Chapter 13: The Three Levers

If thicker time is the goal, we need a map. Not a vague aspiration. A framework. Something clear enough to act on and simple enough to remember.

Everything in the research points to three systems that determine whether your time is thick or thin. They operate independently, but they compound. Get one working and things improve. Get all three working and the effect is transformative.

The Body. Your nervous system sets the tempo of your temporal experience. This isn't metaphorical. Your heartbeat is a literal timekeeper, with each beat creating a "wrinkle" in subjective duration. Your heart rate variability determines how stable and accurate your temporal perception is. Your circadian rhythm dictates when you're capable of deep engagement and when you're running on fumes. Your body temperature affects the speed of your internal clock. Your cardiovascular fitness determines how much blood, oxygen, and neural fuel reaches the brain regions that process time and encode memory.

When the body is regulated, rested, and fit, your temporal resolution is high. Moments feel distinct. Days feel like days. When the body is stressed, depleted, and running on cortisol, your temporal resolution drops. Days blur. Weeks vanish.

The body lever is about physiology, not willpower.

The Mind. Your brain's encoding system determines how much gets recorded and how richly. This is the novelty mechanism, the attention mechanism, and the memory mechanism working together. When you encounter something new, your brain pays attention. When you pay attention, your brain encodes deeply. When encoding is deep, the experience leaves a substantial footprint in memory. When you look back, there's something there.

When your days are routine, your brain coasts. When you're constantly interrupted, encoding is shallow. When nothing novel happens, the brain doesn't bother recording in detail. The day happened. It just didn't register.

The mind lever is about what you feed your brain: novelty, depth, engagement.

The Architecture. The structure of your life determines how much bandwidth you have for the first two levers. This is the scarcity mechanism, the decision fatigue mechanism, and the agency mechanism. It doesn't matter how well you understand the body and mind levers if your life is structured in a way that leaves you no bandwidth to use them.

Architecture is the school run that eats your morning. The campervan that needs constant repairs. The inbox that demands constant triage. The twenty commitments you said yes to out of obligation. Every unresolved structural drain consumes attention, energy, and cognitive bandwidth that could otherwise be directed toward thick time.

The architecture lever is about what you remove, restructure, and release.

Here's how they interact. A well-regulated body gives you the energy and neural capacity to engage deeply with novel experiences. Deep engagement creates rich memories. Rich memories create the felt sense of a substantial life. But none of that can happen if your life's architecture is consuming all your bandwidth on logistics, obligations, and unresolved drains.

Conversely, a clean architecture frees up bandwidth. With bandwidth available, your brain has the resources to encode richly. With rich encoding, retrospective time expands. And with a regulated body underneath it all, the entire system runs at higher resolution.

The three levers don't just add up. They multiply.

I find it useful to think of them as a diagnostic. When time feels thin, ask three questions:

Is my body regulated? Am I sleeping, moving, breathing in a way that supports a stable nervous system? Or am I running on caffeine and cortisol?

Is my mind engaged? Am I encountering anything new, absorbing anything deeply, learning anything that stretches me? Or am I coasting through days my brain has already templated?

Is my architecture clean? Am I spending my bandwidth on things that matter? Or is it being consumed by structural drains, open loops, and obligations I should have closed months ago?

Most of the time, when I audit honestly, at least one of these is badly off. Often two. Occasionally all three.

The good news is that you don't have to fix all three at once. Even a single lever, adjusted, changes the output. And each lever, once adjusted, tends to create conditions that make the other two easier.

Start moving regularly and your nervous system settles, which frees up cognitive bandwidth, which makes novel engagement easier. Eliminate a major structural drain and your stress drops, which improves your sleep, which improves your body's regulation, which sharpens your temporal resolution. Introduce a single novel experience per week and your dopamine system gets a signal to seek more, which builds motivation, which makes you more likely to move, explore, and restructure.

The levers are the operating system of thicker time. The chapters that follow are the specific adjustments.

But before we get to the practices, there are a few more things worth understanding. Because the way most people think about what thickens time is, like most things in this space, not quite right.