When you hit the age of 30, time starts to feel like it’s absolutely flying by. How is it 5 p.m. already, and why does it feel like 2019 was last week? You’re not losing it. Your brain is doing what it does when the days start looking similar for too long.
One clue comes from a 2025 paper in Communications Biology. Researchers had 577 adults, ages 18 to 88, watch an eight-minute Alfred Hitchcock clip while in an fMRI scanner. They used a method that detects “neural states,” stable patterns of brain activity. Older adults showed fewer state changes, meaning their brains stayed in the same state longer during the same video. If your brain logs fewer distinct “events,” the same stretch of time can feel like it slid by faster.
This lines up with how psychologists think about memory and time. How fast something feels while it’s happening isn’t the same as how long it feels later. Routine weeks move quickly and then disappear in hindsight because they leave very little behind. Weeks with novelty tend to stretch out after the fact because the brain had more to hold onto.
Memory is the unglamorous engine here. The hippocampus helps turn lived moments into memories. When those moments aren’t distinct, they get folded together. Later, that stretch of time feels smaller than it really was.
There’s also a reason your teens and twenties feel weirdly enormous in retrospect. Autobiographical memory research calls it the “reminiscence bump,” a pattern where adults recall a disproportionate number of memories from roughly ages 10 to 30. That era is stacked with first-time experiences and identity-building, so it hogs more mental real estate.
Brain-wise, time doesn’t live in a single control room. A 2025 review in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews points to areas like the insula and supplementary motor area as central to subjective timing. Basically, your sense of time changes with what your body and focus are doing, not just what the clock says.
So how do you make adulthood feel less like a sped-up montage? You can’t negotiate with physics, but you can give your brain more “chapters.” Do something that creates a clear boundary, like learning a new skill, and do something that breaks autopilot, like taking an unfamiliar route on purpose. You’re giving future-you more to remember.
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