Won Body Won Life, Ep 2: How to Slow Down Time and Make Life More Meaningful

In this second episode, we dive deep into why time moved by so quickly during the pandemic, why it seems that our life passes by too quickly, and how we can literally slow down time in our minds to make life more meaningful.

I love to talk about this because we only have 'Won Body' and 'Won Life'. You can perceive that your life goes by quickly like the blink of an eye, which is not the route I want you to go down. Or you can live an amazing life, full of purpose, full of spontaneity and excitement, and full of joy and happiness. Our emotions affect time.

Scroll down for the show transcript.

Ep 2 Transcript

Hey, welcome back to the Won Body Won Life podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jason Won, lifestyle physical therapist.

And if you're either new here, or you're returning to this channel, I'd love if you can help support this podcast by either leaving a comment below or a question on Spotify. And if you're on Apple or Google, please click the subscribe button. And also share this to your social media profiles by tagging @Flexwithdoctorjay.

So today is all about increasing our perception of time and our quality of life. And so I know that many of you guys right now, or either you're listening to this at work, or you're listening to this on the drive home, and I get it, many of us are busy, we're time strapped, we have barely any time for ourselves, we sacrifice so much of ourselves. And we barely give any self-care time back to ourselves. So our perception is everything.

And so many of us know that 100% of us are going to die at some point. But some of us are either going to die with regrets, and some of us are going to die feeling like they live a very fulfilling long life. And here, I'm here to share with you guys how to how to increase that perception of time, so that every day feels more meaningful. And every day, you can maybe think about doing different things in terms of how you manage your time.

So if we decide let's take Joe, for example. And Joe is an individual that works as a mechanical engineer, for example, he has two kids. So every day he wakes up in the morning, he has breakfast, he gets his kids ready for school, he drives him to school, gets to work, worked from eight to five, comes back home, gets ready for dinner, eats dinner, and then watch his TV and then he goes to sleep.

Now many of us have a very typical day. Now, if you are somebody that lives that same type of life as Joe, right, you can definitely leave a comment below. But Joe is our prototypical person, a deskbound professional who does the same monotonous things. And from Monday to Friday, 40% of his entire life is going to be dedicated to his job.

Now if he has a job that he's very passionate about. That's awesome. And that's part of increasing that perception of time is if you have something that you're passionate about, that you don't really care about the money and you just work for free, that is a job worth doing.

But also, for anybody that does basically the same monotonous thing, you'll realize that as time goes on maybe six months down the road, 12 months down the road, you're going to think about “Wow, that time passed so quickly”.

And so many people have actually told me that when you have a kid, all you do is you take care of the kid, you're drowning. You're drowning in sleep deprivation, all your life is dedicated to that to that child, while it might be some happy times, and your child smiles, and he poops and he does all these different things is that that time is going to go by so quickly.

And so my kid currently right now Trey, is 17 months old. And so currently right now he's a slow walker, he just started walking. And that's already an exciting time. That's a great memory that I'll never forget. But I personally think that the 17 months of being a father has actually been quite long, it's actually felt extremely long.

And I know that some of you're thinking like, yeah, we'll wait till he's 18 years of age. And you'll be like, “Well, time passed by so quickly”. But I'm going to share with you how I made time feel that much longer. And so for me, I'm always thinking about spending either my time, or my finances, on experiences. And so that's actually called experiential spending.

And I got that from a book called Balance by Andrew Hellam, who actually says that when you spend your money or your time on experiences, is that actually creates new novel pathways in your brain, it stimulates the hippocampus, it simulates different emotions, when you are consistently either spending your finances or your time on experiences, versus let's say, spending our time just doing the same monotonous work or spending our finances on more financial things.

And so I get it, many of us are into our status. You know, it's all about a status thing where when we buy a Gucci purse, we buy a Louis Vuitton purse, or let's say we buy a Tesla, for example. A lot of those things while they feel good in the moment, is that you'll never really say in life that like let's say 10 years down the road.

Let's say you bought a Tesla today in 2022 and 2032. You're never really going to speak about the times where you say, wow, you know, I remembered when I bought that Tesla it was such a great moment. I had such a good time. And you know that was good 30 to 60k well spent, not many of us are going to say that. Okay, and I'm not doubting it. One. So for any of you Tesla users, I'm not saying anything about Tesla.

I'm saying that where you spend your money, and your time will either decrease or increase that perception of time. So if we decide that, you know, we're all about the status, we're all about buying great fancy clothing and great fancy things, is that when we spend our money on those things, we're not creating new experiences, we feel good that day, or maybe for maybe a maximum of a week when we buy that new Louis Vuitton purse, and we feel like we're wearing it out, we feel all good inside.

But the reality is, is that we always talk about the good times even the bad times, right? So times that you get an argument, we're going to remember those things because it elicited a certain emotion. Okay, when I go on a, you know, when I, when I go on vacation to Florida, and I go to Disney World, right, that's the same amount of money that I might spend on, let's say, a purse, or some sort of other tangential good, but when I'm spending money on experiences are spending my time trying to experience new things, despite you maybe having a monotonous job, or maybe we all have to do the same day to day.

