Tricks of time - why we perceive it differently

There are no two people in the world with similar perception of time. If you ask a group of people how their last 5 minutes passed, each of them will answer differently. For some of them this time seemed short, for the others it lasted for too long.

Our mood can change during the day, the same happens with perception of time. Whenever you are happy, depressed, sad or excited you perceive time differently. Psychologist James J. Kellaris studied this hypothesis and came to the conclusion that when a person is happy time lasts longer, because our brain focuses on the event and positive emotions.
As for negative emotions, everyone perceives it absolutely differently, depending on the situation.
Vice versa, When you are bored you have a feeling that time slows down or even stops.

Do you remember how long time lasted when you were a child? It seemed to be an eternity. And how do you feel now when a week passes too quickly?
The thing is when you are a child you gain new experience and learn new information almost every day. When we get older, days start to resemble each other, we lack new emotions and experience.
Researches show that the estimation of time changes with years too. People at 20 perceive time quite accurate, while old ones tend to overestimate it (they say that time passes faster than it is).

Modern technologies brought a vast improvement to our lives, but we gradually become slaves of the Internet, wasting more and more time there. Social networks and modern gadgets naturally steal our time.
Recent statistics shows that people check their phones up to 150 times a day. And have you ever noticed how fast time passes when you spend it in the Internet? We can spend long hours sitting in front of computers, but it will be perceived as a couple of minutes.

Afternoon nap that lasts about 20 minutes can bring you much energy and cheer you up, but if you sleep longer your ability to estimate time changes for the worse. We don't understand for how long our nap lasted and thus we don't understand what time is it now.

Everyone saw slow motion effect in movies or video-clips, when the characters' movements become unnaturally slow. You'll be surprised but one can feel this effect in real life!
People who have ever been in a dangerous situation say that during it time slows down. Psychologists found a logical explanation to this phenomenon. In 2007 a group of people took part in a very interesting experiment: they were asked to fall down on the safety net from the height of 50 meters and then describe their feelings. Beside fear, they felt as if time slowed down.
The thing is in dangerous situations our organism produces Adrenalin, that helps us to concentrate and fight for our lives. Thus we remember more details in short period of time and slow motion effect appears.