Mindfulness Meditation Slows Down the Perception of Time

Amy Taylor June 24, 2013

Wishing you could stretch the time? Feeling like you don’t have enough time to do your daily tasks? People nowadays often find themselves struggling with the day to day demands of life and meeting the expectations of a society that places high value on time. Given its emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness, mindfulness meditation has the ability to temporarily alter time perception, slowing it down just the way most people want to. This is the latest finding from the University of Kent.

The team, led by Dr Robin Kramer of Kent’s School of Psychology, hypothesised that mindfulness meditation can slow down the perception of time and produce the feeling that short periods of time lasted longer. The researchers suggest that this effect would most probably result from attentional changes that lead to either improved attentional resources or a shift to internally-oriented attention that both allowed increased attention to the processing of time.

To test their hypothesis, Dr Kramer and his colleagues conducted an experiment involving a bisection task in which two groups of participants listened to either an audio book or a meditation exercise designed to focus their attention on breathing. Participants’ responses were recorded prior and after the task. This allowed the researchers to measure where each participant subjectively splits a period of time in half.

The team found that the control group (those who listened to an audio book) did not change their responses before and after the task. On the other hand, the meditation group felt that the time periods were longer after the activity.

According to Dr Kramer, their study was among the first to demonstrate how mindfulness meditation can alter the perception of time. He emphasised the role of this ancient practice in helping people cope with the hectic world of the modern society.

The benefits of mindfulness meditation are becoming clearly understood. Previous studies have shown that it promotes cognitive flexibility, working memory capacity and sustained attention. It also reduces reactivity, anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as general psychological distress. Currently, meditation is used as a complementary therapy for patients suffering from cancer, chronic pain, binge eating, fibromyalgia and psoriasis.

The current study is important because it opens the possibility of using mindfulness-based therapies for psychological disorders associated with distorted perception of time, such as memory and emotional problems, and addiction, said Dr Dinkar Sharma, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kent.

Source of this article:

The effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception