How to pause time
7 Ways to Stop Time
Many of us have an iffy relationship with time. Largely, we resent it. Because when we’d rather time slow down, it seems to, almost on purpose, sprint and slip away from us. This is why many of us find ourselves desperately trying to outwit time.
We invent and employ strategies to perform tasks faster. We sample all sorts of productivity tips and tricks—even when it comes to books. One entrepreneur swears by his “ultra-hardcore” reading, which looks like: reading while brushing his teeth, getting dressed and crossing rooms in his home. He also listens to audiobooks at three times the normal speed.
We try to shave off seconds, so we can have more minutes. And yet we still feel starved. We still lie in bed at night thinking about everything we didn’t get to.
But there are ways we can stop time. These strategies have nothing to do with working faster or slashing our to-do lists or inboxes—or turning to any other efficiency tips. It has to do with changing our relationship to time and actually slowing down (often the opposite of what we think we should be doing) and savoring. Below are seven ideas from Pedram Shojai’s newest book The Art of Stopping Time: Practical Mindfulness for Busy People.
Clear out your physical (and mental) space. “Whether you know it consciously or not, there’s a part of your consciousness that has to hold space for the things you keep in life,” writes Shojai, a doctor of oriental medicine, Qigong master and ordained priest of the Yellow Dragon Monastery in China. Many of us own stuff that we stuff into the nooks, crannies and crevices of our homes. We spend time moving this stuff from room to room, from storage space to storage space. We spend time organizing it, and cleaning it, and thinking about it.
Decluttering not only saves us time, energy and effort; it’s also liberating for our minds, Shojai writes. “It gives us the spaciousness we’ve been looking for.” What can you recycle, donate and toss today?
Play with daydreaming. Take 20 minutes out of your day to close your eyes, and think about a trip you’d like to take in great detail: Imagine the sights, sounds, textures and tastes.
Shojai notes that this exercise shrinks stress and boosts theta band frequency in the brain. “Theta is a comfortable wavelength for the brain to hang out in from time to time. Think of it as a lower gear in a car that allows us to cruise and not crank the engine all the time.”
Stretch your body. “Stretching and opening up tight body parts releases trapped tension and trauma from a past time, which frees us from it in current time.” It releases trapped energy and helps us to refocus on the present.
Shojai suggests trying these stretches: Fold forward and bend at the hips; drop to one knee and stretch the front of your hips, then switch to do the other side; rotate your neck in one direction and then in the other direction. Finally, feel for any other tension in your body, and stretch those parts.
Spend time with the stars. Shojai suggests spending 30 minutes staring at the stars. Sit down or lie flat on your back, and connect your breathing to what you’re seeing.
Identify three constellations—which you can actually do with the help of an app (Shojai likes Star Walk). Learn about these constellations.
Also, as you’re watching the sky, realize that you’re actually seeing into the past. As Shojai writes, “It takes the light from many of those stars millions of years to get to the earth, and what you’re seeing is light from ancient days.” Remind yourself that our ancestors spent hours looking at the stars every night. Remind yourself that they created fascinating stories about the constellations. Remind yourself that they used the sky to guide everything—their ships, harvests and religious ceremonies. (And consider star gazing with your spouse or kids or other loved ones.)
Have supportive rituals. Rituals can help us to reconnect to what is meaningful. They also anchor and ground us. They provide structure. Shojai shares these examples: Every morning identify five things you’re grateful for before even getting out of bed; give thanks for your lunch; every night relax your body, as though you’re “melting into the floor.
” To figure out the rituals you’d like to create, reflect on what you need. Find rituals that serve, support and inspire you.
Rethink waiting. Waiting is an inevitable part of life. We wait in line. We wait in traffic. We wait in restaurants. We wait for others. And often we are not happy about this waiting. We’re fuming and frustrated.
But really waiting is an opportunity. According to Shojai, it might be an opportunity to relax and breathe deeply; to jot down your thoughts in a journal; to read or listen to a podcast; to spend more quality time with the person you’re with; or to simply think. “The moral of the story is to take ownership of your time.”
