Why Time Slows Down Under Stress And How to Control It

Ep 142. Under stress, the perception of time can shift dramatically. In moments of excitement or positive stress, time can feel fast, fluid, and fleeting. But in moments of fear, uncertainty, or shock, time can appear to slow down—or even feel like it stops entirely. This is not imagination. It is the nervous system adjusting perception in real time to help us survive and respond.

The human brain is built for efficiency and prediction. Through pattern recognition, it constantly anticipates what will happen next in order to conserve energy and respond quickly to potential threats. This predictive nature allows us to move through life efficiently—but it also creates a hidden cost.

We begin to live outside of the present moment.

Our attention shifts toward the past—what has already happened—or toward the future—what we expect might happen. In doing so, we unintentionally sacrifice the richness and clarity of what is happening right now. The present moment becomes compressed, overlooked, or filtered through expectation and fear.

Attention itself requires energy. And when that attention is constantly directed toward anticipated stress, danger, or uncertainty, it creates cognitive fatigue, emotional strain, and unnecessary tension in the nervous system.

This is why self-regulation skills are essential.

When we learn to regulate our physiological response to stress—through breath control, awareness, and intentional focus—we begin to reclaim our attention. We become more accurate in reading our environment. We respond earlier, more efficiently, and with less emotional cost.

Instead of reacting to imagined threats, we begin to respond to reality.

This shift allows us to move through life with greater clarity, reduced distress, and improved performance. It enhances our ability to stay present, conserve energy, and create higher-quality experiences in real time.

And something important happens:

When we improve the quality of our present moment, we naturally begin to build a more stable, more grounded, and more fulfilling future.

Mastering time is not about controlling the clock—it is about mastering attention, perception, and response.

Train your awareness. Regulate your state. Experience time fully.

