I came across a heart-stoppingly scary piece of research the other day, and ever since, like the Ancient Mariner, I've felt compelled to go around telling others, as if that might somehow ease the pain. Now it's your turn to hear it. We all know, of course, that time seems to speed up as we grow older - but according to studies at the University of Cincinnati in the 70s, this effect is so pronounced that if you're 20 today, you're already halfway through life, in terms of your subjective experience of how time passes, even if you live until you're 80. And if you're 40 - again, assuming you live to 80 - your life is 71% over. Basically, if you're older than about 30, you're almost dead. Have a great weekend!

It's not just ageing that meddles with our experience of time. A week-long holiday in a strange country seems, in retrospect, to have lasted much longer than the average work week, which flashes by. On the other hand, a desperately boring day seems to stretch infinitely. "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour," Einstein said. "Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

So can we thirtysomething geriatrics, and others, find a way to slow down time, to stretch our more enjoyable hours, without - like Dunbar in Catch-22, desperate to prolong his life - deliberately trying to keep ourselves bored? The psychology writer Steve Taylor offers some hope in his new book, Making Time: Why Time Seems To Pass At Different Speeds And How To Control It. Partly, he accepts, time seems to speed up simply because each new year of our lives is a smaller proportion of the whole: if you're 10, any previous year of your existence was 10% of your entire life; if you're 70, it was only 1.4%.

But a more interesting idea, first volunteered by the "grandfather of psychology", William James, and supported by experiments, is that time passes more slowly when we have to absorb more information. That explains why it seems to take longer to get to a new destination than to return from it, and why a holiday seems longer than a week in the office. One obvious solution, therefore, is to seek newness, to break your routines. People who go on adventurous trips, Taylor writes, report longer-seeming holidays than those who choose the regularity and inactivity of a week on a beach.

Hang on, though: isn't time meant to fly when you're enjoying yourself? Yes, but there's a confusion here, between the perception of time as we recall it in memory versus the moment itself. We don't usually want the hours to feel as if they're passing slowly: that's boredom. We want to look back on, say, the past year, and not feel as if it raced by. Our happiest times are those when we stop thinking about the passage of time altogether, but that we later remember as having lasted a deliciously long time. Extreme sports, meditation or any high-concentration activity will induce this effect. But sitting alone in a darkened room, whimpering about the implications of that Cincinnati research, will not, so I'm going to try to stop.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com