Giving Time Can Give You Time

If you want to feel as if you have more time, try giving it away by volunteering to do things for others, suggests a new U.S. study. (iStock)

From the 16 July 2012 article at Medical News Today

Many people these days feel a sense of “time famine” – never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can’t be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but a new study suggests that volunteering our limited time – giving it away – may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.

Across four different experiments, researchers found that people’s subjective sense of having time, called ‘time affluence,’ can be increased: compared with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of ‘free’ time, spending time on others increased participants’ feelings of time affluence. …

Related articles

• Volunteering gives you the sense of more free time (scienceblog.com)
• Giving Time Can Give You Time (psychologicalscience.org)
• Giving time can give you time (eurekalert.org)