Running Out of Time

[desiderata]

I looked up the condition where a person feels they are chronically running out of time. I forgot the condition and fall into the category. On a daily basis with daily activities and a lifetime basis judging where I should or shouldn't be at in a point in my life. It's a cruel affliction because the time and energy taken thinking of time lost takes away from the present time. I suppose this could be categorized in a more generalized form of anxiety. And there are ways to combat this. Unfortunately, I don't take the time to look into.

 

[Daniel E.]

There are also cultural/social factors, e.g.

American Mania: When More is Not Enough

[Video] Past, present or future?

Past, present or future? Health Psych Monday, April 13, 2009 Anxiety often comes from the future, of not knowing what is to come. When that's the case, it's often helpful to bring ourselves back to the present. After all, we often have limited control over the future, we certainly can't change...

forum.psychlinks.ca

On the more psychological/individual side, there is mindfulness and novelty:

Cultivating a Healthy Relationship with Time

Cultivating a Healthy Relationship with Time By Pavel G. Somov, Ph.D. PsychCentral blog: 360 Degrees of Mindful Living November 22, 2009 Being Means Being in Time A sense of being involves a degree of separateness from the rest of the world. After all, the verb “to exist”...

forum.psychlinks.ca

Time always slows down for me when I do pushups

 

[Daniel E.]

Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory – The Time Paradox

www.thetimeparadox.com

An Overview of Time Perspective Types – The Time Paradox

www.thetimeparadox.com

BTW, regarding dopamine:

Dopamine, time perception, and future time perspective

Impairment in time perception, a critical component of decision-making, represents a risk factor for psychiatric conditions including substance abuse. A therapeutic that ameliorates this impairment could be advantageous in the treatment of impulsivity ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[Daniel E.]

Giving Time Can Give You Time
Association for Psychological Science
July 12, 2012

Many people these days feel a sense of “time famine”—never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can’t be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but a new study suggests that volunteering our limited time—giving it away— may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.

Across four different experiments, researchers found that people’s subjective sense of having time, called ‘time affluence,’ can be increased: compared with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of ‘free’ time, spending time on others increased participants’ feelings of time affluence.

Lead researcher and psychological scientist Cassie Mogilner of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania believes this is because giving away time boosts one’s sense of personal competence and efficiency, and this in turn stretches out time in our minds. Ultimately, giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.

This new research, conducted by Mogilner and co-authors Zoe Chance of the Yale School of Management and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

 

[Daniel E.]

Time Affluence - Stuff that Really Makes Us Happy | Coursera

Video created by Yale University for the course "The Science of Well-Being". What can we do to improve our happiness?

www.coursera.org

 

[Daniel E.]

Time Smart

There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is.

Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment.

How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?

Time Smart is your playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores. Author and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans will give you proven strategies for improving your "time affluence." The techniques Whillans provides will free up seconds, minutes, and hours that, over the long term, become weeks and months that you can reinvest in positive, healthy activities.

Time Smart doesn't stop at telling you what to do. It also shows you how to do it, helping you achieve the mindset shift that will make these activities part of your everyday regimen through assessments, checklists, and activities you can use right away. The strategies Whillans presents will help you make the shift to time-smart living and, in the process, build a happier, more fulfilling life.

"Time affluence involves small decisions that allow you to have more and better time, such as saying no more often and paying your way out of time-consuming, unrewarding tasks."

 

[Daniel E.]

A quote about time and uncertainty from the Zimbardo book that I like and just found:

Future-oriented therapy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"The key to relieving depression lies not in untangling the Gordian knot of the past but in accepting and planning for the uncertain future."

 

[Daniel E.]

From Zimbardo's time/book website:

The Time Paradox is not a single paradox but a series of paradoxes that shape our lives and our destinies. For example:

Paradox 1
Time is one of the most powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, and actions, yet we are usually totally unaware of the effect of time in our lives.

Paradox 2
Each specific attitude toward time—or time perspective—is associated with numerous benefits, yet in excess each is associated with even greater costs.

Paradox 3
Individual attitudes toward time are learned through personal experience, yet collectively attitudes toward time influence national destinies.

(At the risk of being extreme, any perspective about anything has downsides. That's why zen is still so popular.)

 

[Daniel E.]

. It's a cruel affliction because the time and energy taken thinking of time lost takes away from the present time.

That aspect reminds me of my OCD.

But I love solution-focused questions, like:

"When does your perfect future happen, even a little bit?" "How did you make that happen?"

"Tell me about a time when anxiety wasn’t a problem."

