How to make your weekend last longer

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

When we spend part of the weekend on useful and practical activities like cleaning, making menus and to-do lists for the next week, the rest days seem even shorter. However, if you spend the whole weekend without getting up from the couch, the effect will be the same. Neuroscientist David Eagleman explained what to do about it.

To make weekends seem longer, we need new experiences, according to David Eagleman. When we are faced with something new, it seems to us that more time has passed, because the brain retains more memories.

This is why time starts to fly by much faster as we get older. After all, in childhood everything is new for us, we constantly put new information in our memory.

When we recall the past summer in childhood, it seems that it was very long, because we remember how we tried, learned and saw a lot of new things. Well, when we get older, we are already familiar and familiar.

David Eagleman

The same rule works for shorter time frames. So if you want to make the most of every hour of the weekend, you'll have to plan ahead.

For example, a short trip will definitely make the weekend longer than the weekend at home. Well, weekends at home seem longer if you go for a walk or visit an unfamiliar part of the city, rather than staying at home with a book. At the same time, the weekend spent reading something new will seem longer than when you re-read your favorite book.

But there is one caveat: this rule only works when we look back. Yes, on Monday the weekend full of new impressions will seem longer. But while you are living them, it will seem to you that time flies too fast.

We do not pay attention to the time while we are busy with something interesting, and when we have nothing to distract ourselves from, we feel that it drags on slowly.

To better understand how this works, Eagleman suggests imagining a long flight: when we are in the air, it seems to us that we are flying for an eternity, and not for several hours. But after we landed and left the airport, it already seems to us that everything went quickly. This is due to the fact that one flight is no different from the others - it simply does not linger in our memory.

So there’s no one-size-fits-all advice to make the weekend seem longer. You will have to choose one thing: to make the weekend feel longer at the time of residence, or to seem long in memories.