New study shows that music helps working out go by faster in our minds

People who listen to music during intense exercise experience a “time warp.”

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Erik Barnes

Mar 29, 2025

By Erik Barnes

March 29, 2025

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Photo credit: Canva – Listening to music really does make workouts go by faster (or at least feel like it).

There are people out there that just can’t go to the gym, go for a run, or exercise at all without their playlist. Whether it’s just playing their favorite songs on Spotify to get through the next set of bench presses or watching a TV show on their iPad while on the treadmill, many people believe that having such distractions just makes it all go faster than if they exercised without it. You might be one of those people, and, according to science, you’re actually right. Sort of.

A study is showing the people who do intense workouts without headphones or other distractions actually experience time much slower during their exercise than people who incorporate entertainment or competition in with their workout session. For the research, 33 physically active people went on three different cycling trials on an exercise bike. The first trial was a solo biking session without distractions, the second trial was with a virtual avatar on the bike’s screen, and the third session was a game in which they needed to race a virtual opponent. Before, during, and after each trial, they were asked to estimate a 30 second time period.

The results showed across all three trials that the participants didn’t showcase any differences in perception of time before and after the exercise, but showed disparity during the cycling workouts. All three trials had the participants experience slowness in their perceptions of time and didn’t show much of a difference regarding whether there was a virtual element or not. The warped perception was credited not to cycling itself, but to how focused the individuals were on the task at hand along with the discomfort that comes with strenuous training.

“Exercise, particularly hard exercise, increases focus on the body, creating a heightened awareness of each moment,” said Andrew Edwards, first author of the study and a professor of psychology at Canterbury Christ Church University. “That makes time feel like it’s dragging.”

You know the old phrase “time flies when you’re having fun”? It’s like that but in reverse. Since the body is experiencing discomfort, even pain in some cases, it’s perceiving each moment much longer than in reality. If the activity isn’t fun, it’s…well, it’s not fun. So it feels slow.

Edwards even followed this study up with an additional one studying professional soccer players and their training habits. Unsurprisingly, the results found that the players enjoyed the workouts that involved them playing soccer and drills with their teammates, finding those activities much shorter and quicker than watching game film for analysis or cardio training.

“If time feels slower, workouts may feel longer and less enjoyable. Making exercise more engaging could help people stick with it,” Edwards said to The Guardian. “Repetitive or unenjoyable exercise might enhance this time-slowing effect, while distractions or enjoyment might reduce it.”

So, what can you do when your workout just drags and drags? Well, as mentioned above, music through some headphones or watching a show on a tablet can help make cardio workouts on the treadmill or elliptical go by much faster and easier. If you’re lifting weights, music can help, but doing it with a friend will not only give you a spot for heavier lifts, but make it a more fun experience. Just make sure you’re still aware of your surroundings and don’t get too distracted if you’re running on the streets outside or are in a crowded gym.

group workout, workout, community, fun, time — Working out with friends also makes exercise more enjoyable (and feel quicker). Photo credit: Canva

When it comes to chores like sweeping and washing dishes, listening to music or podcasts can help pass the time. Folding laundry and other menial tasks like that can be done while the TV plays in the background, too. If you’re doing an elaborate project, invite your friends over for a “chore hang” to keep you company while you commit to your task or errand.

Just know that exercise and many other parts of life can feel like a boring eternity, but there are plenty of opportunities and people out there to help make the time fly by.

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A low-dose CT scan can help with early detection of lung cancer. In this image, the tumor is the white nodule in the upper right corner of the black space. Atlas of Pulmonary Pathology/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Health, Research

Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer highlights growing number of nonsmokers diagnosed with the disease – and younger people too

Smoking isn’t the only risk factor, and screening can miss those who never smoked.

Good Partner

10/22/2026

Estelamari Rodriguez

When many people think of an average lung cancer patient, they often imagine an older man smoking. But the face of lung cancer has changed. Over the past 15 years, more women, never smokers and younger people are being diagnosed with lung cancer.

In fact, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death among women, and more women die from lung cancer than breast, ovarian and colorectal cancer each year. The American Lung Association reports that while lung cancer rates have risen by 79% for women over the last 44 years, they decreased by 43% for men. And for the first time in history, there are more young women than men diagnosed with lung cancer.

