How to Hack Time

Description

"Time marches on", right? Independent of our desires, it just "flies by". But what if you could shift how fast or slowly time moves? We've all experienced how time can slow down in the woods, or speed up when we're trying to get a lot done. Because there is a subjective reality to time's passage, we can learn to control time's apparent speed. This video gives three techniques for altering our perception of time, with the possibility of developing this skill so completely that we effectively extend our lifespans (in the realms of how much we can get done, how much we can learn during our life, how long a day/week/month/year feels in our experience).

This is only one of many 'realities' that rewilding asks us to examine and explore. These unexamined assumptions about what is real in life can cause us a lot of woe if they remain unexamined. If we begin to look at them outside of their cultural context and explore how they can be 'hacked' or modified or even discarded, we can make powerful life shifts that have far-ranging effects on our relationships, our health, and our experience of everyday living.

Visit http://rewildu.com/classes/ for unique educational opportunities in rewilding, wilderness skills, mindfulness, martial arts, primal fitness, homesteading, and more.

Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,time's passage,hacking time,shifting time perception,Time (Dimension)

Video Transcription

one of the funnest things about the rewilding process is that we get to examine a lot of things that we consider to be reality hard-and-fast reality and discover that they may not be as hard and fast as we once believed time is one of those things that we have all been conditioned to think of in a very linear in objective way we all know that there are twenty-four hours in the day each of those hours is made up of 60 minutes in each of those 60 minutes made up of 60 seconds and that is objective time but the truth is that reality isn't all that objective take wine for instance whether you're a foodie or not hopefully this will speak to you a wines flavor can be described in terms of aroma compounds and these are measurable chemical compounds that would give you those those hints of cherry and oak strawberry but that you'll find written up on the backs of wines the objective reality is is the chemical compounds that make up the specific sense or aromas which we interpret as taste but the subjective reality is that no matter how nice that description of the wine is you may not like its flavor time is the same way there's objective time made up of all those units but the subjective reality of time one we actually experience the one that actually matters is much much different if you're woods person you've probably felt this yourself even in regular civilized life we can experience this but especially in the woods we often get to experience the lengthening of time for me I can remember nights when it was it was too hot

mosquitoes were intense and I was watching the moon across the sky and it took like a week for morning to come in school for instance most of us have experienced how long it can take for for that clock to reach the next hour conversely most of us have experienced those times when when time flies and the day just disappears the week just disappears as we get older most of us begin to describe the years flying by and it seems the time inevitably speeds up and gets faster and faster and faster so it becomes clear that subjectively our perception of time can be that time goes very fast or that time goes very slow and notice that in our culture we're always trying to expand lifetimes right we make a big deal that we increase the average lifespan from 60 years to 70 years to 80 years and we think of that as a very good thing that we're living longer but we actually can increase you know that's just an objective measurement the reality is it's objectively most of those people are feeling their life just go by the days the weeks the months the years start flying by so adding 10 years on to your life maybe isn't the great reward

that it looks like on the outside however if we can master the art of slowing down our perception of time so that time dilates and expands we can live a much shorter life and still live subjectively much more life than if we had lived twice as long if we combine a lengthier life length your objective life there's a link for your subjective right that's where we can start to feel that we live multiple lifetimes in just this one one life that we have here so today I'm going to share three techniques for slowing down your perception of time how it works is rather simple actually time speeds up in direct relation to our lack of mindfulness or how much we're running on autopilot when we're distracted and we're trying to get stuff done and we're rushing time flies by we hardly notice life passing that's as if we're just handing out our life to all these tasks that need to be done and if we get in the habit of that we start doing it more and more and more past our teen years our early adult years middle age and then we get to that point we're like wow I'm looking kind of old you know gray and getting lines and where did my life go

on the flipside life slows down in direct relationship to how much mindfulness we have in our life or how much we can avoid going into that default autopilot state so here are those three techniques the first one was first and perhaps best ly summarized by my wife Rebecca when she said one day never rush that which must be done quickly

never rush that which must be done quickly and recently a student of mine who's in his 80s he said a maxim that I've lived by my whole life is never hurry they're both saying the same thing and what they're noticing is that when we start to rush everything falls apart our time speeds up for us subjectively and so even though we have a list of 10 things and rushing to get it done we get to the end of the day we find that we've only crossed six of them off of the list and by the way we've usually added a couple more on to the list rushing is a state of distraction and so it's not just catching ourself in that time when we're feeling oh oh gotta get stuff done but it's starting to notice our tendency to always be in a state of hurry or rush that we have this list of things to do and we've got to get it done the fact is that usually we don't have to be as rushed as we think we are sometimes there's a time when we need to be someplace but the odd thing is that when we stop trying to run and get there we're actually able to focus fully on the task at hand and are able to arrive at the destination at the allotted time much more efficiently rushing is scattered energy and it takes us out of the present moment whether we're driving or trying to organize some things for a meeting or get-together all of our stuff for that backpacking trip do we really have to be going as fast as we think for me in my life a place that this comes into play a lot is with children and when I'm trying to have a discussion with Rebecca and we're talking about something important and then one of our young daughters purposefully or inadvertently interrupts the conversation we're trying to have and so it might be that our oldest daughter really wants to tell us something