Walk well.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back, folks, to episode 142 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in health psychology, licensed professional counselor, and an adjunct professor at a local community college. What we're going to be discussing today, folks, is time and timing as it relates to self-regulation skills, not just when to apply, but how long it takes to apply and when things uh don't work as well because maybe we miss applying because timing is a little off. But also we're going to talk about time as a concept and how it relates to belief and those things that can prevent us from developing a sense of comfort or relief of stress, and also those things that kind of drive us in the direction towards or away from becoming more stressed or less stressed, and how we can manage those. So we're going to be doing a few self-regulatory skill exercises in this podcast today. Very simple, but they're really powerful ideas that can make change happen right now. So time is going to be one of those things that often we look at as an abstract because we can't really capture it or measure it other than on time on the clock. But it's not really time, it's just our conception of how long it takes to measure what we're doing relative to uh frequency of time that we may have on the clock or stopwatch, that sort of thing. But uh the reason the idea of time is so important is that whenever we're looking at our world, our external environment, and also our internal environment, to where to measure anything internally like our pulse, uh we can use a clock with a uh second hand or even just a digital uh clock or stopwatch and count however many beats we have per 15 seconds multiplied times four, and we have our beats per minute, this sort of thing. But also we can count breaths per minute, blinks per minute, this sort of thing, and whatever other behavior we may do externally, how many times a person lifts their hand, this sort of thing, within a certain amount of time. Time gives us a reference as far as how long things go as far as events starting from A to B. And that kind of gives us an idea as to how we can interact with that, how we think about it and categorize it. But without getting too far into the weeds, the idea of time is really important in self-regulation skills. So if we were to define self-regulation, that has to do with what people like to call self-control. But what it is is actually managing stress and maintaining uh what we would call our baseline or our state of homeostasis moment to moment if we can't. And that can vary a little bit depending on if we're walking or we're rushing abruptly across the offices sort of thing, or we're just seated in our living room or kitchen, just kind of watching TV and doing the Netflix and chill. We have what we would call a relative state of homeostasis, and you're familiar with that. Now, time, depending on how stressed we are, can unravel very quickly, but we have this sense of compressed time or loss of time or not enough time. That tends to be associated whenever we have a sense of urgency or anxiety often, not clinical level, but just a general sense of worrying about whether or not I have enough time to do something or get somewhere, for instance. Now, whenever we're in a comfy space and we're feeling particularly creative, not necessarily bored, sometimes we can get into a sense of flow if we're, let's say, juggling and not throwing that out there very randomly, and you have a sense of timing, yes, but there's also a dropping of a sense of time generally in your environment, and you're paying attention or focused on what it is that those balls are doing in the air, casting upwards and downwards in certain arcs and eddies and uh all that good stuff if you're particularly good at juggling, which I am not, and uh I can, it's just not for very long, but uh even then there is a sense of I don't feel the sense of time elapsing, but rather I just feel the event and what I'm doing, and I'm immersed in it. So there's a sense of I have started, now I'm doing that, and there's no before and after that I'm worrying about, not in a discrete, well, in a few seconds this is gonna come down, I'm gonna do this and that. Not in a cognitive process sense, but we are experiencing it perceptually, and this is where we have to pay attention to what self-regulation really is, and it's having to do with how we perceive whatever signals are coming in from environment, they may stress us and that might cause us joy. If it it doesn't have to be negative, it can be you stress versus distress, and how we interact with that by maybe slowing down how intensely excited we may be, or maybe even speeding up how afraid I may be that, oh no, I'm gonna burn the waffle, so I better hurry to the kitchen. And then there's this sense of I don't have enough time, it can vary very quickly. But the concept of time, once again, has to do with kind of how we measure what's going on on the outside, and we kind of feel it on the inside, but in in a semi-non-measurable sense, because we're not always taking our our pulse or heart rate when we're going through stress, but just as an idea, these are the physiological things that we may experience that we call time. Now, when it comes to self-regulation, once again, time um can elapse differently depending on where we enter the stream. Are we having a panic attack, anxiety, or shock or fear? This is where time seems to be slipping through our hands, almost like an hourglass. We can't stop it, it keeps going, it's faster than what I can one perceive, two, act on, and three, catch up to. So it doesn't feel really comfortable sometimes. But whenever it's on the other end of the spectrum where I'm kind of calm, things may be a little slower. And if you were to enter a room where things were moving particularly slow and you were feeling a little stressed, you will start to entrain to the nervous system's expressions or behaviors that we're seeing around us if people are chilling out and just kind of moving languidly, comfortably, but no rush, and you come in from a rough situation very quickly, it's a shock almost. It's very stark, it's very discreetly different than what you were experiencing. And if everyone were turned around and look at you, you would feel very much like eyes were on you because chances are they were, and there may have been a disruption by virtue of the noise of you coming in in a hurry, or even breathing hard if you were running down the hall and getting to, let's say, the ballroom where there was going to be a presentation, thinking you were late, and then realizing, oh, I forgot to set my watch and I'm actually kind of early. I shouldn't have rushed, this sort of thing. But the idea is this that the entrainment of the majority of the nervous systems out there that are nice and calm will eventually affect you. We tend to mirror that. We will embody that, we'll encompass that into ourselves, and it's not an idea or even necessarily a choice, but rather we kind of are wired