Find space between the notes. There’s a saying that “Music is the space between the notes.” According to Shojai, it illustrates the Taoist principle of emptiness: “The notes themselves would drive us crazy if there were no reprieve between them.” And yet that’s how we structure and live our lives.
Shojai suggests listening to an instrumental track, without doing anything, such as cleaning or scrolling through your phone. (His favorite is “Adagio” by Remo Giazotto.) Next sync your breath with the melody. Ponder how it makes you feel.
Then reflect on the saying and consider: “Where in your life do you need to pause between notes? What subtle spacing can you put in your day to make things more beautiful?”
You are no doubt busy. Your to-do list no doubt has many, many tasks on it that legitimately need doing. But arriving at inbox zero doesn’t mean you’ll stop receiving email. Often it just means more replies. As Oliver Burkeman writes in his brilliant article “Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives,” “you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it ‘slightly faster.’” The same is true for our endless lists.
We can stop time. Maybe not for 3 hours. But we can pause it long enough to savor what we need, to savor what we love.
I have the power to pause time and move freely. I desperately need to know if anyone else has the same ability. : nosleep
I couldn’t tell you how long I’ve thought about doing this. I wouldn’t call it going “public” per se, but this is the first time I’ve ever felt the need to actually announce what I can do. There’s always been a reason to keep it quiet, whether it’s because people would think I’m crazy, or because they’d try to exploit me, or because they’d become crazy paranoid around me. The few times I’ve managed to convince someone of my abilities their attitude towards me changed and things went horribly wrong.
But now I need to know. I need to put it out there because if there’s anyone else out there like me... I need to find out who’s fucking with me and why. I know it can’t just be me and if just one person could come out and confirm they have the same power as me then I can rest easy knowing that I’ve not gone completely insane.
Because there has to be someone else like me out there.
It’s that or…
I don’t know.
I don’t even know how I do it. I just do. I don’t know how it works but I do know that when time stops, I can move things freely using my own strength, but that’s it. Water still flows, air still flows into my lungs, but nothing decays, and I don’t age. I’m ashamed to say I’ve lived almost my entire life with time frozen, sleeping in other people’s beds and eating other people’s food. Pretty much the only reason I even resume time is because I need to get somewhere and driving with time frozen is a bitch.
And the thing is, I’ve spent years, decades even, like this. Why would I ever leave? The whole world is a frozen paradise and there’s nothing I can’t do. And for ages I assumed it was just me, right? But it can’t be. And I know this because lately things have started happening that just don’t make sense.
It started out small. And the thing is it’s easy to ignore the small things. Do you know how lonely it is to wander through a busy high-street with time paused? Do you know how easy it is to become paranoid with all those people around you? It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking, “Oh that person must have moved.
” Or, “was that guy there when I entered? Was she staring at me like that? Did I just hear something?”
So sometimes I’d leave a shop after taking something and I’d look up and see the cashier staring at me angrily. Other times a security guard might be standing there, arms frozen, with a look of anger on his face. Time was still frozen, they were still just standing there like statues, but I’d always be left wondering if they’d been like that when I first entered. And I’d have to try and convince myself that their expressions had nothing to do with me and the things I was taking.
But pretty soon it started to get weirder. I’d go to leave and the cashier would be staring at me with their hands held out and a finger pointed at their palm in a sort of “Pay up” gesture. When I broke into places I started finding the owners hiding under the stairs, or in airing cupboards, acting like their homes were being burgled. Sometimes they’d be crying, or afraid, and they’d be clutching their phones, and always with an over-exaggerated expression (like a theatre mask).
One guy even had the emergency number ready to dial on his phone, like he was seconds away from pressing ‘call’.
