New Experiences Can Change Your Life
Written by Terence Gilbey
The other day I was visiting with a close friend on the phone when they took a deep breath and shared with me how stressed they are feeling by the ‘topsy-turvy’ (their term) nature of the world. They offered me an exhaustive list of their worries and fears, including the rapid pace of change, and the discomfort of the post-pandemic ‘new normal’ – political upheaval, cost of living, lingering illnesses, frustrations at work, challenges with aging parents, depressed and disenfranchised teenagers, and an overriding sense that there is never enough time to get through all that needs to be done. As we talked, the tension, and discomfort rolled off of them in waves and their voice was laced with frustration. I could sense just how powerless they were feeling in that moment …
The value of time
As I hung up the phone, I was left musing about my friend’s closing comment, “Isn’t it awful how time flies even when we aren’t having fun and that just seems to make things worse?!” I reflected on how much of our lives are defined by time – and how the sense of compressed time, running-out-of-time, or not-enough time can magnify the stress, powerlessness, disconnection, and unhappiness in our lives. But so, too, can feelings of wasted time, losing track of time, and getting lost in time. Like my friend, many of us are caught-up in some sort of perpetual push-pull cycle of feeling so overwhelmed and starved for time, that we seek temporary escape and distraction in our devices, only to lose hours of our lives in mindless scrolling and binge watching. It is a vicious pattern, which takes a heavy toll on our physical body, emotional well-being, and mental health as it renders us increasingly exhausted, reactive, and dissatisfied. It’s no wonder that it often feels so difficult to wade through all of the heaviness in the moment to see hope and possibilities for the future.
Try something new
The good news is that there are validated ways to break the debilitating cycles of worry and powerlessness, stretch time, and create greater peace and presence in our lives. One of those is to seek new experiences – whether as simple as visiting a different supermarket for your weekly shop, or as big as travelling to a foreign country, new experiences bring us into the present moment, activate our senses, sharpen our minds, and open us to the creative possibilities in our life. Their very nature, as something ‘different’, acts as an interruption that wakes us up from the doldrums of our routines and, in so doing, allows us to see the world differently. When so much of life seems to go by in a haze of sameness, new experiences shine forth with memorable moments, deeper connections, and new learning. In that way, they can be the catalyst you need to take back your personal power and change your life.
95% of our behaviour is hardwired
In a 2020 online interview, author and teacher, Joe Dispenza talks at length about how easy it is for us to fall into routine behaviours in our lives. According to Dispenza, “Ninety-five percent of who we are by the time we are 35 years old is a memorised set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer programme.” (1) And this programme is difficult to change. You may recognise this programme in your own life if you have ever had times where you felt you were simply living on autopilot and ‘just going through the motions’, which rarely feels good or fulfilling. When we are simply living out our programme, we begin to lose track of time, disconnect from ourselves and those around us, and miss out on opportunities for transformational experiences. Life begins to pass us by.
You can only spend time once
Over the past few years I have thought often about, and relayed to others, the paradox that time is infinite but it is the only non-renewable resource in our lives. In a way, it is a currency that can only be spent once and cannot be replenished. Therefore, it is important that we spend it on what is important to us, because time marches on, whether we are living into each moment or sleepwalking through life. We don’t want to find ourselves on our deathbed with regrets. Experiences matter!
When researchers from Cornell asked thousands of people at the end of their lives what their biggest regret was, an overwhelming 76% of people expressed regret about “not living my ideal self”. (2) They regretted the things that they hadn’t done, far more than the things they had. And in a 2022 “Global Survey of Life Experiences”, fully 94% of the 20,000 participants reported the main reason for not having had the experiences they wanted to have in life was because, “I just never got around to it.” (3) That is a difficult truth to face when it becomes too late to do anything about it.
Remember your death
Recently I was introduced to the idea of a memento mori chart (4), which is a representational image designed to offer perspective about one’s life. Composed of a large grid of boxes, the memento mori map is designed so that each box is meant to represent a week of life, and each row represents a year, encompassing all the weeks of a lifetime. To use it, you fill-in the completed weeks of your life (by age), and leave blank those that are yet to be lived (determined by an estimate of how long you believe you might live). By doing this, you create a rather striking visualisation of the time you have completed in your life, and what is remaining.
Memento mori is Latin for ‘remember your death’, and is built upon a notion that in recognising our mortality, we are able to crystallise our priorities, heighten our awareness of the preciousness of time, and find the motivation to take consistent action toward the life we want to have. Although quite stunning, this tool is not meant to be frightening, or to create a sense of scarcity. Rather, it is an extremely effective catalyst for reflection and change – it quickly puts all the things that don’t matter into perspective and can clear a path to focus on what is truly important.
