Your Heartbeat Is Making You Late

If you’re the type of person who is always late to work, don’t blame your alarm or traffic. Because, per scientists from Cornell University, your heart is the real problem, since it acts like a natural timekeeper for the brain and directly affects how you perceive time. 

Talk about taking punctuality to heart. 

Past research shows that our emotions can alter our sense of time like a DeLorean, making moments seem like they’re flying by or dragging on and on and on. To determine why this is the case, the Cornell researchers recruited 45 individuals between the ages of 18 and 21 who had no history of heart problems. These participants were hooked up to electrocardiography, or ECG, to measure the electrical activity of their heart. The ECG was then connected to a computer that set off brief tones lasting 80 to 180 milliseconds, based on individual heartbeats, and participants had to guess how long each sound lasted compared to previous one

The researchers discovered that those with shorter intervals between heartbeats perceived the tone as lasting longer, and that those with longer intervals between heartbeats interpreted the sounds as shorter. They referred to this as “temporal wrinkles” — for which there is no Botox. Interestingly, the brain appears to affect the heart, too, because when subjects focused on the sounds, their heart rate shifted, further altering their experience with time. 

“Our research shows that the moment-to-moment experience of time is synchronized with, and changes with, the length of a heartbeat,” study co-author Adam K. Anderson concluded in a press release. “The heartbeat is a rhythm that our brain is using to give us our sense of time passing. And that is not linear — it is constantly contracting and expanding.”

All of which is to say, the snooze button is a product of your mind and heart, not your phone or alarm clock.