How’s life for you? I bet you’re busy.
No… really. If life was a roulette wheel, I suspect it’d have 36 slots marked “busy” and one marked “totally nothing going on over here”. I think putting my money on you being busy is a fairly safe bet.
I was thinking about my own back-log over the weekend, and the fact that I haven’t felt ahead of the game for perhaps the past five years. There’s just always so much to do. My email currently shows 78 unread messages. The list of to-do projects that runs along the side of my calendar is extensive, and some of them are still there, unstarted, since this time last year. I have hundreds of hours of music in my iTunes that I haven’t listened to, and a backlog of movies and television in a roll of disks on my desk that would take me months to watch if I did nothing else. I rip things out of the newspaper that I intend to use, and now I have shopping bags full of newspaper clippings and no idea what’s in them.
Information, and I think life itself, is just flowing so incredibly fast, that I think we’ve all been caught on the hop in developing our coping mechanisms.
Scientists have been exploring The Neuroscience of Time, and they’ve found that when you’re hyped up, time really does speed up for you, and when you’re relaxed, time really does slow down:
Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here’s where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you’re feeling sleepy. But it might last 100 pulses if you’ve just drunk an espresso. That’s because stimulants literally speed up the clock in your brain (more on that later). When your brain stores those two memories of the objective minute it took to cross the street, it winds up with memories of two different time intervals.
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TIME AND OUR RELATIONSHIPS
Whether you’re in a D/s relationship, something more vanilla, mono, poly or just playing the field, you know that healthy relationships take a certain amount of work, and work means time. Not just time where you’re in the same room but both checking emails on your phone, but quality time. We buy into the myth that we don’t have very much of that, and so we multi-task and use our time in strange ways. We think nothing of spending 30 minutes on Facebook, yet finding 15 minutes to focus on our partner can seem difficult.
But part of the magic of the neuroscience of time, is that it actually takes less time than you think to connect and communicate when you focus. Time slows down, and if you’re trying to get the best out of a period of time then you can.
That goes for BDSM scenes too. Remove the distractions and set the environment, and 30 minutes can feel like an hour, an hour can feel like three. There really is no such thing as “no time for BDSM”.
I know you’re all busy. But don’t forget to take some time out to relax and reset the clock, OK? Science says it’s good for you (and it’s good for your relationships too).