Christmas is a wonderful time. It’s a chance to catch up with family and friends.
It’s a good opportunity to reflect on the positive achievements of the past year and to look ahead to how we can positively move forward during the course of 2025. It’s also important as it allows us to recharge our batteries.
One area to consider over the course of the next few weeks is the sprucing up the practice for our clients. Making something look festive is a great chance to provide a positive first impression – and also an opportunity to have a quick ‘tidy up’ around the place.
It seems like a ‘small thing’ but it actually takes time to do. It’s something which a lot of clients may expect when they walk in to meet with us – they may have passed many shop windows with outstanding displays before they reach us!
Putting aside a Saturday or Sunday morning to give a bit of TLC for our work areas and pop up a bit of tinsel and the Christmas tree is great for the soul.
It also provides us with a sense of positivity as we know that it’ll give someone (maybe not everyone!) a bit of a spring their step when they sit and absorb the atmosphere we’ve created for them.
Time’s speeding up?
Do you ever feel that time between one Christmas and the next seems to speed up? It’s a common occurrence as we all get that little bit older. Tempus fugit.
And so, when writing those all-important Christmas cards, do you find yourself writing about how ‘we really must catch up’ in the New Year?
The New Year comes and goes but we haven’t quite managed to meet up. To quote John Lennon: ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.’
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of explanations for why we might experience a sense of the days, weeks and months flying past us at an every increasing speed.
My favourite is the idea of the brain’s ‘filing cabinet’ filling up with more and more stuff. And that means there’s less space for new stuff which causes us to feel time is speeding up when, of course, it isn’t.
And when I use the metaphorical term of a ‘filing cabinet,’ I am, of course, referring to the hippocampus. I’ve tried to find some academic paper to back up this idea – but haven’t come across one to date. I’ll keep you posted.
An explanation for why time seems to speed up as we get older?
But there are some interesting articles on the subject. And so, I found myself heading to the Psychology Today website (it’s often my ‘go to’ resource for finding things out). And, Hey Presto!, it did provide a good explanation.
In short, Steve Taylor (author), explains that much of the phenomenon centres around the idea of information processing.
As he states: ‘The more information our minds process, the slower times passes. Time speeds up with increasing age because we have fewer new experiences and our perception is less vivid.’
It makes sense. My interpretation would be that if we become very used to undertaking our day to day workloads, and interactions, then our brains can ‘skip’ parts of the process of sifting through information as it already knows what the outcome will be.
The result? We suddenly realise it’s a Friday when we can’t quite explain what happened on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday! Steve Taylor explains goes on to say we can stop the sense that time is speeding up ‘by bringing new experiences into our lives and by living mindfully.’
He’s even written a book on the subject: Time Expansion Experiences. His research shows that ‘time perception is highly flexible and subjective.’ His article explains the strong link ‘between time perception and information processing.’
In summary, the more information presented to us then the more we need to process and so the slower time seems to pass.
When we exist within our familiar worlds then we can find ourselves repeating the same social interactions, conversations and work tasks. Things become less memorable. The result? Time feels to pass faster.
Different to the norm
Equally, could the opposite be true? I like to think new experiences means the brain allocates more time to understanding what we’ve felt when trying something different to the norm. And maybe that’s the reason why I still find myself thinking about going to a Pet Shop Boys’ concert in June.
It was different from my normal day to day life and so my brain is still processing that happy feeling of familiar music being presented in a way that wasn’t quite so familiar for me (i.e. being in the stalls at The Royal Opera House).
Anyway, back to being focused on topic. And so, here’s where the trance state comes in. We need to process information once we’ve absorbed it into our conscious arena.
That commute home when you ponder about the events of the day. That lecture where you have a coffee afterwards to gently consider what’s been learnt during the past hour or two.
All of them are important factors in the deepening our understating of what we’ve garnered from the new information we’ve taken in. And, of course, all will involve trance work.
The train commute is a good example. Looking out of a window as the world passes by us which results in a spot of Rapid Eye Movement and a chance to process our day.
Our sessions also give clients a chance to deepen their own understandings of what they’ve learned from their experiences.
They focus on the Miracle Question outcome and that creates a ‘mind’s eye’ view of a positive direction for them to take. It’s something which is ‘cemented in place’ when they head over to the couch and start to enter into that all important trance state.
On behalf of all of the team, we hope that you have a fantastic and peaceful Christmas with a positive start for the New Year!