Why the Pandemic Is Messing with Your Sense of Time

One day, more than a month into the pandemic, I skimmed my Twitter feed early in the day and was totally confused. Why were people posting tweets from April 22? I checked Twitter again at night. Same thing happened. People were still sharing tweets from April 22. I was baffled.  It took a few more hours until I realized why: It was April 22.  I don’t know what day, exactly, I thought it was, only that I was sure it was a whole lot later than April. Maybe months later.  Under quarantine, time gets bent out of shape, like Salvador Dali’s clocks. For me, time was speeding up and stretching into the future. Social media, though, seems filled with quips from people who are describing the opposite experience. One tweet was so popular, it was featured on a t-shirt: “2020 is a unique leap year. It has 29 days in February, 300 days in March, 5 years in April.”  Why is this happening? Why is our sense of time so warped?  Psychologists who study the perception of time have been sharing their insights. One is Ruth Ogden, a psychologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK. She has been conducting an ongoing survey of people’s time perception during the pandemic. She told Arielle Pardes of Wired that, of the first 800 or so people who had responded, about half said time was flying and the other half said it had slowed to a crawl. She and other social scientists point to several factors that could be warping our sense of time.  Stress The potential sources of stres...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Memory and Perception Mental Health and Wellness coronavirus COVID-19 Perception Of Time temporal disintegration Source Type: blogs