The Experience Of Time

The week between Christmas and New Year feels strange. Time seems to crawl and sprint simultaneously.
This phenomenon is real enough that researchers have studied it.

It was the time between Christmas and New Year and I stumbled once again upon a meme, and this article is the consequence.

The weirdness is psychological. A 2024 study in PLOS One found that 76 percent of UK participants felt Christmas came around more quickly each year, while 70 percent of Iraqi participants said the same about Ramadan. The literature proves that this feeling crosses many cultures.

Your brain doesn't actually measure time. It pieces together your sense of time from how many distinct memories you form and how many events catch your attention. Novelty, routine, what you pay attention to, all of it shapes whether time drags or flies.

During the holiday week, your normal work routine vanishes. The cues that usually tell you it's Tuesday or Thursday disappear. You might do laundry on a Wednesday. You might sleep in on a Monday. Days start blending together. You're not doing much that stands out as memorable.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has shown that novelty stretches time. When your brain processes unfamiliar experiences, it records richer memories with more detail.
Time feels slower while it's happening and longer when you look back. Routine squashes everything down.
Your brain stores familiar experiences with barely any detail because it already knows what to expect.

The holiday period creates a weird paradox. Before Christmas, you're busy.
There's anticipation, preparations, gatherings, gifts. Plenty of novelty. But the week after is mostly downtime without much structure.
You're off work but you're not really on vacation either. You're just existing in this formless stretch where nothing signals what day it is.

Memory Density Matters

Psychologist Marc Wittmann at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health links accelerated time perception to reduced memory encoding. Adults experiencing routine days create fewer memory flags than children encountering constant firsts. During the holiday week, many people exist in a strange in-between state, neither working nor doing something novel. The result is thin memory formation.

Time perception operates on two levels. Prospective time is how long something feels while it's happening. Retrospective time is how long it seems when you look back. These can diverge dramatically.

An engaging conversation might feel like it passes quickly, but when recalled later it might feel substantial because you encoded rich details. An hour of passive scrolling might not feel particularly fast in the moment, but it leaves almost no memory trace. Looking back, it's as if that hour barely existed.

During the holiday week, many people experience both shortened prospective time and thin retrospective memories. The combination makes the whole period feel surreal.

Keep doing new stuff and times slows down I guess ;)

Attention

Attention mediates time perception directly. When you focus intensely, more neural pulses register and time feels fuller. When you're distracted or passive, fewer pulses register and time compresses. The phrase "time flies when you're having fun" captures one aspect, but time also compresses when you're bored and not paying attention at all.

Or when you are Kermit the frog: Life is fun when you are having flies.

The holiday week often involves both. You might be engaged in pleasant activities, making time feel fast. But you're also likely scrolling more, watching more television and doing less that requires active mental processing. This creates low density memories. Looking back, the week vanished.

A 2023 comparison of young adults and retirees found that older groups reported the year rushing by nearly twice as often. The difference correlated with daily routine predictability rather than health or cognitive decline. People who maintained varied activities and continued learning new skills reported more normal time perception.

Temporal Cues

External markers help track time. You know it's Wednesday because you have a particular meeting. You know it's Friday because the work week rhythm shifts. The holiday week removes these markers.

Psychologists note that vividness serves as a proxy for recency.
Events that feel vivid seem more recent than they are. The holiday period, with its repeated patterns year after year, triggers strong associative memories.
Last Christmas feels closer than something that happened a few months ago, even though objectively it's been a full year.

Still, feeling and knowing are two different things, just like being right and being proven right are two very different matters. But that is a topic for another day.