While COVID-19 famously impairs its victims’ senses of taste and smell, many of us who have managed to stay healthy over the last 16 months have developed a different kind of symptom: an impaired sense of time.
For some, it feels as if the pandemic has been going on for a decade or more.
For me, it’s the opposite; time seems to have telescoped.
The months of trepidation and lockdown have compressed themselves. I feel like I just saw my dentist, and yet it’s been more than two years.
“For humans,” said psychologist Ruth Ogden, “time is not like a clock. Time is super flexible.” I called Ogden, who teaches at Liverpool John Moores University, because she is an expert on how people perceive time.
During the pandemic lockdowns, she said, she surveyed more than 600 people in the U.K. about how they were experiencing time. Only 20% felt time was passing normally. Of the rest, 40% said time was passing faster, and 40% felt it was passing slower.
Those who had satisfying social contacts tended to report time passing more quickly than those with unsatisfying social lives. But why have some of us lost track of time altogether?
Ogden said the pandemic has robbed us of what she describes as “our temporal markers.”
“If you are working at home, you can eat lunch or go to bed whenever you want,” she said. “All the normal things that separate each day from another and hold us in time are gone. The thing that made Saturday Saturday was that you weren’t going to work, you could lie in, you didn’t have to leave the house.”
Now, every day blurs into the next, a phenomenon that some have dubbed “Blursday.”
Ogden was on maternity leave with her third child when the pandemic first hit. Understandably, her sense of time shifted.
“It was hell, basically,” she told me by phone Thursday morning. “I could not believe there were only 24 hours in a day. It felt waaay longer.”
This is because time really does fly when you are having fun, she said, and it drags when you are not. No one is exactly sure why, as ideally, it should be just the opposite. But emotion is believed to play a major role.
Some researchers have noticed a paradox in the perception of time during the pandemic.
In a BBC radio interview for a segment called “Why Time Flies (and How to Slow it Down),” Duke University physicist Adrian Bejan told host Armando Iannucci that in the early days of the pandemic, many people experienced a slowing of time because we were having a whole new range of experiences and behaviors and our daily lives felt unfamiliar.
