The 2026 Playbook, Chapter 2: Manipulating Your Perception of Time
How to slow time down, speed it up, and stop waiting for Monday
Welcome back to The 2026 Playbook! I hope you are having a great start to your week! I’m really excited about this week’s topic, time, as it’s something I genuinely have not been able to stop thinking about. I took my time (lol) writing this one, and I still feel like I have a million more thoughts on it. This doesn’t even scratch the surface, but these ideas have already changed how I’ve been showing up over the last week and a half. Let’s get into it!
Time Keeps Going
Last week, I was on my way to my first clinic shift of the semester, downtown, at a clinic that was new to me.
I left my house already running through my usual thoughts that show up when I’m going somewhere new and doing something that matters to me:
What if there is a delay? What if I get lost? What if I’m late as a result?
I got down to the subway platform and watched the doors to my train close. I looked up at the screen, the next train wasn’t coming for another six minutes.
My nervous system responded immediately, like it had been waiting for proof that my worry was justified. I started fidgeting, shaking my leg, I kept checking the screen, I reached for my phone because holding it made me feel like I was doing something. And those six minutes, the same six minutes that exist for everyone, felt unbearably slow, just like a microwave minute.
The next evening, I was in a workout class, and the instructor said something that I didn’t expect to carry into the rest of my week. She said:
“you can speed up if you want, but don’t forget you can’t race against time.”
That sentence stuck with me, because it named something I think a lot of us do without noticing: we treat time like something we can fight, like if we tighten our grip hard enough, we can make it move faster in the moments we don’t want to be in, or slow down in the moments we’re scared to lose. Just like me on that subway platform one day earlier.
So for the rest of the week, I kept thinking about how time is fixed, but our experience of it isn’t, and that experience shapes our behaviour and the way we move through life.
Here are three patterns I noticed…
1) Wanting to speed time up in moments of discomfort
There are moments when we just want something to be over, fast.
Waiting for a train when you’re running late, sitting in uncertainty or an uncomfortable situation, studying something that feels like too much for the time you have, being mid-interval in a workout when your body is tired and your mind starts negotiating with you.
But time doesn’t respond to urgency.
Six minutes is six minutes.
When we can’t speed up the clock, we try to speed up ourselves. We check the time more, we scroll to distract, we mentally sprint, we fidget.
From a physiology standpoint, this makes sense. Stress and autonomic arousal can distort our perception of time, so the same span of time can genuinely feel longer or shorter depending on the state we’re in.
But the practical takeaway is what matters: we can spend a fixed amount of time waiting… or we can spend it waiting and suffering.
That subway platform was a good reminder that anxiety doesn’t create control, it creates tension. And tension doesn’t make time move, it only changes what it costs you to live through it.
2) Fear of time moving too quickly
There’s another side to this: the fear that time is moving too fast.
This is the feeling that the weeks disappear. That life is happening, but you can’t hold onto it. That you blink and a month or a season is over. I mean, can you believe we are already half way through January!? It’s the type of fear that shows up in quiet moments when you realize how quickly things become “before.”
What helped me here was thinking about memory.
When days are repetitive, they leave fewer distinct markers in the brain. In hindsight, routine can compress time because there are fewer “new” reference points to remember. The subjective sense of time speeding up is often tied to the way our minds encode experience; what we notice, what we remember, and how much texture a period of time actually contains.
Unfortunately, our attention is getting more fragmented. When life is busy, we spend less time actually inhabiting the moment we’re in. We’re half in the past replaying moments that have already happened, half in the future planning what we want to happen, and rarely fully here. And when you live like that, it makes sense that the weeks start to blur, because you’re living through the days, but you’re not truly registering them.
I think phones make this worse as they turn every in-between moment into a portal somewhere else. You’re eating but also responding to texts and emails, you’re walking but also consuming content, you’re waiting but watching someone’s stories.
It’s not that any of these things are inherently bad, it’s that they remove the texture from your life. You stop noticing the things around you, like the advertisement on the train, or the the way the light hits a building on your walk, and you get sucked into a time vortex.
That means the opposite of “time flying” isn’t necessarily doing less or escaping responsibility. Sometimes it’s simply returning to a life that you choose to notice. A small change in route, a new class, a conversation you’re fully present for, a meal eaten without multitasking, a colour walk without your phone.
3) Using time as a way to stay stuck
The third pattern is the one I’ve heard incredibly often when people discuss their health goals, but I haven’t thought about it in this way…
“I’ll start Monday.”
“I’ll start next month.”
“I’ll start when I have more time.”
“I’ll start when I feel motivated.”
But often, time is the container we place our avoidance into so it feels justified.
Waiting for Monday is rarely about Monday, it’s about what Monday represents: a clean slate, a fresh start, a version of you who magically feels more prepared than you do today.
The problem is that the days between now and Monday still exist, which means they still pass. And the longer you postpone, the more power the goal gains in your mind.
Another example: people start exercising and expect to look and feel different in two weeks. When change doesn’t show up quickly enough, they assume it isn’t working, so they stop. But really, the timeline was never two weeks.
Bodies change on timelines that are often inconvenient. So do habits, and so does confidence. So we can stop at two weeks when we don’t feel better, but ultimately, six months is going to pass anyway.
And that can be discouraging… or it can be reassuring. Because it means you don’t need to panic, you don’t need to sprint, you don’t need to change your whole life overnight. You just need to keep showing up long enough for the timeline to do what timelines do. You can’t race the timeline.
Time keeps going. Your choice is whether you let it pass while you build something, or while you stay the same.
So, how do you manipulate your perception of time?
If you want time to feel slower
Do one thing a day with zero multitasking. Eat without your phone, finish a task without checking your notifications.
Try a “colour walk” (my personal favourite!). Leave your phone at home, pick one colour (pink, red, green, etc.), and spend the walk noticing how many places it shows up.
Add one “novel” thing per week. Try a new walking route, new workout class, new coffee shop, a new recipe, so your days don’t blur together.
If you want time to feel faster
Use markers instead of minutes (2 songs, 1 podcast segment, 10 pages).
Choose an obsession. Time speeds up when you’re fully absorbed; the problem is we usually hand that to our phones. Pick something you actually want to be obsessed with: cooking, creating, training, learning, building something.
Mindset shifts to stop using time as an excuse
Interrogate the meaning you’ve assigned to various times like “Monday” or “next month.” Ask yourself why that time feels safer: why Monday, why a new month, why “after this week”? What are you actually waiting for?
Use micro “fresh starts”. Monday isn’t the only reset. Every moment is new time you haven’t had before, so it can count as a fresh start if you decide to treat it that way.
Some journal prompts
I’ve personally used these prompts in the last week to reflect on my relationship with time, I hope you find them as helpful as I did :)
Where do I feel “behind” right now? What am I afraid will happen if I don’t catch up?
When I rush, what am I trying to get: relief, control, approval, certainty? How does this show up in my body?
What “fixed minutes” am I fighting (waiting, commute, studying, workouts)? How would I like to show up/feel in these moments instead?
What story am I telling myself about time?
What am I postponing to Monday/next month? What feeling am I avoiding by waiting?
A final thought
Time isn’t something you win against, and it isn’t something you get to pause until you feel ready. It’s going to keep going whether you like it or not, on the good weeks and the bad weeks, whether you’re building momentum or waiting for a perfect start.
The only real choice is how you choose to move through the time you have.
Love,
Megan