary University of London, tells Metro that we might have an internal clock made of a ‘pacemaker’ that emits pulses that signify the passing of time.
‘The more attentively we monitor time, the more pulses are registered, and the longer an event appears to last,’ he says.
‘When attention is directed elsewhere – toward a demanding task or a flood of sensory input – this gate narrows, pulses go uncounted and time seems to contract.’
This plays into how life seems to feel slower when you’re young and turbocharged as you get older, as it’s proportional to what we’ve already lived through. A year for a two-year-old is half their life, and is only one-70th for a 70-year-old.
‘Memory becomes the clock,’ says Arlaud, adding: ‘Events that lack novelty or variation feel short in memory because the brain has stored fewer temporal “markers”.’
Days are going to get shorter
Clock time is also getting shorter, kind of. Broadly speaking, Earth takes roughly 24 hours to spin around on its axis. Ocean tides, volcanic activity and earthquakes can affect the planet’s rotation speed.
For years, however, the Earth has been spinning faster, making days shorter.
Global timekeepers say that tomorrow, July 22 and August 5 will be between 1.30 and 1.51 milliseconds shorter than normal.
August 5 will be one of the shortest days on record, with the shortest being July 5, 2024, cut short by 1.66 milliseconds.
All this lost time means we’re going to have a ‘negative leap second’ in 2029 to keep timekeeping systems, like GPS systems, accurate.
Richard Holme, an emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Liverpool, says the Moon is partly behind this.
The Earth’s gravitational dance with the Moon causes our planet to bulge, Holme tells Metro.
‘It takes some time for the material to recover and go back. Try pulling the skin on your arm – or better, find an old person like me and do it to them. When you let go, the skin returns, but it takes a little time,’ he says.
‘In the time it takes to go down, the Earth has rotated, which means the bulge is not aligned with the direction of the Moon, but rotated out of line.
‘The out-of-line bulge is pulled by the Moon in the opposite direction to the rotation, so it tends to act against and reduce Earth’s rotation. This slows down the speed of rotation, and so increases the length of day.’
But tomorrow, the Moon will be far enough away enough that a day will be shorter instead.
So, is time going faster?
We probably won’t clock – pun intended – that we’ve lost milliseconds tomorrow. But losing mind time is taking a toll on us.
What Lisa is describing is called ‘digital hyperstimulation’, which is turning our brains into ‘sieves’.
Arlaud says: ‘The digital environment offers relentless novelty – news updates, messages, entertainment – but this novelty is often shallow and rapidly replaced.
‘Paradoxically, this leads to poor memory encoding: the constant churn of low-significance content prevents the deep processing needed to form durable memory.’
Think of those nights you spent in bed scrolling on TikTok for a few minutes, only to realise it’s been three hours.
We now feel ‘behind’ all the time, leaving us stressed and burnt out.
‘People are not just misperceiving time – they’re mismanaging it, reinforcing a feedback loop of overload and disconnection,’ Arlaud warns.
Lisa knows this feeling all too well. Making every day meaningful as someone self-employed has left her in an ‘odd time warp’.
‘Weeks bleed into months,’ Lisa says, ‘and, suddenly, two years have passed.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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