The weird thing is if I resumed time they’d just put their phones away, or stand up and act like nothing ever happened. I couldn’t quite understand it. It’s like they weren’t frozen like that, if anything most of them showed a bit of confusion as to how they’d wound up cowering under the kitchen table, but at the same time there was no way they were moving around when time was stopped
I wondered, even at the time, if maybe someone else with the same abilities as me was messing around. But the changes were still just small enough that I could dismiss them. I never had any actual proof someone was moving. I never saw anything change with my own eyes so I kept dismissing it.
But that changed a few months ago. You see, I love a good bath. I have all the time in the world and there’s nothing better than breaking into some millionaire’s house and taking a long soak in their tub.
I have found some truly amazing places dotted around that I like to revisit but one of my favourite is a luxury apartment in a high-rise belonging to a pretty well-off tech investor. And he just so happens to have a tub that fits my back like a glove. Well, I climb on in and proceed to really soak it all in. I put my feet up and a sleep mask on, I play some classical music, and just lazily enjoy the bubbles and relaxing smells. Eventually, after an hour or so I decide to run the hot tap for a little bit to heat the water back up.
I pull the sleep-mask off and boom, there he is.
It’s the owner, standing over me and clutching a kitchen knife. He’s frozen, completely still, but he has the knife raised like he’s going to plunge it into my gut. I freak out, splash around like crazy, and manage to slide out of the tub. Once I calm down I take some time to look over the scene and the thing is… there were no footprints, and I never heard a damn thing. The music was way too quiet to have masked someone coming in, so I should have definitely heard him approach.
And he was definitely, 100%, not standing over an empty tub waiting to gut me when I first came in. The only conclusion I could reach was that he had been moved.
I don’t even know how they did it. But something about his face, the way it had twisted so his mouth was over-sized and his eyes were wide, it just crept me out. It was worse than all the others, but at the time I just hoofed it out of there and prayed to God nothing like that would ever happen again.
It was just a harmless prank, I told myself.
But it just kept happening. A week or two ago, I was walking through a busy street, meandering between people and ducking below outstretched arms (and occasionally taking a peek in the odd shopping bag to see if there was anything I liked) when something caught my eye a few dozen people away. This was Oxford street in rush hour so I couldn’t see very far at all, it was all just a close press of people like a forest of navy suits and beige heels, but still, I manage to glimpse a sort of twinkle in the sunlight.
It was like when you walk on the beach and the sun catches a distant shard of glass. It caught my eye and I decided to walk through the people and get closer and when I did it was like my whole world was shrunk with terror.
It was another one of them... Someone like the man from the bath, that is. It was a little girl, maybe nine, wearing pyjamas. She was hiding behind a larger man like he was a building and was holding a box-cutter that poked ever so slightly beyond his silhouette. It had been that blade I’d seen glinting in the sun. It was almost like finding a child playing hide and seek, except everything was all wrong. She resembled the other man, in that her face was twisted out of sorts. But her skin was pale and her features even more grotesque. And there was no denying what she had in mind, the way she was crouched down with her tongue pressed into her bottom lip, her legs and arms tensed to spring out at any second. She looked like a little monster, and her eyes had been fixed in my direction.
I still don’t know how anyone could have managed it. To move her seems like so much work, but that’s not even accounting for the look on her face. I even had to check to make sure it wasn’t rubber, even as my hand shook with fear just to touch her. God my mind played tricks on me, filling my head with images of her suddenly lunging at me the second my thumb brushed her cheek.
How are they doing it? I asked myself, over and over.
Pretty soon they started appearing almost everywhere I go with time frozen. One time, I went to break into a lovely manor house only to look up and see a pair of pale-faced people staring at me from a terrace up-high. They looked like a couple and were each holding a pair of scissors like a knife, standing completely naked, head-to-toe. Their sagging chubby skin and pitiful tufts of white body-hair made them look almost ghostly, and I decided to avoid that place entirely.
Other times I spot them spying on me from distant places. When I wander around in cities, I can catch glimpses of them in high-rise office windows.
