It’s not their imagination. Psychology has a term for it: “temporary dissociation”—when the present becomes disconnected from the continuum of time—and it plays an important role in how we experience and respond to trauma.
“One of the most fundamental and important and underlying principles, very important to our ability to function, is that we have a sense of the flow of time,” said Alison Holman, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine. He recently published research showing that most Americans experienced at least some temporary disfigurement during the pandemic era.
This finding, she said, could hinder recovery from the pandemic: “When people have a really constrained sense of time, they have a hard time moving forward. They have difficulty getting back into their lives and focusing on rebuilding their sense of the future.”
It is normal to focus on the present, leaving the past and the future. But if you often don’t know what day of the week it is or can’t remember that something important in your life happened a day, a month or a year ago, or feel like the past and future are missing If so, a more serious time warp may be at work.
In an August paper for the journal Psychological Trauma, Dr. Holman and co-authors reported on a series of questions asked from a panel of 5,661 individuals—such as the extent to which they were “focused on the present moment” (76.9% reported that they were “focused on the present moment”). said they sometimes felt that way), “felt unsure about what time or day it was” (46%) or “forgot about what just happened or the sequence of events you experienced feeling vague about” (35%).
The researchers combined the responses to create an index of how intensely someone experienced the blurry time. They found that more than half of Americans experienced most of these maladies at least sometime during the pandemic.
Ian Phillips, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Johns Hopkins University, has noticed some unusual studies measuring the blurring of time. In 1962, French spelunker Michel Sifre spent 60 days in a cave without sunlight, clocks or watches. He called his research partners to the surface via landline at mealtimes, before bedtime, and upon waking, so that they could track his time without him knowing.
After some time, he would try to count up to 120, one second at a time. It took him five minutes. When their experiment ended after 60 days, they thought only 35 days had passed. In other words, his sense of time was completely shattered. He repeated the experiment 10 years later with a stretch of seven months and not only lost his time again but succumbed to severe depression.
Or consider a particularly wild experiment from 1961: People were asked to estimate 5-second intervals on a platform being pushed either toward or away from a cliff. Those thrown to the side experienced 20% slower of the time than those thrown away.
An important finding of this research is that the blurring of time is related to stress. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo developed what is known as the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, which included nearly five dozen questions on attitudes and perceptions of the past, present, and future. Studies from the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory show that a balanced time perspective, one that is neither stuck in the past nor fatalistic about the future, contributes strongly to well-being.
Dr. Phillips said, “It’s really hard to separate. Does the blurring of time give people mental health problems, or is it just related to that?”
Your Ph.D. In 1993, Dr. Holman considered an experimental study at the time, but the types of experiments approved by the ethics panel—such as asking subjects to give a speech or hold their hand in particularly cold water—do not equate to trauma. Were.
Then, she met a co-worker who had encountered a series of firearms that swept through Laguna Beach and Malibu, Calif., that year, destroying hundreds of homes and displacing residents. The Los Angeles Times reported one resident saying of the firearms: “It’s hell, man. I’m looking forward to seeing the devil come out sometime now.”
Dr. Holman quickly surveyed the displaced residents within 36 hours of evacuation. After several months of follow-up, she and her colleague Roxanne Cohen Silver concluded that those who experienced the most severe temporary dislocations immediately after the fire experienced the most distress a year later.
In other words, excessive periods of blurring can be a warning sign that someone is going through a stressful event – covid, wildfire or any kind of grief or disruption in life – after a long time to be traumatized and move on. the risk of fighting.
What to do? Psychologists have developed time perspective therapy (a type of talk therapy, not drug-based) that appears to help at least some people.
Dr. Phillips of Johns Hopkins initially approached the study of time as a philosopher, and suggested some simple advice for those who lost their sense of time:
“If you want to report that time is dragging on, my life is fading away, maybe just trying to inject more specific or unique experiences into it… fingers.”