Everything in your future relates to what precedes it… In fact, how you perceive and spend this next year– and its 525,600 minutes–will determine your future. If life is a waste of your time, then time wastes your life, so, let's get wasted together and have the time of our lives!

Skidding into oncoming traffic or being bored out of your mind, brings different perceptions of time. A minute can seem like an hour or an hour like a minute. Looking back, it may all seem like a blink. So, how will you invest your time in 2025? Will it be in blissful relaxation? and “in the flow” of peak performance?

It’s your choice.

SCARY RESEARCH

Movies show a winning home-run, a lover’s kiss, or “fearful” moments in slow motion… This same thing happens to you in real life. You dish up your defining moments in vivid minute detail. When you amp up time seems to slow down.

So, how does time take your awareness under its spell to stay a spell or race on by? In one time stopping study, volunteers free fell, upside down, with no harnesses or safety lines and landed in a net 150 feet below at 70 miles an hour! The drop took three seconds. Participants used a stopwatch to estimate how long their fall took. Then they watched another do the same thing and estimated the other person’s plunge time. Each volunteer thought their own experience took 36 percent longer than that of others.

Next, volunteers had a “perceptual chronometer” strapped to their wrist that flashed numbers too quick to read. If fear truly speeds perception, or slows time, it would follow that a person in a terrifying freefall could make out and read the speeded numbers… They couldn't! The study concluded: “Fear does not actually speed up your perception; it allows you to remember an experience in greater detail… Perhaps a direct experience of what you feel now is only a memory of a millisecond ago making your vivid present a retroactive illusion.”

That’s why truly loving moments always make a deep, permanent and lasting impression on your memory.

WHAT IS TIME?

Yesterday, I went to the future and here I am! How about YOU? Are you lost in time? Finding the time? Absorbed in the moment? Consumed by time? How does each moment burst into being? The best I can figure is that time keeps things from happening at once…

BODY CLOCK

“Spring is sprung the grass is riz… the time to set your clock forward is.”

Temperature, sunlight, and phases of the moon influence your rhythms and chemistry. Scientists speculate that as your retina registers light, photosensitive ganglion cells interpret it in your pineal gland, which then secrets melatonin to conk you out or wake you up. Others say that special brain cells in your hypothalamus (SCN for suprachiasmatic nuclei) is the master pacemaker that regulates your wake and sleep. Your perception-driven clock commands you “Get up!” or “Go to sleep!” It’s timely ticking tracks your deadline and lifeline. Your perception marks time when you think you have all the time in the world. It regulates your hormones, digestion, body temperature, and blood pressure. Every 90 to 120 minutes, while awake, your alert focus is followed by 20-minutes of lesser focus. This rhythmic natural trance allows you to “go in to find out?”

FEEL THE RHYTHM

When walking or jogging, your breath entrains to your footsteps and your footsteps entrain to your swinging arms. Those with Parkinson disease walk more easily if they swing their arms. People around you influence your rhythms. You entrain to their breathing and pacing. Young women in close proximity have the same menstrual cycles.

Rhythms and resonant vibrations, like a lullaby. Muzak in elevators, rhythms in advertising and religious rituals and hymns are carefully orchestrated to affect your mood. Hypnotists often use entrainment music and sound and encourage you to relax.

PACE YOURSELF FOR JOY

I fought a battle with time; Before we became acquainted time and I

At first, I ignored time (ignorance). Then I noticed Time keeping company with old and battered folks I passed on the street. Once, I even stood by a young man as rejecting Time ran out on him, and I mourned loss and cried bitter hateful tears. I knew that we, time and I, could never be friends.Then, one day, or else a year, Time stood silently at my mirror and while I watched, giddy time began to dance upon my face, leaving laughing footprints about my eyes.

I fought a battle with time before we became acquainted. Before, without an agency or reference, but, just for old time’s sake, we became roommates.

Perhaps it’s best to heed the Mad Hatter’s wisdom: “If you knew Time as well as I, you wouldn’t waste time talking about it… you’d live it!”

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Local Personality, Shelley Stockwell-Nicholas, PhD is a hypnotherapist, mindfulness and NLP trainer, artist and the author of 25 books. She certifies practitioners through the International Hypnosis Federation. You can call her at 310 541-4844. Website: https://www.hypnosisfederation.com/