They stand out, even from a distance, always catching my eye. I don’t know if it’s the way they’re always looking directly at me and the human mind has a way of knowing when that happens. Or if it’s because their warped almost clown-like faces are strange enough to scare me even when I can barely see them clearly. But no matter what, again and again, I’m faced with the question:
How?
How are they doing this?
It must be someone like me. It just has to be. And yet I cannot work out for the life of me how they could be running around putting these people all over the place. One or two, here and there, maybe. But I can barely even stop time for more than an hour before dozens of these leering white faces start to appear in distant shadows, lurking under stairs and cars, or on top of distant rooves, and one time even standing atop a speeding truck.
They look like self-satisfied gremlins, leering at me and laughing at me. It’s like they’re setting traps but they deliberately want me to see them.
At first it didn’t make any sense, the way I’d catch them standing behind my bedroom curtains with knives in their hands, or standing awkwardly behind doors, or trying to conceal themselves in wardrobes. It seemed to me that their efforts at hiding were always laughable. What was the point?
But it quickly started to make a perverse sort of sense. I haven’t slept right in a month. I check every seat before sitting and pour over every inch of a car before driving it. I’ve taken to checking every nook and cranny of a room before staying there and I can’t even bring myself to go near an elevator. It’s exhausting, and every close call just makes it worse. Every thumbtack I find in a chair, every needle I pull out of a sandwich, every severed brake line… it’s driving me further and further into paranoia and I don’t know what to do. That’s why I need to know if there’s someone else out there like me. If I’m not alone then maybe someone else is doing it, right? It has to be that.
But still, I can’t explain everything I’ve seen.
I couldn’t explain, for example, why I once used a pair of binoculars to look at a plane flying overhead and saw one of those pale-faced people standing on the wing, waving at me, mocking me. Nor could I explain how their faces look so warped, but magically return to normal when I resume time. I just need to know if I’m the only one with this power…
I guess that’s why I’m asking you guys. Someone out there has to have the same ability as me. If I could just find one more person then maybe I could confront them or at least explain it. Maybe loads of people are messing with me? I don’t know. It’s just lately when I freeze time I can’t stop this feeling of raw hostility coming from every little thing around me. It’s like the universe knows I’m cheating and it’s not happy. Things move around when I’m not looking, machines break when I touch them, food rots, and those people are everywhere, stalking me like damn prey.
Please tell me I’m not the only one?
I don’t want to consider the alternative because sometimes, and I can’t say for sure, but I swear I can see those faces in the darkness even when time is running normally.
I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen those laughing rubbery faces glaring at me from under the tracks of a passing train, or in a doorway I just turned my back to.
Lately I've been thinking about why it's happening like this. Why they're so obvious, the way they hide. And why they always seem so happy to see me. It's the same reason I've had such a good life, why I've never been stressed before now. Of course they can go slow and have fun with it.
Whoever's doing this to me... They have all the time in the world.
"Let's take a break in the relationship?" Is it worth parting for a while and how to do it right
May 28 Relations
This can both restart feelings and lead to a break.
In romantic films, this often happens: the relationship of the characters begins to deteriorate, and one of them offers to live separately for some time. Further events depend on the genre. Sometimes heroes realize that they cannot live without each other.
But sometimes they realize that they completely do without a partner.
The iconic plot twist of the legendary sitcom Friends was based on Ross and Rachel taking a break. Ross slept with a girl from a bar, and Rachel accused the guy of being unfaithful. Although he was sure that the betrayal did not happen: “We are having a break.”
In general, from the side we saw different examples of such pauses. But is it worth trying to put it into practice? We deal with psychologists.
When a break in a relationship is not the best idea
It should be understood that a break is a serious step, and you should not take it in any incomprehensible situation. This is the last measure before the break, a kind of parting probe. And, most importantly, no one can predict what such a decision will lead to.
If clear analogies are needed, a break in a relationship is like a drug with severe side effects in a terminal illness. Such a drug is prescribed only in extreme cases.
But no one prescribes for a normal cough.