to the group and we seek to belong, not because we need acceptance, but because that's wired into us, because a long time ago there were safety in numbers, and that had to do with our immediate safety and our ability to be more survivable into the next moment, into the next day for that matter. So it's a very deep understanding that timing, often how we're experiencing it, can also be expressed uh to us in that maybe someone else is downtime where they're relaxed and calm. And I'm uptime, and we tend to meet in the middle, but uh the strongest suggestion in the environment always wins. So if you have a higher level of intensity, and let's say you go into a room yelling, fire, fire, or there's a fire, or there's cops here and they're fire people, and we need to evacuate, people will very quickly startle and then train to your level of intensity if you're believable enough. So the compelling quality of how one arrives, or if one arrives somewhere and the compelling quality of the suggestions is much stronger from the calm to the to the stress, which is you, if you walk in stressed, um, you'll note the difference. So there is a power uh uh differential there that occurs, but it's not one that's decided upon, it's one that experience uh gives us, and we tend to almost automatically fall into such things. It's not a mindless thing, but it definitely feels like sometimes we don't have a choice. So the next thing as far as time goes and how it elapses, if we look at whenever we're stressed, depending on if it's a positive or negative experience, it can be a time dilation where it feels like time's longer, or time compression where it feels very, very short or like there's not enough. And uh you can have a positive flow state and have it just go very quickly, like when we're jumping in the bound to see how I was playing at Disneyland, next thing you know, two days are over and$2,000 later, it's like, wow, that didn't last long enough because we had such fun and we weren't keeping time, we were just kind of in the moment. Whereas if we enter from the other side, wherever we're having joy and someone is shooting a curl, it can feel like forever. And you could keep going, even though it may just be fractions of a moment or maybe a couple of seconds. And you can be in a positive fill and be able to enjoy that as well. And this inverse can be said about the negatives where it feels like we're we're stuck in this negative, it feels like it'll never be over, or it's like like it's gonna go on forever. And our stress state could cause it to feel worse than what it would have otherwise. And also we can have a negative state where things are happening so fast we're at a loss to be able to do anything to counter what's going on, and that could be very uncomfortable as well. So depending on how we relate to whatever situation we're in and where we enter into the stream as far as self-regulation, it's always better if you catch it early, it's always better if you see it early. And much of self-regulation isn't just what's going on inside and how I'm managing my uh body's physiological stress, but also using your powers of discernment to where you start to determine whether or not you should be going somewhere or shouldn't be somewhere, or you might kind of half-predict or expect things to go down a certain way and not being there. The best self-defense isn't punching somebody in the mouth and blocking their kicks, this sort of stuff. That looks really good in the movies, but the fact of the matter is the best self-defense is not being there where there is no attack, there's no need to defend, there is no fight, so therefore there's no contention, and there are two people that are harmoniously going their own way, one wondering where's my victim, and the other one is like I'm nobody's victim. I'm gonna go eat popcorn and go see a movie, and I'll go that away, and there's nothing wrong with that. So as we get better with self-regulation skills, you elevate your capacity to read one or room two people's behavior and body language, tonels, this sort of thing, and you start trusting your gut more effectively. If you already did, then you trust it better. Then you realize that it's not dropping you from the fire pan frying pan into the fire, but actually that you're staying in the frying pan and jumping out and uh taking off before they cook you. So on top of that, you have an exit strategy that's not binary one or two, black or white, up or down, but rather you have choices, you have multiple other options. That means you maintain not only your creativity, but your capacity to think under certain types of pressure before pressure becomes too hard. And we're allowing ourselves a certain level of grace and a plumb whenever we're moving, such that we're able to use our fullest capacity, our fullest IQ and intelligence to make those decisions that give us better outcomes over time with less friction and less stress. And that's the goal. Now, some other things having to do with time is that often, depending on what it is that we hear or what we see, like the person going into the ballroom once again saying there's a fire or fire, fire, this sort of thing. And if it's done with enough salesperson intensity, if there really is one going on versus one trying to get people moving by lying and saying that, and that's illegal to do, by the way, don't do that, um, to be able to create mass hysteria. Um, the believability, the compelling quality makes the biggest difference in whether or not there's a sense of wonder. Hmm, is that true? Or two, shock, we got to get out of here. And that's an important quality that we have to pay attention to because if we're running with an idea, so to speak, and we're out and about and we hear a noise, and that sudden shock of noise could be, let's say, a wild animal, could be a truck revving running by really close that I didn't expect, but our shock factor puts us into that physiological state of arousal. But if we're running around with an idea or a belief beforehand, and it's kind of primed in the sense that I have it in the forefront of my mind, or at least in the back of my mind, we're still within my capacity to draw on, or maybe I'm just kind of half thinking about it, when that revving goes by the vehicle that comes by really close, that maybe shocks you, or maybe there's a wild animal or an animal barking suddenly, and you don't see it, all of a sudden that starts bringing about not only the thought, but starts exaggerating the negatives of that thought pattern, if it were a negative pattern, and we start kind of pulling and applying it to what's going on there, and it shapes our beliefs, even though it has nothing to do with what's going on in the immediate moment. Anything that we can use as leverage, as advantage to make ourselves more survivable in the moment, we're gonna use it. It doesn't have to be accurate, doesn't have to be true, but I will pull at it if it gives me any chance of getting from here to there and not being the baloney sandwich, especially when there's