“Time flies!”
“I lost track of time.”
“I don’t know where time went.”
These are common phrases we use on a regular basis. Time is relative, and how we experience it depends on our connection to what we’re doing with it. Yet, some interesting answers — or maybe even questions — arise when we explore what we really mean when we use these phrases.
What are we actually doing with time? How are we spending our days? Many may answer with factual things like “I went to work,” “I did my laundry,” “I studied,” or “I went out with friends.” But when we dig deeper and ask ourselves what really happened — meaning, how did we actually experience those random and seemingly mundane tasks and routine activities — many of us may blank out or even feel confused. What does asking ourselves these questions even mean?
You see, these questions are guiding us to reflect on our internal experience instead of just our external activities. You may have gone to work all day on a Monday, but how was that for you? Was it stressful? Was it fulfilling? Was it exciting? And however it may be, why and how did those emotions come up — physically or mentally?
So many of us go through our days like this, and sometimes those days stretch into years — until one day we’re left wondering what we did with all that time.
This disconnection from time, and how it affects our connection with ourselves, is deeply normalized in our society today — especially with the rise of hustle culture, which normalizes and even glamorizes being overworked and burnt out, naturally dismissing our traumas along the way.
We are naturally drawn to ignore our pain and our own disconnection from within, and this hurrying world is perfectly designed to disconnect us even further from our opportunities for healing and thriving. We might one day wake up feeling aches in our bodies, depression, or deep isolation — and feel stuck, unable to understand or trace where those feelings or sensations came from.
One prevention and healing tool is to start slowing down now. Trauma healing, when we think about it, is simply the act of being present with ourselves as we experience life as it is — whether we are experiencing something positive, unpleasant, or difficult. When we slow down, we allow ourselves to return to kindness, something essential to any healing journey.
Because trauma is about disconnection, the counteraction is rooted in connection — such as repairing our relationship with time. This can look like being intentional with how we spend time and being mindful of our internal and emotional experiences as we do certain activities.
Notice how you manage your schedule. Do you give as much importance to rest and recovery as you do to productivity? Take note of how your body feels while doing tasks. Are your palms sweaty or your neck stiff? How about when you’re fully rested or simply sitting still — does your heartbeat feel calm, or does it make you anxious or guilty? When you do something that excites you, are you aware of how that feels in your body — how that excitement shows on your face?
These are small things we can begin incorporating into our daily lives. So next time, even when we say something so familiar as “Oh, time just flew!” — we can give ourselves the honor of remembering how time didn’t just pass us by. We experienced it. We were present — with ourselves, with others, and with what we were doing. And in that presence, we embodied our natural emotions as the clock continued to tick.
