The Secret to Making Your Weekend Longer
If all you can think about Monday morning is how quickly your weekend has flown by, you might want to consider broadening your horizons a bit in the future. It turns out that the key to having a fulfilling weekend that doesn’t feel too short is to seek “novelty.”
According to David Eagleman, a Stanford University professor and author of The Brain: A Story of You , finding new environments, new activities, and new experiences is the best way to “stretch the time,” so to speak. It all comes down to what your brain perceives as new. When you spend time with something unfamiliar, your brain focuses more on collecting data related to that activity, thereby creating a deeper memory of the experience . When you reflect on this memory, it seems like you had more time.
The converse is also true. If you do the same routine every weekend, you won’t remember much about your Monday morning weekend. It will seem like they flew by unnoticed because you were not giving your brain new data to collect and turn on. Eagleman notes that a typical weekend is like a really long flight without an accident; it seems endless as long as you are actually in the air, but as soon as you land, you practically forget about it all. For the same reason, time seems to go faster with age, Eagleman explains :
“When you’re a child, everything is new and you put off new memories of it. So when you look back at the end of childhood summer, it seems like it took a long time because you remember this and this, this new thing, learning it, experiencing it. But when you get older, you already kind of saw all the patterns. “
Luckily, looking for new items every weekend isn’t as hard as it sounds – you don’t need to go skydiving or anything. You just need to make a few plans that go beyond your regular routine.
You can:
- Go on vacation for the weekend
- Take a hike off the beaten path
- Try a new restaurant or bar
- Explore an area you haven’t spent much time in
- Take a long bike ride along the beach
- Browse the bookstore or antique store you’ve always wondered about
- Go to a flea market or farmers market across town.
- Watch a play instead of a movie.
The new setting can also be just as effective. I took my Kindle and Nintendo Switch to the park last weekend just to get a change of scenery. I was still doing exactly what I was going to do at home, but it was fresh and really made my weekend seem longer in the end.
However, getting new impressions does not slow down time in the present. Anyway, doing new stuff makes time to feel like it is happening faster while you do it. But that’s the price you have to pay if you want to start your week feeling like you’ve made the most of your free time. So, do you want your weekend to flow slowly while you do the same old routine, or do you want to look back at your completed weekend marveling at all the new things you’ve done in such a seemingly short amount of time? There is no right answer, but the choice is yours.