 

[desiderata]

There are moments in our lives but they are fleeting when the three aspects of time converge. The past is not filled with regret, the present is smooth, and the future looks bright. To capture the sensation would be amazing but not possible at this juncture. The reality is we are still bound by time and until we can perceive it relatively we will live within the three dimensions of it. It will take an evolvement of hundreds and thousands of years to achieve. The best we can do now is the changing of the mindset to start the way. I sound as if I know what I'm talking about and I do in my mind, taking time to write this post.
Taking time- what an interesting message!

 

[Daniel E.]

Why the French Don’t Show Excitement

Not only is ‘Je suis excité’ not the appropriate way to convey excitement in French, but there seems to be no real way to express it at all.

getpocket.com

“You Americans live in the faire [to do]. The avoir [to have]. In France, we live in the être [to be].”

 

[Daniel E.]

When things are not going well (like working at a boring job or being in prison), the "immensity of time" can be another form of time anxiety or chronophobia (as opposed to time famine or running out of time):

Coronaphobia and chronophobia – A psychiatric perspective

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Chronophobia--dread of passing time is a common experience for those in quarantine; a neurotic fear of time typically described in prison neurosis where duration and immensity of time is utterly terrifying to prisoner and passage of time throws him into a panic. At a later stage, people become phlegmatic automatons who live by the ‘clock’- wondering when the 14-day isolation is over, when curfew is over, and most importantly when this hardship is over.

 

[Daniel E.]

Time affluence - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Time confetti is a term coined by Brigid Schulte in her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time. Schulte uses this term as an analogy to describe how people today constantly switch between perceived obligations, managing time ineffectively due to both stress and never-ending to-do lists: a practice that results in the inability to perform any given task well. In other words, we are left with small, fragmented amounts of time due to unproductive multitasking. Schulte and others cite increasing use of digital technologies as the primary contributing factor.

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From an Amazon review of the book:

Now that I have had some time to absorb Overwhelmed I am starting to make some changes. I have made a pledge to spend some time outside every day rain or shine. Not only is the fresh air and change of perspective good for me, but it gets me away from technology and forces me to slow down. I am trying not to multitask - harder than it seems. I am working on a master to-do list where I write everything down so that it is out of the constant brain loop in my head and secure on paper where I can refer to it, thus freeing up my mind to actually think. I have been doing my #100happydays project for more than a year and it seems it was driving me to this point all along - to a place where mindfulness and practicing gratitude keeps me in the now. I am not only going to continue the project for as long as I can, but I am encouraging the kiddos to do it too...

I am dabbling in meditation and trying to write more. The fact that I am even thinking about ways to make life better is a big step in the right direction. I am hopeful that these small changes will spill over into my parenting and our family life in general and help our kids get where they need to be all on their own. Lastly, I am trying to put important stuff on the calendar first and do it like anything else on my list. I have decided that I need to go to yoga, both because of my achy old back, but also because it combines meditation and mindfulness and awareness of the now of my body in all the ways I need. So, the new me goes to yoga every Monday night and I love it. It makes me happy and relaxed and I hope to do it a lot more.

 

[Daniel E.]

In Praise of Slowness

Journalist Carl Honoré believes the Western world's emphasis on speed erodes health, productivity and quality of life. But there's a backlash brewing, as everyday people start putting the brakes on their all-too-modern lives. Honoré is best known for his advocacy of the Slow Movement. His book...

forum.psychlinks.ca

 

[Daniel E.]

Feel like you never have enough time? Try these 5 ways to cope with the anxiety

Similar to productivity shame–the feeling that you’ve never done enough–time anxiety is when you feel you never have enough time to meet your goals or that you’re not maximizing the time you do have.

www.fastcompany.com

An often overlooked aspect of time anxiety is how we think about the future. Many of us stress out over making the best choice possible. But there is no ‘perfect’ decision.

Psychologists have identified two types of decision-makers:

• Maximizers strive to make a choice that will give them the maximum benefit later on.'
  
  
• Satisficers make choices according to their set of current criteria and nothing more.

Trying to maximize your time today, tomorrow, and every day after will only lead to more time anxiety. Instead, look at your time well-spent activities and realistic schedule and decide what fits best now.

(If it helps, studies have found that maximizers actually often make worse choices and suffer stress and anxiety in the process.)

TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPING. WE’RE JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE.

We all want to spend our time in the best way possible. But stressing out over the seconds and minutes we have does us more harm than good.

As writer Maria Edgeworth wrote back in the 1800s:

“If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.”

Be realistic about your time, know what makes you feel accomplished and the rest will take care of itself.