Your summer vacation may have started recently or you actually don’t start it until August , but once this month starts to end, you’re sure to have those feelings that you wish would last a little longer since you have to come back. to routine. However, you can make it look like they last longer yourself. Learn the mental trick to make vacations seem longer.
The mental trick to make the holidays seem longer
The mental trick to making vacations seem longer than they are is not something that was just made up, as it has been revealed by a team of US researchers . who has discovered why long-awaited events, such as holidays, can lead to a distorted perception of time , influencing the way people judge their duration.
Probably it has happened to all of you, when the summer holidays approach, have the feeling that they are over even before they have started . This perception can have a ripple effect, changing the way we plan our summer : it could, for example, not make us plan extra activities and, at the same time, make us more likely to indulge in an expensive dinner because we want to take advantage, in the best case, the little time we think we have. Where does this trend come from? And how can it be avoided?
The answer to these questions comes from a team of researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus, USA , who have evaluated the reasons behind this perception in three different studies , examining what influences the view of time in the case of particularly anticipated events.
“First, we explored the effect of this attitude on the occasion of Thanksgiving,” explained Professor Selin Malkoc , co-author of Time Will Fly During Future Fun (But Drag Until Then) published in the Journal of Consumers Psychology . “We chose Thanksgiving because almost everyone in America celebrates it, but not everyone is looking forward to it. Some people love annual family gatherings, while others – whether from the stress of the kitchen, the boredom of cleaning, or the anxiety of dealing with family drama – dread it. In another study we asked participants to imagine taking a weekend trip that they hoped would be fun or terrible and finally we told participants that they would watch two five-minute videos, one fun and one boring, one after the other « .
What emerged from the three investigations suggested to the researchers that when one anxiously awaits an event , it seems shorter and shorter, almost as if the desire for something mentally shortens its duration . “These two judgments, the fact that the event simultaneously appears further away and is supposed to last less, can almost eliminate the perception of duration in the mind’s eye ,” Malkoc added.
” While it may seem trivial and obvious, we often rely on our objective feelings (not objective measures of time) when deciding how long a period of time is going to last and how best to use it ,” say researchers who have found a way to Overcome this distorted perception: The trick is to focus on the actual duration of the event.
“ When we told study participants that they would watch two videos, the second being more boring or fun than the first, most directly referred to how long the fun video would last and not the perceived distance from its beginning and end. People were much less likely to assume that fun was shorter and boring was farther away . ‘
Therefore, the advice is to think in hours and days, and then remember how many days the long-awaited event will last , such as holidays. ” With experience you will surely get more and hopefully this will allow us to make the most of the time available .”
