How Living in a Pandemic Distorts Our Sense of Time
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After Spring 2020, time doesn’t mean much for many people, myself included. In February 2020, during the Before Times, my family traveled to Barcelona. Other times, I blink and it feels like three years have disappeared. How can my son start his 5th grade?He was in 2nd grade not long ago.
Welcome to “Blur’s Day”. The term impacted the zeitgeist when the pandemic began. This word captured a sense of time that crumbles as our world and everyday life are turned upside down (SN: September 14, 2020). Days melt together, weeks, and years.
When people began to wonder why time felt so crazy, Simon Grondin, a psychologist at Laval University in Quebec City, and colleagues wrote a theoretical paper that attempted to explain the phenomenon. Our time is usually punctuated by events such as dinner dates and daily commutes, Grondin and his team wrote in October 2020. the forefront of psychologySuch events provide temporary landmarks. When those landmarks disappear, we lose our day-to-day identity. Time loses its definition.
Since the initial shutdown, cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists have struggled to document changes in people’s relationship with the clock. Early findings from these efforts confirm that the pandemic has distorted the perception of time for many people around the world.
For example, two surveys of more than 5,600 people conducted during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States found that about two-thirds of respondents felt strangely out of alignment. I was.The days felt blurry, the present loomed too big and the future felt uncertain, researchers reported in August. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy.
“Suddenly, everything stopped.
For some people, the distortion of time may feel like a strange and somewhat disturbing phenomenon, but it can be shaken off. For others, the trauma of the past few years combined with this strange perception of time is a disturbing combination. They may be at risk of prolonging mental health problems, says Holman.
Participants and women aged 18 to 29 years reported being more sensitive to time distortions and possibly at higher risk of developing mental health problems. Previous life experiences, such as stress and trauma, also increased the likelihood of feeling out of sync.
As a graduate student in the 1990s, Holman first observed how a distorted sense of time undermines people’s well-being. For her paper, she interviewed survivors of the 1993 Southern California fires within days of the fire. Two years later, she found that people who had lost their sense of time in a fire reported feeling greater distress than those who had little sense of time.
“People who have experienced a temporary collapse … got stuck in that past experience.
Now Holman may be able to give an early indication of who needs recovery help by measuring how people feel their time is falling apart during the pandemic. I expect.
Other recent research during the pandemic shows that people who perceive time to be moving slowly appear to suffer greater emotional distress than those who perceive time to be moving fast. suggesting. For example, respondents who reported feeling that time was moving too slowly also reported higher levels of loneliness.Researchers reported in August natural human behavior.
In a similar study, Ruth Ogden, an experimental psychologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England, and her colleagues explored how people ultimately remember the pandemic and what that means for recovery. I’m trying to understand what Ogden and her team asked nearly 800 respondents in the UK to reflect on the beginning of the pandemic, one year after it began.
Only 9% said the last 12 months felt like a year, but 34% said it felt like a short time. pro swanMost respondents (57%) said the past 12 months felt longer than a year.
When in hindsight the traumatic event seems long, people may perceive the trauma in their rearview mirrors to be much closer than it actually is. Ogden and her team speculate that such negative emotions can prolong recovery from the pandemic. Remember, “The longer the pandemic drags on, the more likely it feels to be more recent, and therefore more present,” the team wrote.
Mindfulness training, which pulls people back into the present, is one promising way to overcome distorted perceptions of time, says Olivier Bourdon, a psychologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal (SN: September 26, 2022).
But unlike more limited traumas such as wildfires and mass shootings, the pandemic is not yet in the rearview mirror. Many people are stuck in some sort of limiting present rather than the past. The answer to how to treat people in this case isn’t clear, but Bourdon says it’s important to help people connect with their past, present, and future selves. It’s not good for your health if you’re obsessed with it,” he says.
Research suggests that helping people rebuild a new vision for the future is especially important for well-being. Holman says people “must have a sense of tomorrow.”
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