What is truly important?
If I make a memento mori chart for myself, using 82 years (or 4264 weeks) as the “average lifespan for a man in the UK”, I quickly see that I have likely lived about 74% of my life. Wow. That is something to think about.
According to the ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca,
“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.”
How have I invested the time in my life? When I look at the boxes remaining on my chart, what do I want to fill them with?
The true wealth of life are our experiences
In their book, Experiential Billionaire: Build a Life Rich in Experiences and Die with No Regrets (2023), authors Bridget Hilton and Joe Huff challenge readers to recognise that, “our experiences are the true wealth of life … our experiences, not our bank accounts, make up the chapters of our life stories, so our experiences are the most important thing to invest in.” They teach us to shift our focus away from managing time and onto creating experiences. Research shows that doing new things, rather than being a frivolous luxury, is an essential tool for enhancing cognitive and emotional well-being. (5) New and diverse experiences are linked to greater happiness (6) and they stimulate neuroplasticity in the brain, increase dopamine, boost confidence, increase social interaction, encourage mindfulness and presence, distract from negative emotions, reduce stress, and give us purpose by reminding us of the richness and diversity of life.
How to slow down time
In his book, Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time (2024), Dr. Steve Taylor presents four strategies to slow down the speed of time including:
Embrace new experiences and environments because ‘newness’ stretches time;
Make an effort to be consciously aware of your surroundings and live connected to the present moment
Spend less time in passive absorption (i.e. binge watching your favourite series)
Our invitation: Experience Week on Erraid
It is clear that new experiences hold powerful transformative potential, so it is quite synchronous that this month at the Findhorn Foundation SCIO we are excited to be sharing the (re)launch of our core program, Experience Week, on the Isle of Erraid. Just as it has been since its inception in 1974, Experience Week is designed to give you a taste of the principles and practices of the Findhorn Foundation by guiding you through an experience of them. With an emphasis on forging a deeper connection to self, others, nature, and Spirit – along with mindfulness and meditation practices, engagement with a small cohort of participants, and immersion into nature and community in a stunning and remote Scottish island landscape – Experience Week offers one truly powerful way to interrupt the numbing routine of your life. It allows you to fully live in the present moment and to stretch time.
Create your own Experience Week at home
Although we would certainly welcome you into one of our Experience Weeks, I also see our invitation for an Experience Week as something greater – a general call for you to open yourself to new experiences and wake-up to life. You don’t have to travel far to benefit from incorporating new experiences. Wherever you are and within what is possible for you, give yourself the gift of declaring your own “experience week” – a time dedicated to trying new things, mixing up your routine, and being more present in your day-to-day life. After one week, you might just decide to add another! Travel to new places, give yourself new challenges, meet new people, learn a new hobby … be intentional in seeking out new experiences for the very fact that they are new, and then switch yourself on to your life and see it transform.
Remember …
… we measure time by the memories we make, not the minutes we have lived. When you stop to envision your own life as a series of weeks mapped out on a grid, how many boxes remain? What will you fill them with? I encourage you to heed the advice of French philosopher and poet Jean-Marie Guyau (1885), (9)
“Fill [life], if you have the chance, with a thousand new things.”
What is the secret ingredient that makes Experience Week so special? If you would like to dive deeper into the magic of Experience Week read more here.
Footnotes
(1) Joe Dispenz interview by Tom Bilyeu, 2019
(2) ”Woulda, coulda, shoulda: the haunting regret of failing our ideal selves,” by Susan Kelley, Cornell Chronicle, May 24, 2018.
(3) Experiential Billionaire: Build a Life Rich in Experiences and Die with No Regrets (2023)
(4) https://onlinetools.com/time/draw-memento-mori-calendar
(5) “New experiences enhance learning by resetting key brain circuit,” National Institutes of Health, February 24, 2021.
(6) "New and diverse experiences linked to enhanced happiness, new study shows," NYU Magazine, May 2020.
(7) “How to slow down time in the coming year,” Dr. Steve Taylor, Psychology Today, December 18, 2024.
(8) In 2014, a group of German researchers interviewed 42 people who had been meditating regularly for many years. Compared to a similar sample of non-meditators, the meditators felt less pressurized by time and reported a slower passage of time, including over the last week and month. Source: Wittmann, M. (2018), Altered States of Consciousness, MIT Press.
(9) “How to speed up or slow down time,” BBC Radio 4 – All In the Mind, Claudia Hammond.