a hungry animal trying to eat me, so to speak. So something to think about there, and that will in effect cause us to draw on past time. Uh, and this is where the time thing is really important in beliefs, and also kind of help us draw on that to make us believe that maybe the future time's different. We haven't lived it yet, but yet we're going to protect and expect against it, maybe even half predict. And what are we doing by default by doing that? We're drawing away from the immediate moment and right now. We don't have that sense of grace anymore. We lose that, and our capacity to make really good decisions gets limited to reactivity. And that reactivity, generally speaking, is very binary, very up and down, black, white, my way or the highway, right or wrong, live or die. There are only two options, and there is no gray area when in actuality there is gray area, but we just can't leverage it to our advantage. We can't think with it, we can't create within it, especially if something is immediate or sudden. So depending on how quick a stimulus pops up, it can very quickly put us in a state to where we can't leverage our best advantage, and that is our ability to stay creative in the moment, to stay centered in the moment and stay ourselves. That is not our stress-born self, but rather our actual self, that is the one that's making the decisions and driving this vehicle we call ourselves my organism. If you like the word self instead of organism, that's okay. But uh the idea is still the same. And uh another idea about time in particular. I want to keep in mind that uh often whenever we're thinking about our goals and what direction we're going to go and what we're going to do, if we use this example, it's a great example, by the way, that you can actually kind of test. If you've already done it and experienced it, you know what I'm talking about. But uh, whenever we look forward, we set a goal, and there are many that talk about starting with the end in mind, and yes, we have a goal where we want to be. We may not need to know all the steps that we're going to take intimately to get to that goal, but the idea is we have a sense of direction. Motivation will come and go depending on how our feelings are, but discipline and consistency is what will get us there. Now, if we think about how we're going to get to that goal, one of the most important things is look in the direction of where we want to go. Not unlike whenever you're learning how to ride a bike, or maybe you've had a little one that rides a bike, or somebody's driving NASCAR, what are the things that they tell them when they're driving at speed? They tell them don't look at the wall because you'll drive into the wall. Look in the direction you wanted to go. And this is something that uh if you really want to try and train this, you have to make sure that somebody is forward in the direction that you want them to drive, because at some point, if it's a bike riding learning experience, uh as they pass you, they will turn and look at you, and then they will wreck in your direction. Um, and that is just natural neurological tracking. Now, what I want to tell you is that if you want to test this, if you stand with your feet together, it doesn't have to be uh literally heel to heel, but close to it or within shoulder width, don't have to be like bending your knees or anything, but just kind of stand with your arms to the side and looking forward. Now, if you have somebody there, just have them stand in front of you and have them raise a finger in front of you to where it would be technically level with your nose at a distance, not close enough to poke your nose, but enough where you can see them, full body, and see the finger, and then tell them to move the finger from left, not real fast, uh move the finger left to right, just like uh about a second to get from the center to the furthest arms length that they have with their fingers sticking out like they're pointing at the wall to the side. And just have them do that and you follow that finger without turning your head, but just tracking with your eyes. Don't turn your body in that direction, don't turn your face, just literally look in their direction and only track with your eyes. And as it goes to the right, you will notice your body will start wavering off a center line. You will notice that you might even have to step out a little bit because you may lose your balance very quickly. Your vestibular action starts to get activated there, and then have them go back to center and then use the other hand and point to the left and follow that without turning your head, just tracking with your eyes. It doesn't have to be fast or abrupt, it just has to be smooth and steady so you can follow that and then back. And if you don't lose your balance, that's really good. Now, if you do that left and right, if you don't have anybody to work with you, look in the mirror and you can turn your eyes right and turn your eyes left, and you'll notice your your reflection to where your body starts to waver. We're very sensitive to the direction that we're looking. Now, this is a physiological external exercise, but fact of the matter is conceptually, whenever we aim our mind in the direction of where we want to go, we create a belief factor of sorts wherever our body will start moving and changing its awareness and attitude in the direction of where we want to go. Coupling that, like sports psychology does with behavior, wherever you may entrain the body by imagining the steps you're going to take. Famous uh uh guy that used to do high jump in the 70s, last name Stone, he used to go and literally mentally rehearse is what they would say, every step that he would take running up to the side of the pole, and then he would do the Fosbury flop backwards and he would jump and get his world record height or whatever. But he would stay there for a moment staging, always wondered, I was a youngster at the time, why is he taking so long? Why doesn't he just go run and jump and go? He knows what he needs to do, I was thinking. Then I didn't know at the time that he was mentally rehearsing, actually using visualization of himself. He'd done it so often that he could truly see every step he was going to do. The Olympian athletes are amazing at this skill, and many have very specialized skills as a result of that. And um there is a friend that I have across the Ponce across the world actually teaching kung fu, sports psychologist. And uh there's some questions I'd like to ask her about visualization because I know that she teaches kung fu using these things with her students as well, her sports psychology background. And um, I'm very curious as to how she leans on that. I've been trained uh for many years on how to use this stuff, um not only from my education, but also from other subfields like uh hypnosis and uh neurolinguistic programming, and these uh methodologies bring the imagination to life. And imagination isn't just for kids, it's very powerful. And when we think about the things that we