How the Pandemic May Have Distorted Our Sense of Time's Passing

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We are fast approaching the end of the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when looking back at it, we may not have experienced time as moving quite as fast as it actually has. In fact, recent studies show that the disruptions to our everyday routines over the past two years have resulted in widespread and significant distortions to how fast we perceive and remember time as passing, and whether we attend more to the past, present, or future [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

The higher prevalence of distortions to our perception of, and our memories of, the passage of time seem to correlate with the well-documented pandemic rise in psychological abnormalities like depression, loneliness, and stress, as well as with "The Big Quit"—the recent trend of voluntarily resigning from one's job without having another one lined up [3].

Memories of time's passing

Recent research has consistently found a significant distortion to the remembered speed of time's passage during the pandemic [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. The majority of findings suggest that people predominantly recall time as having passed more slowly during COVID-19 [1], [2], [4], [5]. What explains the apparent slowdown of subjective time during the pandemic is still not fully known. However, five recent studies draw on earlier findings of distortions to our experience of the passage of time during stressful and traumatic events to explain the pandemic slow-down of subjective time [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Earlier findings suggest that we often report perceiving time as moving slower during relatively brief but traumatic incidents, such as car crashes, robberies, or incidents of sexual assault [2]. But not only do we perceive time as passing slower during traumatic incidents; time also seems to run slower when we look back at prolonged stressful situations, such as recessions, wars, and pandemics. Joyful, exciting, and novel, unexpected events, like a year abroad in college, an exotic vacation, or pregnancy, can result in a similar experience of time as having passed more slowly.

Memory and temporal markers

Why do memories of stressful, joyful, disruptive, and adventurous periods in our lives result in the subjective feeling of time having passed more slowly? The answer may depend on the association between bodily arousal and memory [2], [3]. Particularly stressful, joyful, disruptive, and adventurous periods in our lives can all cause bodily arousal. Stressful and disruptive periods cause negative, or unpleasant, bodily arousal — for instance, by elevating our stress hormones. Joyful and adventurous periods of our lives cause positive, or pleasant, bodily arousal by elevating chemicals associated with pleasure, such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin.

Arousal-inducing events tend to lay down memories with a greater number of what are known as temporal markers, [3] which break up the otherwise monotone stream of experiences that get laid down in our memory.

By dividing up an otherwise long and undifferentiated stream of content into "memorable" moments, temporal markers slow down how fast your brain replays the narrative content of your memories. These markers thus serve as speed bumps on our ride down memory lane. Accordingly, we often remember time as having passed more slowly when looking back on particularly stressful, joyful, disruptive, or adventurous periods in our lives.

Vacations and the pandemic

To illustrate the phenomenon of distortions to our subjective time experience, think of a time when you went on a long-awaited vacation away from home. Did you experience time passing at different speeds at the beginning and end of your vacation?

Many people report experiencing the first few days of a long-awaited vacation in a different location as lasting substantially longer than they in fact do. The last few days, on the other hand, appear to go by in the blink of an eye.

When vacationing away from home, we are initially exposed to a variety of novel, or less familiar, places and undertake various novel, or less familiar, activities. As a break in our routine has an arousal effect on us, we tend to form memories whose content is more densely populated by temporal markers during the first few days of a vacation. Accordingly, we commonly recall the first few days as lasting longer than they actually did.

But once we become familiar with a location and form a new kind of routine, the events we experience are less arousing and therefore less likely to lay down as many temporal markers. With fewer temporal markers, the content of our memory becomes more general and lacking in details. When we recall more coarse-grained memory content, the span of the remembered time period will seem more compact.

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For many people, the pandemic has been rife with arousal-inducing events, such as unexpected changes to everyday routines, layoffs, fear of infection, hospitalizations, and the traumatic loss of loved ones. These types of arousal-inducing events are likely to lay down memories demarcated by a greater number of temporal markers. As we tend to remember time as passing more slowly when memory content is demarcated by a plethora of temporal markers, those of us who have found the pandemic to be stressful and traumatic are more likely to remember time during the past two years as having passed more slowly.

Newer studies of our memories of time's passage

Although studies of the general population indicate that many people feel that time has passed slowly when looking back at the pandemic [2], studies of younger people have found the opposite to be true: College-age participants are less likely to report experiencing time having slowed — and some report experiencing time as having gone faster [3].

The reason for this discrepancy may be unrelated to age, however. The findings indicating that younger people recall time as having gone by more quickly have been more recent [3]. Accordingly, some sort of acclimation to the pandemic, coupled with fewer lockdowns and restrictions, may have resulted in fewer distortions to how fast people recall time as having passed.

At first glance, we should not expect fewer distortions to people's experiences of time's passage to result in the feeling that time has gone by faster than normal. However, the sudden easing of the distortions of subjective time may have led to a comparative experience of time suddenly flying by.