News about Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer diagnosis on Oct. 13, 2026, sparked discussion about increasing rates of the disease among people who have never smoked. Leo reportedly is not a smoker. Potential causes for the disease include environmental exposures and genetics, and recognizing the diverse factors that can increase someone’s risk of lung cancer – regardless of their smoking history – is essential for timely and appropriate screening and treatment.

Cancer that is found at the earliest stages, like that of the pope, can be treated with surgery and cured for both smokers and nonsmokers. The challenge is that people who have never smoked are not currently included in lung cancer screening guidelines, and tumors are often only found by chance.

As a thoracic oncologist, I have seen many younger women and never smokers walk into my clinic with a new diagnosis of lung cancer. Particularly for never smokers, lung cancer is unexpected for both patients and their doctors, which can often lead to delays in diagnosis. Researchers have described this trend of increasing lung cancer rates among women in different parts of the world and are starting to understand why cases are on the rise.

Lung cancer in women

The first explanation of why rates of lung cancer in women have increased is that many started smoking later than men, pushing back their peak in smoking-related lung cancer diagnoses.

Women also started smoking in the years when filtered cigarettes were most commonly used. This led to an increased risk of a type of cancer called adenocarcinoma due to the way cigarette filters distribute tobacco smoke to the outer parts of the lungs. Some studies suggest that women are more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of exposure to tobacco and cigarette smoke, including second-hand smoke, and may develop lung cancer after fewer years of smoking compared to men.

However, it is important to note that most people diagnosed today with lung cancer are not active smokers. About 20% of women with lung cancer have never smoked – higher than for men with lung cancer who’ve never smoked.

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An increasing number of lung cancer diagnoses are among people who never smoked.

Lung cancer risk factors

Besides smoking and secondhand smoke, there are several other lung cancer risk factors. These include a family history of cancer and exposure to asbestos, radon and air pollution.

Exposure to carcinogens in the workplace in the form of inhaled chemicals such as arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, silica and nickel is still a concern in some parts of the world. The potential lung cancer risk of e-cigarette and marijuana smoke is still under study but of potential concern.

Recently, researchers have also found that genetics can play a role in lung cancer risk in some patients with a strong history of lung cancer. Studies of these families have helped identify potential susceptibility genes for lung cancer and environmental risk factors.

Like BRCA1 and BRCA2 in breast cancer, alterations in genes that promote or protect against tumor development can contribute to lung cancer development. Researchers have yet to identify specific mutations that may predispose individuals to lung cancer. However, studying familial genetic predispositions can help elucidate how lung cancer develops and lead to new biomarkers for early cancer detection in high-risk groups.

Lung cancer screening

In 2021, the United States Preventive Services Task Force updated its lung cancer screening guidelines to include younger patients with less smoking history. Now, lung cancer screening is recommended for adults ages 50 to 80 who have smoked at least one pack per day for 20 years, current smokers and former smokers who quit smoking within the last 15 years. Women at risk for lung cancer can talk to their doctors about ordering a low-dose CT scan for lung cancer screening.

Nationwide, more than 70% of eligible women undergo breast cancer screening but less than 6% of all eligible smokers pursue lung cancer screening. Researchers estimate that these new screening guidelines will increase the number of women eligible for lung cancer screening by 40% by including those at a younger age who have less smoking exposure.

A low-dose CT scan can help with early detection of lung cancer. In this image, the tumor is the white nodule in the upper right corner of the black space. Atlas of Pulmonary Pathology/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Lung cancer diagnosis

In recent years, increasing understanding of the genetic changes that can lead to cancer and how to harness the immune system to treat cancer has led to new targeted therapies and immunotherapies that have improved the prognosis of patients with lung cancer. Women tend to have a better lung cancer prognosis than men, especially if they never smoked and have tumors with molecular changes that can be treated with targeted therapies.

However, lung cancer symptoms may go unrecognized in women. Symptoms of lung cancer can include coughing, shortness of breath, overwhelming fatigue and pain in the back, chest or shoulder, which could be confused for other ailments. Because women tend to be slightly younger when diagnosed than men, patients may be able to tolerate symptoms longer and delay seeking medical attention. Physicians also might not attribute these symptoms to lung cancer due to a patient’s younger age.

Recognizing the early symptoms of lung cancer, expanding lung cancer screening eligibility and testing for genetic biomarkers to select the best therapy are some of the steps that could help address the global epidemic of lung cancer in women.