believe, in a clinical sense, many years of seeing people struggling and suffering as a result of their emotions and their mind, and I would say mind then emotions first, um, is that they struggle painfully because they relive and rethink things and they continue to punish themselves and make themselves feel bad about something that's not occurring anymore. And the memories that they're having are distortions because they only remember the pieces that they're judging themselves by. Now, what I'm telling you is that if you do something long enough, hard enough, you rewire your brain. You get really skilled at depressing, you get really skilled at being anxious, you get really skilled at being angry, being worried, being short fused, as easily as you can learn how to be calm, to be measured, to be able to think and slow down and pause before reacting and responding mindfully instead. And I said just as easily because there's an equivalency there, assuming that the time is put in to repeat these actions, these skills. And I usually tell people that what I teach is not a cognitive process. There is cognition involved, don't get me wrong. You have to think to do it, but it's not the thinking that's the tool itself, but rather it's the thinking that we use to decide and to strategize, to use the school the the tools of physiology of the body and how to manage that. That will long override any of your best attempts at thinking whatever the stress has hit the fan and you are in survival mode, and whenever you're at full tilt boogie, that's not the time to start pulling out cognitive behavioral impact plans and safety plans and stuff like that. Because if you don't have that down, you might have it memorized, but it's gonna fly in your face and it's gonna be irritating to you, maybe even insulting, because you're gonna say, Well, that stuff didn't work whenever I got stressed or whenever the poop hit the fan. The fact of the matter, it's not supposed to. But most people won't tell you that you have to practice the skills of self regulatory methodology to make the cognitive. Behavioral stuff work. And those things work whenever all assumptions of safety are met. But whenever the poop hits a fan, you have to practice skills under stress and you have to stress test them a little bit. But you have to physiologically do them to where you get get competency, where you gain skill in learning how to regulate your breath and your heart rate and your sense of tension and be able to recognize those things early that we would call the signs of stress, not in ourselves, but rather in our environment, but also the symptoms of stress within me and how those work together to give us the best one-two punch and knocking out those things that can cause me to go into this cascade of not only stress, but dysregulation and dysphoria. Those are the things we're trying to avoid. So what we talked about today has to do not only with time as how it's elapsed and how we experience it, but timing. When do we do those things and when it works? Do it early. And also catching things by learning how to read the signs of the environment external to us and the symptoms within myself that occur when I'm stressed, and also knowing what to apply as far as the breathing methodology. I would encourage you to look up Huberman Podcast. I've mentioned several of my podcasts as far as the double sniff technique, two inhale zen through the nose, and then extended exhale. Do that several times. Nobody can tell you you're doing it unless you tell them you're doing it. It's very ninja. Using the box breath as well. Four count in, four count hold, four count exhale, four count hold again, which gives you the double time to uh absorb the oxygen you took in at the very beginning before you blow out and start inhaling again. And this is an important thing. So you have twice the amount of time to absorb oxygen, you also have the double amount of time to be able to speed that anxiety and stress down, that perception or the feel of pressuredness. Now, what I want you to think about time, and I got this from a really cool book today called Blurred Boundaries about martial arts, and uh in the 1940s when people would travel by train and they were talking about uh fighting this sort of stuff, but also the idea of timing. What was cool about it is that one of the teachers, uh the late uh Hung Yi Sheng, mentioned to his friend that speed is important, but you double speed by cutting the distance in half, which may seem incredibly powerful first off, but also more effective if you're on time or faster than. So if you can learn how to do the self-regulation skills by cutting that distance in half, means you catch it early. You'll be much more effective at applying these things, that's the timing part, and the time that you'll have after the fact will be much more enjoyable as a result. So that's what I have for today, this evening, actually, Sunday evening, and I certainly have enjoyed talking to you today. And uh here shortly I have two books that are gonna be hitting the newsstands. One uh it's called Poco Chico, just a little small, and uh it has to do with working with the inner self or the or what they call the inner child of sorts, and it's kind of a storybook with pictures, and it teaches a very important story. Then I'll be releasing the book on the running man uh human stress model, and um looking forward to getting that out and published as well, because I think it has the largest part of what self-regulation is about in a very simple way with non-judgmental language. It teaches you how to do stuff now, and you don't have to be a clinician to make it work. This is for everybody, and it's not hard to read. You can even have it for your teenage kids and even under eighteen kids as far as adults as well, and people that have experienced PTSD and shock and trauma will equally benefit. So I've been very careful in cobbling that in a way that makes it broadly useful. And I certainly, if y'all get it, want you to give it away, share it, tell people about it, because these tools aren't mine, they they belong to you. And my goal is to get them out to you and everybody that you know because I want to see our younger generation learn how to self-regulate more so they can have a greater deal of quality of life moving forward, and I want this to be for the elder folks and the people that are of my age in the middle range of age as well, where we stress so that way we can we can have a greater degree of quality of life as well with less stress. So I appreciate your time. Thank you for listening. Please share this podcast. If you go to YouTube, like, subscribe, and share. I want that channel to grow on my YouTube channel. That would be wonderful. I would appreciate you. And if you know anyone that could benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. I'd love to have them listen. And do you have any feedback for me? Please send it to the email at running man get skills project at Gmail. I'd love to hear from you. Take care, keep timing, walk well.