According to psychologist Yulia Kuznetsova, relationships are like a living organism, they develop according to their own laws. A person has a crisis of three years, adolescence, middle age. But these difficulties allow us to make a leap forward and move to a new level. Same in relationships. But in them it already depends on two people whether the union will collapse or, conversely, become stronger.
Yulia Kuznetsova
Psychologist of Teledoctor24 service.
It happens that a couple decides to part for a while. But I think it's a destructive step. These two people are in a childish position: as if the kids did not share something in the sandbox and decided to get out of it.
And if we talk about an adult position, then we cannot do without a constructive conversation. If you do not talk, do not express feelings, do not talk about your point of view and desires, do not listen to the opinion and feelings of a partner, then there will be no development.
In any case, this unspokenness will grow and accumulate, misunderstandings will begin to increase - and the crack between the couple too. And this crack is usually filled with quarrels and insults.
A temporary separation is a way to get away from difficulties for a while. But each of the partners will take with them the baggage of unresolved problems, which will not become easier at a distance. And if the reunion takes place, then the couple will be in the same situation from which they fled. Because all this time everyone was stewing in the juice of their own experiences. While the problem is common and it can be solved only together.
In what cases a pause can be useful
We have already decided that a break in a relationship is an extreme measure. And you need to use it in extreme situations.
When irritation and fatigue in relationships have reached a critical point
Relationships develop in different ways. Sometimes people may feel that they are tired of each other and the accumulated irritation can no longer be contained.
Or decide that the partner is tired and building a couple with him was initially the wrong choice.
Andrey Smirnov
Master of Psychology, practical psychologist.
Here a pause is more important than ever! Do not bring the relationship to scandals and screams. It is better to agree to live separately for a week or two or even a month. And here comes the moment of truth. At first, during the pause, you can experience relief. But soon the proverb “What we have, we don’t keep, if we lose it, we cry” may turn out to be true. You begin to understand how dear your partner is, only the good is remembered, the bad is forgotten.
In this case, you should call your partner and find out how he is doing, what mood. By intonation, you can feel whether the time has come to end the pause or whether it is better to wait. After all, people move at different speeds. For some, even a one-day separation is uncomfortable, while for some, two weeks need to calm down.
In any case, things should not be rushed.
You can break the pause only when there is a clear desire on both sides to reunite. Often after such pauses, the meetings are joyful and even enchanting.
Andrey Smirnov warns: such a result does not always happen. If the partner is exhausted so that no pause helps anymore and there is no desire to see each other again, then you should think about the final parting.
When one of the partners cheated
Cheating is complicated. First of all, because there is no correct reaction to this event. The decision what will happen next with the couple will have to be taken by the partners. It is especially difficult for someone who has been cheated on, because he experiences a lot of emotions at the same time, which are not so easy to understand. And the presence of a traitor is even more disorienting. At the same time, partners, despite the storm of emotions, are not always categorically disposed to parting. It takes time to deal with the situation. And sometimes a pause in a relationship.
It also happens the other way around: the cheating partner hesitates and does not understand whether he wants to keep the old relationship or is interested in new ones. And take a break to think things through.
When there is violence in a couple
Elena Slinkina recommends acting immediately.
Elena Slinkina
Family consultant, art therapist.
If this happens, pack up and leave. You can tell your partner that you love him and ask him to do something: seek help from a psychologist, a consultant. If a person really loves, then he will try to do everything in his power so that this does not happen again.
It is important to make a reservation here: breaks can be part of a scheme that increasingly involves the victim in domestic violence. This is a common cycle. The act of cruelty is followed by the remorse of the aggressor. The victim forgives, the so-called honeymoon begins, when everything is fine. Further, joy and peace fade, and they are replaced by violence again.
And each time it becomes more cruel.
Apology without change is manipulation. A break in order to think things over and give the aggressor a chance to correct himself is possible. But the pause should not be part of a cycle in which the victim repeatedly takes a break, forgives, and faces the abuse again. It only makes sense when a person understands what he is doing wrong and is really ready to change.
When separation is inevitable
A pause can help you make this difficult decision.