Things like take out the trash or cook. While these things might seem monotonous. We need to think about what we're going to do in life that creates new experiences. So I'm always thinking about how when we know when my son is going to a park, I'm thinking how can we go to a new park? How can we create new pathways? Can I put them in my backpack? This? How can I put them in a stroller, because every time that I spend time with them, okay, I'm also creating new stimuluses. I'm creating new neural pathways and creating new memories that I'll remember forever.

So, for that time being, you know, when it comes to, if you're a person, that's just saying, like, wow, you know, the last 12 to 24 months in life during this pandemic, it felt like it's just been a breeze like it all just passed by, it just felt like last, you know, just yesterday, it was 2020. My urge to you is that to fulfill a better quality of life, in order to feel like your life is more meaningful, and to feel like your life is more full, I urge you to think about how you spend your time and how you spend your money.

If you spend your money on tangential things, things that you can feel, right things that are like within your grasp, like a new wallet, a new car, right? All these things, if it's a necessity, absolutely get it, right. But if it's something like a luxury, think about how you can delegate some of that time, or that finances towards things that will actually create memories in your life.

That way, when you look at life, and you're saying, “Wow, I'm so busy”, and then when life gets busy, you know, two years down the road, you're going to have that regret of saying, “Wow, life just passed by quickly”, and we don't want to waste our life. So in order to gain back that time, and I know that we can't reverse time, but in order to gain back that time, or to increase our perception of time, is to think about every little emotion that comes with a vacation versus a car, right.

And so my last little bit is in terms of how you perceive you know, let's say your family time, your friends time, think deeply about where you are in the moment. Okay, I can't stress that enough. I think that some of the moments that really struck me was like, let's say, just the other day when my son was going to sleep and he was going through a sleep regression, I think there's like an 18-month sleep regression. Let me know like in the comments or somewhere if, if you drive it and you're like, hey, that really wasn't Sleep, sleep regression, we had no idea was going on until we Googled it.

We said hey, there's a progression. So he used to sleep really well just put him down in the crib, and then just leave the room. But the past three days, he's been very, I guess, maybe he seemed like, there was something wrong, right? He was constant shaking his head constantly yelling. And I think that something that really struck me was I decided to you know, like, I have the endurance to like, you know, rock them to sleep. You know, my wife, she's like, “Oh, my back hurts. You know, I don't want to do this”.

So I decided, you know, like, I'm going to do the next couple days. I'm going to put him to bed. And he, I realized, yeah, he was having some separation anxiety. So I did the same typical things, but I stayed longer in the room. And that moment in life, I will never forget, because what I did was I laid him down. I had some strategies to like, you know, put a blanket on his stuffed animal be like, hey, you know, like your, your stuffed animal. He's also sleeping.

So he decided to also lay down with his stuffed animal. And all I did was I lie down. I was looking at him through the bars through the crib. And I just sang him. I just sang him music, you know, and I think that one really cool thing that I'll never forget is that he reached out. He reached out through the bars, and you wanted to, like touch my face, and you want to touch my hand. And those moments were like, you see, like his smile on his face, you know, babies smell good. So you're like, you're smelling him, you're, you're, you're just embracing the moment.

And he was smiling. He was like he was at peace. You know, because I stayed with him an extra 30, 40 minutes, just to make sure they slept soundly. So I stayed with him, I sang with him for like, 30 minutes until he fell asleep. And so even right now, as I'm getting kind of cracked up emotionally, you know, the emotions that come out with a certain memory, or a certain thing that you do in life, you know, if you're a person that you're married, and you remember the day that you propose to your wife, or let's or you know, your husband, or, you know, at the time that you got proposed to, you remember those things, you remember the emotions, okay?

So, when it comes to building memories, and spending money, or spending your finances and your time on things that will last a lifetime, I think that's when you'll start to notice that your quality of life, okay, you'll start to have a more winning life, right? Like I said, you know, this podcast is called Won Body Won Life, we're gonna hit on so many different subjects as time goes on. But I think this is something that really matters most to you know, my clients, and the people that follow me is I want people to know that this is not just a physical therapy podcast, you know, this is about teaching you how to live a life that's more meaningful.

So when that time again, going back to that time, where I just stayed with my baby for an extra 30, 40 minutes until he fell asleep, and he was smiling and, and grabbing for me and wanting to touch me, I'll never forget that. There was a moment as a father that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

And so that's what I have for you guys today. Is that where do you put your finances? Where do you spend your money? Where do you spend your time? Are you actively trying to create more memories in your life that are going to be more meaningful, and that you're going to remember, so that when you look back on your life, you can be like, do you know, I had a great, amazing life, I didn't have a life where it just passed by. And I'm having these regrets of what I could have done or where it could have spent my money or where I could spend my time.

Okay, think and think deeply about where you are now. Okay, what do you smell? What do you see? What who are the people that you can decide to touch that you haven't, that you haven't talked to in a long time? Where can be my next vacation? What can be the next thing on a Wednesday where I've had 50 Something Wednesday's this month? What can I do this Wednesday, that's going to be something different, that's going to make it stick out that's going to create a new memory in my life, so that the perception of time in my life is more meaningful. So that's what I got for you today.

Again, this is Won Body Won Life. If you guys liked this episode, please go ahead and support the channel by supporting clicking the Follow button, leaving some comments but also tagging your social media. Tag me @Flexwithdoctorjay. And I'll see you guys on the next one.