Once upon a time there was a Greek man called Melisander. The god of time, Cronos, gave him a gift that allowed him to make time pass more quickly or more slowly. The god warned Melisander to make good use of the gift, but instead he used his new power solely to his own advantage and did not share it with anyone else.

After many years, Cronos appeared to Melisander and told him that because he had abused his power, he would lose it. Melisander asked for one final wish, asking to return to the day before he received it, when he was still a young man. While Cronos granted his wish, he was outraged at Melisander's deception and decided to punish not only him but the whole human race. Cronos decided that time would pass more quickly when people are having fun or are with others, and more slowly when they are bored.

We all have a relationship with time: it punctuates our every action. Everything we do requires time. We divide our days into hours and minutes, and our lives into past, present and future. These divisions help us make sense of the world, to create structure and meaning from its otherwise relentless flow.

Our need to exert control over the passage of time is reflected in the language we use to describe our relationship with it: we try to 'save time', 'make time' and 'spend time wisely'. However, any sense we have that we can control or limit the passing of time is, ultimately, purely illusory. The punishment meted out to Melisander in mythology may serve to explain this illusion: we apply our own subjectivity to something that is entirely independent of us.

A whole range of factors may determine the extent to which we are aware of the passage of time, including our age, our jobs, how time-rich or time-poor we feel, and where we live. With this awareness, we then constantly make decisions about how we spend our time. Many of us may also dedicate time plus money and effort to activities, products or interventions designed to halt or conceal its passing, from exercise to diets to plastic surgery. We may also see artistic or philosophical endeavours - whether that be painting, literature or philosophical treatises - as an attempt to reject time's passing and instead to capture or even transcend a moment in time.

From a personal point of view, I am and have always been preoccupied with time, both daily and more globally. As a teacher, I work very long hours and have a long commute. I regularly give up a day at the weekend to catch up on my work and feel squeezed from all sides. I often find myself sacrificing sleep, relaxation, exercise or just doing nothing to my workload.

More widely, I have always been aware of and anxious about the passage of time. My anxiety, plus the fact that I have been in or worked in education for most of my life, has locked me into the habit of undertaking annual reviews of what I have achieved over the last year, primarily at the end of each academic year but also - in common with many people - around my birthday and at the start of each calendar year. This cycle, along with a general sense of dissatisfaction with my life, then imposes a greater sense of urgency in terms of how I spend my time; 'shoulds' and 'coulds' tend to prevail and make it harder for me to take time to relax or to detach myself from time and just be in the moment.

The time paradox

I have recently read The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University. In it, he identifies and then unpicks the paradoxes inherent in our relationship with time, the chief of which is the fact that while time regulates every choice or decision that we make, we seldom recognise the profound impact that our attitude to time has on all aspects of our lives.

Beyond this, he has identified six approaches to time, and devised an exercise that enables you to identify which relationship to time is your most dominant. Each of these approaches can play its own key role in determining how we think and act.

The six approaches are:

• Past negative: I often think about what I should have done differently in my life
• Past positive: I reflect positively on the past
• Present fatalistic: I believe that destiny determines many aspects of my life
• Present hedonistic: Ideally, I should aim to live every day as if it were my last
• Future: Respecting future deadlines and not getting behind with work is more important than having fun this evening
• Future transcendental: I believe that only my body is destined to die