As we age, time seems to fly by. One moment you're marking a significant birthday, and before you know it, another year has slipped away.

As children, weekends seemed to last forever, but as adults, it feels like no sooner have we closed our eyes on Friday night than we're stuck in Monday morning traffic. This universal experience of wanting to slow down time isn't just a feeling; there's scientific evidence behind it.

"Almost universally, people report that time passes more quickly as they get older," says Prof Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time at Liverpool John Moores University. "It seems to be something we all experience but when we try to capture it in studies it's quite hard to find."

Prof Ogden shared these insights with the Manchester Evening News for their Science Spotlight series, which each week features a different researcher answering pressing science questions.

According to Prof Ogden, there are several reasons why our perception of time changes as we age. The simplest explanation is that each passing year represents a smaller fraction of our total life, reports the Manchester Evening News.

"When we're little, a year of your life is a huge proportion of your overall lived experience so it feels really long in comparison," she explains.

Prof Ogden believes that our perception of time is heavily influenced by memory. She points out that in youth, when everything feels new – from school to first experiences and discovering new places – time seems to stretch on endlessly.

"Your brain is not constantly processing time so it has to use other indicators to judge how long things last for, and one of those indicators is memory," she says. "If we've got a period of time where lots of new memories are formed and life is really exciting, our brain interprets this as 'if we did lots of things, it must have been a long time'."

As we grow older and fall into routines, with days merging into one another and fewer unique events occurring, time appears to accelerate.

"That could be another reason why we feel as if time is moving really slowly, because when we look back at the year we haven't done as many new things, so our brain tricks us into thinking it must have been a short period of time since last year," Prof Ogden notes.

She also mentions that theories exist which link the sensation of time speeding up with the slowing down of brain processing speed and changes in memory due to ageing.

"As we get super old, our memory starts to fail, and that could be another reason why we get this sensation of time passing as we get older," Prof Ogden concludes.

Prof Adrian Bejan, a top engineer at Duke University in the US, has shed light on why as we age, time seems to fly by. He explains that it's all about how our eyes and brain process images – when we're young, it's snappy, but it slows down with age, making us feel like time is zipping past.

"Mind time is not clock time. I perceive the passing of time in my way and that differs from the way which you perceive it. But certainly both ways are not clock time," Prof Bejan remarked during a TED talk, delving into the reasons behind the acceleration of time perception as we grow older.

He points out that our brains gauge time based on the intervals between visual snapshots taken by our eyes. Drawing on physics, he notes that these intervals are determined by the distance signals travel from eye to brain, divided by their speed – and this equation changes as we age.

"With increasing age, the length of travel increases and the speed of that flow decreases," he says, noting that the degradation of neural pathways contributes to a slowdown in biological signal speed.

This deceleration is compounded by physical growth, which hampers muscle movement as our bodies expand. "You can compare mentally the movement of the legs of the mouse compared to the movement of the legs of the elephant," he suggests.

In essence, his theory posits that in our later years, the brain registers fewer environmental signals per unit of actual time, creating the sensation that time is slipping away more rapidly.

A fascinating study by Prof Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University has delved into the perception of time, revealing that UK residents feel Christmas arrives more swiftly each year, while those in Iraq sense Ramadan approaching sooner.

Prof Ogden's research examined the role of memory in this phenomenon, focusing on individuals' retrospective memory—their ability to recall past events—and prospective memory, which involves remembering future tasks.

"People who were bad at remembering all the things that they had to do were more likely to report that Christmas comes around more quickly," said Prof Ogden. "You can kind of see why; if you're not prepared for Christmas then it feels all of a sudden very soon."

Moreover, Prof Ogden highlighted that our emotions significantly influence how we perceive time.

"Our experience of time is generally really tied up in our emotions. The more emotionally aroused we are the more we experience these distortions to time," she elaborated. "If you think back to being a child, it's a very emotionally charged experience. Life becomes slightly less emotional on a daily basis as you get older."

In her 2021 investigation into the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our temporal awareness, Prof Ogden discovered that people encountered "mass distortions to time" during lockdowns, with these alterations closely associated with their emotional states.

"For some people, lockdowns were passing really slowly, and these were generally people who weren't coping well with lockdown – people who were socially isolated, or anxious or stressed," Prof Ogden explains. "And then you've got this other group of people for whom lockdown was passing really quickly, and these were people who were socially satisfied, less anxious and less depressed."

Not only does this tell us that changes to routine – which help us understand where we are in time – can impact our perception of time, but so can disruptions to our social environment.

Above all, Prof Ogden says Covid lockdowns fundamentally changed how people feel about time.

"Time is our most precious resource. It's the one thing you rarely have enough of, and when it's gone, there is no getting it back," she told Liverpool John Moors University.

Lockdown gave us an insight of what it's like to have time taken away from you, which has probably changed the way people feel about time.

No matter what underpins the feeling that time speeds up as we age, it's something that we all tend to experience – and Prof Ogden says our sense of time is intrinsically linked to our own satisfaction in life.

"Research consistently shows that people with anxiety, stress, and depression all experience really significant distortions of time. We have this experience where the bad times last a long time and the good times feel like they last a short time," she says.

As the old adage goes, "time flies when you're having fun," so maybe the secret to making the clock tick a bit slower is to live in the moment and make every second count.