This is an updated version of an article published on Feb. 1, 2023.

Estelamari Rodriguez, Associate Director of Community Outreach in Thoracic Oncology, University of Miami

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: LWA/Stone via Getty Images – Older people may confuse memories rather than forgetting them altogether.

Health, Research

Why does your brain mix up memories? A new study examines how memories are misplaced in your brain’s filing cabinets

A new study explores how aging changes the way our brains store and retrieve experiences.

Good Partner

10/19/2026

Ian McDonough

Associate Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University, State University of New York

Old age and forgetfulness seem to go hand in hand. But my colleagues and I found that memories actually becomes less precise, not entirely forgotten. Our study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows how the brain blends related experiences as you age rather than replaying the exact one you need.

Memory is a complicated process. Even when everything’s working as it should, the way people remember specific events has many parts.

Say you have a conversation with a friend. The first stage of memory is when you’re experiencing, feeling and perceiving details of an event as it happens. The second stage involves storing these details in your brain’s file cabinet. The third stage covers when you need to search that file cabinet for just the right file when, a week later, you want to remember that conversation with your friend. This last retrieval stage is what many people think of as memory.

Imagine that when your brain was retrieving information from that conversation with your friend, it accidentally combined details from that conversation with one you had with your spouse that morning. When you then try to remember the conversation with your friend, you actually pull the file for the conversation with your spouse instead. This kind of mix-up might be an example of what happens with the aging brain.

Why it matters

Remembering people and events is important for many social activities. Confusing people’s names can be embarrassing. The fear of confusing memories can even lead to social isolation.

Scientists already know that confusing memories happens more often than forgetting them altogether. What’s less clear is how the brain gets confused.

My team’s study tried to understand when in the memory process these mix-ups happen and how the brain’s memory center, called the hippocampus, plays a role.

The hippocampus is involved in all stages of memory. The patterns of neural firing that occur during the first stage of memory – the initial experience of talking with your friend – often recur while your brain is filing that memory away and later when retrieving it.

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The hippocampus is critical to memory.

For our study, we scanned the brains of young, middle-aged and older adults while they went through those same three stages of memory. While in the scanner, they briefly saw images of a face at the top of the screen and an image of either a scene or an object, such as a forest or an apple, on the bottom of the screen.

We told participants to imagine the person at the top interacting in the scene or with the object. Each image pair served as a separate “event.”

They then relaxed for 20 minutes while we continued to record their brain activity. Finally, they took a memory test in which a face they had previously seen reappeared on top with four images below. Participants had to remember which of those images had previously been paired with the face. We repeated this test several times to gauge how well people remembered links between faces and scenes and objects across events.

We found that older people had more memory mix-ups than young adults. For instance, they were more likely to falsely remember a face that was initially paired with an apple as having been paired with a forest. Older people were also less likely to repeat the same brain activity patterns seen when they first experienced, stored and retrieved a specific memory. Surprisingly, even when older adults did repeat the original brain patterns, they were even more likely to confuse their memories.

Our study provides new evidence that the hippocampus is inappropriately changing memories between different memory phases as one gets older.

What still isn’t known

Research in young adults, including those in our study, suggests that the hippocampus is supposed to engage in the same neural firing patterns when remembering an event as when first experiencing it.

But the older adults who made more memory mix-ups than younger participants showed these same neural patterns. So what is the brain signature when older adults get a memory right? Are other brain regions outside the hippocampus helping? We did not get a good answer for these questions from our study.

What’s next

Researchers are still learning how different brain regions talk to one another. One of the next frontiers in neuroscience is understanding how electrically stimulating the hippocampus prevents memory loss or restores lost memories.

Future interventions might try to strengthen the hippocampus to prevent it from changing a memory after it’s stored. Researchers already have some ideas for this: intensive exercise, mindfulness training, brain stimulation and even recording memory cues on smartphones.

But researchers still need to investigate whether changing the hippocampus can lead to stable, consistent memories over time.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Todd Lookingbill – Urban parks are great places to soak in the outdoors without planning an elaborate trip.

Health, Well-being

Getting outside despite your 9‑to‑5 job can improve your mental health – here’s how to spend time in nature during and around working hours

Small outdoor habits can make the workday healthier.

