The Year That Felt Like 3 Years

"Feel like years have passed in the last 10 months? You're not alone. Clinicians, researchers, and armchair psychologists alike are taking note of a similar phenomenon: since the beginning of 2025, more and more people are reporting a strange sensation in their experience of time. [1] On one hand, the days seem to speed by at a dizzying pace. On the other, looking back, the year already feels ridiculously long. It's like we're living two different time realities at once."

"One explanation comes from what's called the Cognitive Load or Information-Density Model. The idea is simple: the more your brain had to deal with, the longer that period feels when you look back on it. [2] Think about a year of breaking news, multitasking, rapid-fire decisions, new routines, job changes, emotional roller coasters, and technological tectonic shifts. Each one leaves a minute memory trace behind."

Compressed time occurs when short spans filled with change, tasks, novelty, and emotional highs and lows feel longer in hindsight because the brain encodes many memory traces. High cognitive load and information density cause the brain to store more detailed records of events, stretching perceived elapsed time. Rapid changes in external context during 2025 provide salient cognitive markers that increase retrospective duration estimates. Moment-to-moment attention shifts make days seem to pass quickly, while the accumulation of tasks and novel experiences enlarges the year’s retrospective footprint. The combined effects of attention, memory encoding, and contextual boundaries create the sensation of two conflicting temporal realities.

Read at Psychology Today