![]() When a traumatic event feels long in hindsight, people may feel that the trauma is much closer in the rearview mirror than it is in reality. See all our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic Most respondents, 57 percent, said that the preceding 12 months felt longer than a year. Only 9 percent said the preceding 12 months felt precisely like a year, while 34 percent said that time felt shorter, the researchers wrote in July in PLOS One. Ogden and her team asked almost 800 respondents in the United Kingdom to reflect on the start of the pandemic a year after it started. In a similar line of work, experimental psychologist Ruth Ogden of Liverpool John Moores University in England and colleagues are seeking to understand how people might eventually remember the pandemic, and what that could mean for recovery. For instance, respondents who reported that time felt like it was going very slowly also reported higher levels of loneliness, researchers reported in August in Nature Human Behaviour. Other recent research during the pandemic suggests that those experiencing time as moving more slowly seem to struggle with greater mental distress than those who experience time as moving fast. Now Holman hopes that measuring how much people feel like time is falling apart during the pandemic might provide an early indicator of who might need help with recovery. They couldn’t put together the flow from past to present to future,” she says. “People who experienced temporal disintegration … got stuck in that past experience. She found that two years later, the individuals who had lost their sense of time during the fires still reported feeling greater distress than those who had largely kept their temporal bearings. For her dissertation, she interviewed survivors of the southern California fires of 1993 within days of the fires’ onset. Holman first observed how a warped sense of time can hurt people’s well-being as a graduate student in the 1990s. Previous life experience, including preexisting mental health challenges and high levels of lifetime stress or trauma, also heightened one’s likelihood of feeling out of sync. Those who reported greater feelings of time distortion, and thus may be at higher risk of developing mental health problems, included participants ages 18 to 29 and women. For others, the trauma of the past few years combined with this weird perception of time is a worrisome mix: They could be at risk of lingering mental health problems, Holman says. “All of a sudden everything went on stop.… We could not be the people we were used to being in the world anymore,” says health psychologist Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine.įor some people, distortions in time may feel like a strange, somewhat unsettling phenomenon, but one they can shake off. Days felt as if they were blurring together, the present loomed overly large and the future felt uncertain, researchers reported in August in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy. Early findings from those efforts now confirm that the pandemic did lead many people worldwide to experience distortions in their perception of time.įor instance, two surveys of more than 5,600 people taken during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States showed that roughly two-thirds of respondents reported feeling strangely out of sync. Since the initial shutdowns, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists have been scrambling to document people’s changing relationship with the clock. Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research ![]() When those landmarks disappear, days lose their identities. Our time is typically punctuated by events, such as dinner dates or daily commutes, Grondin and his team wrote in October 2020 in Frontiers in Psychology. Days melted together, then weeks, then years.Īs people began wondering about why time felt so out of whack, Simon Grondin, a psychologist at Laval University in Quebec City, and colleagues penned a theory paper seeking to explain the phenomenon. The word captured that sense of time disintegrating as our worlds and routines turned upside down ( SN: 9/14/20). Welcome to “blursday.” Back when the pandemic started, the term hit the zeitgeist. How can my son be starting fifth grade? He was a second grader just a minute ago. ![]() Other times, I feel like I blinked, and three years vanished. In February 2020, during the Before Times, my family traveled to Barcelona, a relatively carefree trip that now feels like a lifetime ago. Time hasn’t made much sense since spring 2020 for many people, myself included.
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