Good Partner

9/11/2026

Todd Lookingbill

The modern workday unfolds largely indoors. Long hours spent commuting, sitting in meetings and staring at screens can make time outdoors feel like a luxury. Finding time for nature in an already packed workday can feel impossible, especially if you think nature only “counts” when it involves hiking boots and camping gear.

But a growing body of research suggests that nature’s benefits don’t require an exotic vacation getaway or weekend adventure. Even brief, routine interactions with green space can reduce stress, improve mood and promote overall well-being.

I spent the spring of 2026 teaching and studying urban landscapes in Denmark, a country consistently ranked among the happiest in the world. I expected to find thoughtfully designed parks, courtyards and bicycle paths. I did see those things. But what surprised me was how seamlessly people moved through those spaces as part of their ordinary lives.

These green spaces weren’t aspirational destinations, reserved for special occasions. They were places to eat lunch, meet friends, walk through on the way home from work, or just pause for a few quiet moments. Getting outside seemed a part of the natural rhythm of the day.

Denmark‘s outdoor culture stemmed not only from the creation of a meticulously planned network of parks, but also from the way green spaces were fundamentally woven into the routines of everyday life.

A wooden bench in one of Copenhagen’s forest therapy parks invites people to sit and soak in their surroundings. Todd Lookingbill

Everyday parks, everyday benefits

Evidence linking time spent in nature with health benefits has increasingly shaped public policy. In the U.S., for example, the National Park Service’s Healthy Parks Healthy People and ParkRx initiatives reflect a growing recognition that access to parks contributes to well-being.

For many Americans, however, the word “park” brings to mind iconic national parks such as Yellowstone, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon. Yet visiting parks of all kinds can improve your overall health. The greatest public health value may come not from the parks people visit once in a lifetime but from those close enough to visit again and again.

My own research on Civil War battlefield parks illustrates this point. These are parks that were established to commemorate historic conflicts that were frequently fought on the fringes of major metropolitan areas. Consequently, many of these landscapes preserve forests, grasslands and trails within easy reach of millions of Americans.

Because they’re accessible without extensive travel or planning, they can become places people return to repeatedly – such as during a lunch break or after work. Reframing the notion of “park” opens up millions of acres of land for everyday uses.

Designing for everyday nature

At the University of Richmond, where I work, a stream restoration projects became an opportunity to rethink how nature fits into campus life. Landscape architects designed an Eco-Corridor, as the project became known. It has walking paths, gathering spaces and seating areas for quiet reflection alongside flowing streams and native vegetation.

The result was a landscape that supports biodiversity and improves water quality while also creating places for students, faculty and staff to walk between meetings, eat lunch alfresco or spend a few quiet moments outside during the workday. Its ongoing care depends on an army of volunteers who spread mulch, remove invasive plants and tend the community garden. For these volunteers, stewardship between classes and meetings meant another opportunity to interact with nature.

Students walk through the ‘Eco-Corridor’ at the University of Richmond. Haley Herrmann

What we learned was that nature doesn’t have to compete with work, studying or everyday responsibilities. Thoughtful landscape design can make spending time outdoors, even if only for a few short minutes, feel like a normal part of the day.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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More for You

Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer highlights growing number of nonsmokers diagnosed with the disease – and younger people too

Lung cancer in women

Lung cancer risk factors

Lung cancer screening

Lung cancer diagnosis

Why does your brain mix up memories? A new study examines how memories are misplaced in your brain’s filing cabinets

Why it matters

What still isn’t known

What’s next

Getting outside despite your 9‑to‑5 job can improve your mental health – here’s how to spend time in nature during and around working hours

Everyday parks, everyday benefits

Designing for everyday nature

Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer highlights growing number of nonsmokers diagnosed with the disease – and younger people too

New world map makes Africa look bigger: what’s the fuss about? Cartographers explain

Gen Z communicates differently in the workplace, but older colleagues can still decode them

Generous paternal leave policies improve maternal and newborn health, family finances and workplace equality

Why does your brain mix up memories? A new study examines how memories are misplaced in your brain’s filing cabinets

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New Russian research suggests that the human lifespan could be up to 156 years

Screen time guidelines for kids and adolescents have shifted as research paints a more nuanced picture

ER doctor and mom sets the record straight for parents of kids with e-bikes and e-scooters