This neuroscience trick makes time feel longer—and better

How to make this Groundhog Day —and everyday—one to remember

Unless you’re Punxsutawney Phil, or Bill Murray, you might be forgetting today is Groundhog Day.

Throughout my childhood, GroundHog Day meant getting in unnecessarily heated debates (good practice for adulthood!) about whether or not the titular groundhog would see his shadow

But in adulthood, it marks another occasion to contemplate my usual angst about time— why we feel we never have enough of it, and why we’re also so bad at spending it on what matters.

You see, this otherwise random holiday has become synonymous with the plot of the 1993 classic, featuring a cranky weatherman inexplicably reliving GroundHog day over and over again.

It summarizes how lots of us feel this time of year. And in our defense, the winter months don’t help. Those New Years resolutions we made for January 1st require repetition on January 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Those emails we ignored in 2024 require copy-paste-template-answering in 2025. That chili we made on Sunday does taste just as good on Wednesday.

Couple all this with the cold weather, the current political sh*tshow, and the seven hundred sicknesses going around, it’s easy to understand why we seek familiarity at the expense of variety. We’re too exhausted to do much else. And besides, when our wellness culture obsesses over “atomic habits” and morning routines, repetition feels like a virtue.

But then, when I get pangs of getting-older-anxiety, or reminders of how tragically short life is, I wonder: what the hell am I doing? Why am I auto-piloting my days away? Why do the hours feel long but the weeks blur together and the years fly by?

Dr. David Eagleman, a Stanford neuroscientist, has good news. He reminds us “time is not the unitary phenomenon we may have supposed it to be” and points to the ways we perceive it differently depending on the novelty of our experiences. Did you ever wonder why you remember your first day of work, but not your 564th? Or why you remember your first meal with your partner, but not the 13,456th? Or why, if you’ve ever been in a car crash, you remember every detail and feel time stands still?

Eagleman explains this through neuroplasticity; because our plastic little brains are tasked with making sense of the world, they have to adjust their neural circuitry every time they face new sensations.

Laying down neural circuitry takes work. And humans happen to be really good at it; it’s why we’ve survived bear attacks and pandemics. It’s why people with Alzheimer’s—whose perception of the world gets shattered every day—find ways to rebuild that world each time.

It’s also why kids feel like time is infinite; when every day brings a new first —a first snow, a first bike ride, a first school, a first friend— kid-brains work hard to create new pathways. In return, they feel time as rich, and memorable, and slow (“Are we there yet?!”).

But as we get older, and we GroundHogDay ourselves into the same sensations, environments, and routines, our brain model stops adjusting. And, as a consequences, Eagleman says, time feels like it speeds up.

Liz Moody, one of my favorite podcast hosts (who had me on her show last month), has a hack to counter this. She calls it the Novelty Rule—a way to “slow down our perception of time by increasing novel experiences.” Liz aims for one novelty activity each a week, and points to lots of examples: Making a new recipe. Playing a board game. Calling an old friend.

Even small novel experiences “make our brain more primed to remember that week, instead of letting them blur together,” Liz says. And after all, any activity can become novel if you bring another person (hint hint).

When I test the Novelty Rule on myself, I know Liz is right. If I think about the days I most remember from this time last year, it’s certainly not the days spent in routine; It’s the days spent deviating from it: The day the Quiltwomen dressed in black turtlenecks and participated in an emo JCPenney photoshoot for a very pregnant Kate. The night we threw Kiera a “funeral-themed” 30th birthday, casket and all. The hours spent running in rain and falling in the mud with Dan to watch bikes race through rural Belgium.

This year, the groundhog gave us six more weeks of winter.

But really, he gave us all the time in the world.

You can check out conversation I had on The Liz Moody Podcast and some of my other interviews here.