Elena Slinkina
Family consultant, art therapist.
If you feel that the relationship has become obsolete, you are trying to grasp the last straw and both of you decide to leave for a while so that time will do you good, then in fact this means only one thing: your separation is inevitable. But it will be less painful, because it seems like for a while. In this case, it's an option. Take time to get used to the fact that you broke up.
How to properly pause a relationship
Let's go back to Ross and Rachel.
The main problem of their break, as we know from the further development of events, was that they did not agree on its terms and, in general, acted emotionally. This is a bad way to take a break.
Psychologist and head of the Center for Settlement of Social Conflicts Oleg Ivanov advises first to clarify the following points.
Make sure the decision is mutual
If you are the initiator, give your partner a specific reason why you want to take a break.
Determine the end goal of the temporary separation
A pause does not mean a break. This time is given to both of you to think things over and make an informed decision on where to go next.
Set a pause period
An indefinite break will not work: without clear deadlines, everything runs the risk of ending in a simple breakup.
Decide how often you will meet
This is also important for solving everyday issues. A pause does not mean isolating and ignoring each other, even if you live in different places for a while.
Oleg Ivanov
Psychologist, conflictologist, head of the Center for Settlement of Social Conflicts.
Be honest with yourself and each other: agree on how you will spend time apart. A pause in a relationship does not mean complete freedom from obligations towards each other. Therefore, if you want to leave the city for a couple of days, go to a party or meet friends, warn your partner about your plans.
And separately discuss the issue of romantic communication with other people. It took Rachel and Ross seven seasons and 10 episodes to get back together after their mistake. But it’s better not to destroy your happy ending with your own hands in the first place.
Read also 🧐
- 4 fears that prevent relationships from developing
- How to sort things out so as not to spoil them
- Don't work on relationships, work on yourself
5 ways to stop time and enjoy every moment of life
vasilek/depositphotos.
com
The older you get, the more often you get the feeling that time is slipping through your fingers. But is it really so? And more importantly, can we stop him?
How we perceive
time
aleksandrsb/depositphotos.com
Research confirms that at least 7 regions of the brain are responsible for the perception of time.
If you look objectively, time, of course, moves evenly, but our sensations suggest otherwise.
The passage of time for us depends on at least three components:
Mood
Age
Environment
For example, during an accident, many people notice that time seems to stop in place.
And at a fun party, it seems that time flies by completely unnoticed (just like the drinks in the glass run out).
We should not think of time as a universal constant: our brain is not synchronized with some kind of cosmic clock, and personal perception of time largely depends on individual characteristics.
How does age affect
for the perception of time
variant/depositphotos.com
As we get older, time seems to speed up...
...and endless days at school suddenly become days at work that fly by at the speed of light.
Everything is relative
According to the “correlation theory”, we perceive certain periods of time in relation to the time that we have already lived.
For a 4-year-old child, a year is 25% of his entire life. And for his 50-year-old grandfather, a year is only 2% of his life.
Life is accelerating
Experiments confirm that age directly affects our ability to perceive time.
If you ask a 21-year-old to say when 5 minutes will pass, his answer will be quite accurate. However, with age, people begin to underestimate time. Experiments confirm: for older people, time starts to flow a little faster.
How to stop time
1. Try self-discovery practices
For example, meditation or self-talk. By throwing everything superfluous out of your head for a while, you can achieve a state of deep concentration. Such pauses are necessary in the accelerating pace of life in order to sort out your thoughts and find support.
julia tim/shutterstock.com
2. Avoid the monotony
Instead of sitting in front of the TV or hanging around all weekend, fill your free time with new experiences. Because when you learn new things and keep your attention on one thing, time slows down.
3. Set goals every day
Being organized will help you slow down time thanks to the feeling of accomplishment after a hard day's work. Set realistic goals for yourself every day and stick to the time allotted for achieving them.
4. Stay Curious
It's never too late to learn, so focus your efforts on finding new interesting activities and topics to study.
