As we all know, time flies when you’re having fun. But according to a study in the journal Psychological Science, the reverse is just as true: we enjoy ourselves more when we think time passes quickly.

Time is a tough thing to keep track of. Sometimes it zooms, other times it drags. And psychologists got to wondering, as psychologists often do: how does that make you feel?

So they asked people to take a 10-minute test. And then they pulled a fast one: For half the volunteers, they called “time’s up” when only five minutes had passed. The other half had to labor for 20 minutes before their 10-minute test was done. The result? Compared with the folks for whom time stood still, the finished-in-five team said they had more fun.

—Karen Hopkin

[The above text is an exact transcript of the audio in the podcast.]