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When was the last time you raced against an unforgiving clock? Perhaps you skipped breakfast, shelled out for a taxi or missed time with your family. Many of us have become slaves to time, with huge portions of our day spent chasing appointments and deadlines. But what is this thing we're trying to beat?

We tend to imagine time as constant and non-negotiable, ticking by somewhere out in the world, impossible to slow or stop. Yet an emerging scientific picture is that such "clock time" isn't a physical phenomenon. It's a mathematical tool useful for coordinating our interactions, but with no independent existence of its own. As with other key innovations, such as money, we can no longer get by without it. But disproving the myth of the clock can help us to focus on how life really progresses.

Psychologists have identified the rise of "time famine", where the more efficient and productive we try to be, the more precisely we measure time, and the more we try to pack into our busy schedules, the less time we actually feel we have. This has a big impact on quality of life: people experiencing time famine are less likely to do things they enjoy, or help each other.

Time is puzzling in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we're bored; hours race if we're excited. And in certain circumstances, our sense of time can even go in circles, break apart or stop altogether. Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called motion blindness. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. Rather than being mere mistakes, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. Because even scientists don't find any moving river of time: most believe there's no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of "happening" or "becoming" in which the future slips into the past.

Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. What we're left with, when we release ourselves from the cosmic clock, is "lived time": our personal, flexible experience of change.

This gives us a different way of thinking about how our lives progress, probably releasing us from the constant beat of the clock. Lived time is different from clock time because it isn't defined by a numerical counter chopping moments into seconds. It's a creative process that's vital not just for our sense of time but of who we are.

To tackle time famine, remind yourself that the clock is a tool, not a master. In contrast to clock time, lived time expands and grows richer the more we focus on being present. Instead of something we chase and never catch, it's a flow that connects us with each other.