Controlling Time with your Mind

• February 21, 2019
• Aleksey Weyman

One of the most common excuses for why we don’t achieve our goals is that we don't have enough time..

We’ve all heard that excuse before and very likely have used it ourselves. Time just seems to “slip away from us” and what was once a determination to achieve a goal is now a feeling of exhausted resource. Well here’s something that might come across as a shocker- everyone has the same amount of.. time!

You, me, your family, your friends, your teachers, your pets, we all have the same exact amount of the time at our disposal every single day. The same 24 hours are experienced by both you and I and yet, some people are extremely successful and have time to not only make their dream careers flourish, but time for leisure and enjoyment of all their riches. Meanwhile, other people feel like they just.. don't have enough time. How is this possible?

Time and our Mind(s)

If you say you don’t have enough time to achieve your goals, and we know there’s no way to get any more time, then it’s pretty obvious that you’re never going to achieve your goals- plain and simple. Twenty four hours in a day is all you’ve got. You can't criticize all you've got, that’s all there is to work with! So, since there’s no way to get any more time, the answer becomes obvious- we must change the way we use our time. We must become masters of time (dramatic music starts playing..).

Better use of our time means better chances of reaching our goals, but in order to use our time better, we must first understand how our mind perceives time.

Here’s something interesting, rooted in scientific understanding of the human mind- there are two types of mind. We all have both types and can only exist in one of them at a time, they’re asynchronous.

• The Experiential mind
• The Memory mind

When we’re engaged in doing something new for the first time, or perhaps in a new environment, we’re engaging our experiential mind. This mind is responsible for learning new patterns, becoming active in new situations in order to learn and make sense of all the new stuff around us. Starting a new job, moving to a new city, buying a home for the first time, going to a new school, etc. This is when the experiential mind steps in.

The opposite of the experiential mind is the memory mind. This mind becomes active when you get into a habit, or a pattern, where the activities are done consistently every single day and they become predictable. In this state, your mind no longer needs to learn new things, it simply goes into autopilot.

Now here’s an interesting fact- the memory mind feels good. It feels safe and its feels secure, because there are no surprises. There’s nothing demanding our minds strain. The experiential mind on the other hand, requires large amounts of energy and focus, but is also responsible for the greatest amount of personal growth.

Have you ever felt like time was moving slower or faster than normal? As if the day seemingly went by in the blink of an eye, or on the contrary, your day at the office has just dragged on and on? This experience of time depends greatly on whether we're in the experiential or memory mind. When I was a kid, my parents would always tell me that time goes faster as you get older- and that used to scare me so bad. I didn’t want time to go fast, I wanted it to go slow so I could enjoy all the cool stuff that life had to offer.

Here’s the secret- time starts to go faster as we get older because we stop learning new things. We use our experiential mind less and less, and instead default to the memory, autopilot mind.

This was a profound discovery for me in more recent years, and it has revolutionized my entire story. Simply put- you can control how you experience time, but it does require practical understanding of how the experiential and memory mind operate. As well as what we can do to train and apply these two minds to pursuing our goals. In my “How to Control Time with your Mind” audio tape, I’ve shared several specific strategies and immediate steps you can take to master your time and achieve your goals.

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Tagged in : SelfTime