As someone who grew up with elders telling him time speeds up as you get older, I spent a year or so researching with anxiety what I could do to mitigate this feeling.

The first thing to do is refuse to indulge this idea that one day being an elder just happens: as they say, if you declare it’s a bad day in the morning, you’re conditioning yourself to look for confirmations that the day is indeed going to be bad, while potentially overlooking the good.

Time, objectively, goes at the same speed your entire life— for most people, sans astronauts or regular mountain climbers. It’s your perception of it that changes, thanks to your memory. The theory is memory is a survival mechanism: it really only commits things to memory that it deems a potential threat. If your day is routine, you are safe, there is no need for your mind to automatically record it.

So instead you need to manually record it. At the end of the day, journal either physically or mentally what you did today.

I personally use Daylio (which records data points) and BeReal (forces you to take a pic at a random time of day of yourself and whatever is in front of you), and every now and again I get to look back and say “wow, it really has been an entire month, eh?”

The other thing to do to combat it is make new memories/avoid routine, but sadly many of us are not in a position to afford this one.

For me it helps I am really into movies; I can’t really afford to travel, but movies are new experiences to me in and of themselves, and are a hacky way for me to make new memories in an otherwise routine life.