Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made... See more

As well as potentially speeding up puberty, screentime also seems to speed up ageing. A recent study of 7212 adults tracked various biomarkers of body age, such as muscle mass and telomere length, and found that those who spent more time staring at screens had aged faster, even when controlling for physical inactivity.

Be deliberate not just in your experiences, but also your actions. Make a habit of resisting habit, choose a life of choices.

Thank you for your writing, it's amongst the most memorable/useful on the site for me. This one especially so, as I've been thinking about this topic for years now. After all, I was one of the hesitant youth, prodded and pulled to download snapchat and the rest, only to become utterly trapped by them like everyone else. You're right to describe... See more

Be deliberate not just in your experiences, but also your actions. Make a habit of resisting habit, choose a life of choices. Continually question why you’re doing things, and stop when you don’t have a good answer. Instead of instinctively checking your phone every five minutes, only pull it out when you have a clear idea what you want to see,... See more

This creates problems of its own. Continually dividing your attention between two worlds means you can never fully settle in either, creating constant anxiety and stress. And when attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. Thus, by constantly interrupting... See more

Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also... See more

This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorising information when it’s presented in narrative form.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made... See more