it might be that our younger daughter Falls she's just learning to walk and bumps her head a little bit and starts crying it's very easy to feel like look we're trying to have a conversation and with the two kids we just don't we don't get that much time to actually talk and can that wait and then we feel interrupted and we have that sense of rushing us but we found over and over again that if we just stop and listen to what our daughter has to tell us that conversation we're having it's not going to go anywhere and in fact our conversation becomes richer and deeper because it has these lovely pauses and it has this space in it when often as we know when we're talking to her spouse and we're trying to hash through something that came start to get a feeling of of Russian as' where we're just kind of pushing through and trying to figure everything out and stop thinking creatively really paying attention to each other number two is to take breaks that you don't have time for and this one is really tough for a lot of people because it asks us to stop when we're rushing and we feel ourselves in that fast forward momentum feeling it asks us to stop and do something else and so this can be as radical as you're trying to get everything together for that for that backpacking trip and you know your friends are waiting and you're just getting frustrated and that's when you stop and you go for a five-minute walk and you just enjoy the clouds in the sky and the birds singing and when you come back to that task guess what you're relaxed you're efficient you're probably going to get packed up faster than you would have if you had continued to push through and likely it's not you'll discover when you meet your friends that they're running a little bit late as well if time is super pressed and for whatever reason the world is going to explode if you don't get there in ten minutes your break doesn't have to be a five-minute walk it can be as simple as stopping setting everything down I'm taking one deep long breath and when you take that one deep long breath you'll gather back up your energies you'll relax and I can promise you you will be more efficient and faster if you're not rushing goes back to Rebecca's saying never rush that which must be done quickly you see it at work when in an emergency situation where the doctor or the EMT comes upon that emergency they're relaxed and they move slowly as opposed to somebody who comes and they're panicking and they're rushed and fumbling around who would you want there when it was your life on the line number three is the most difficult of all and it's a technique that leads us it's really more than a technique it's asking us to open up a whole new door in our life number three is to get off of pie autopilot running on autopilot is the default for most of us in our culture and it doesn't do us any favors at all when we're on autopilot we're inefficient we make mistakes we don't notice or savor or enjoy the experiences of a lot of life that are occurring around us in every moment being on autopilot is something that we learn and we cultivate in our lives through watching a lot of media that allows our brain to just kind of turn into tapioca pudding and just be on spectator mode all the time time not truly participating autopilot comes from our lifestyles that are always stressing these demands these goals pushing on to the next thing instead of stopping to appreciate or notice what we currently have just being on autopilot it's just bad news in addition to all that it's it's stressful it's releasing high levels of cortisol into our into our system and it's unhealthy it just is not good for our bodies it's not good for our minds it's not good for our emotions as we get older we get so habitual eyes into that auto pilot that we've been unknowingly cultivating that light starts to slip by unnoticed and time speeds up and speeds up and speeds up if we can stop that autopilot in its tracks even discard it our whole life shifts time slows down our relationships change and become much stronger and healthier our physical health shifts because now we're starting to release a lot of positive good chemicals into our body instead of overloading on stress hormones our life just takes on a new deliciousness how do we turn off the autopilot means we have to start cultivating mindfulness being present moment and that means starting to become aware of our senses what we're actually experiencing in the world around us not just experiencing in our mental imagery so

here's one thing you can do to start to cultivate more mindfulness okay here it is all I'm going to ask you to do is to taste something I mean really taste it and so it might be one bite of your meal tonight might be a square of chocolate it might be a couple leaves of wood sorrel and whatever this food is that you choose take it and hold it in your hand and really become sense orally sensuously aware of it look at it see what it looks like feel its texture smell it when you put it onto your lips and into your mouth taste it feel its texture really experience it this is a very simple basic exercise but it Tunes us in to our senses and it asks us to take an everyday moment and you really become aware of it you don't just have to do that with things that you taste you can do that when you're looking into a loved one's eyes and you can try to see the color of their eyes like you've never seen it before you can do it when you hear a bird singing let chickadee up there in the tree really hear that sound life is full of these moments and if you start to see some of them out of your daily experience begin with one or two a day and then add them on this will start to enrich your life like nothing else we can spend our time trying to get people to like us trying to earn more money that's not going to do half as much to enrich our lives as hearing that birdsong as tasting the food that you're eating of seeing the eyes of the person that you're looking at that you're looking into sees a few moments out of life and see what happens as always I would love to hear your experiences with any of this and thank you for watching I hope this gives you some new tools for shifting your perception of time and starting to cultivate more present moment mindfulness and awareness in your life

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