Wake-up, go to school, eat, work, go to sleep. Wake-up, go to school, eat, work, go to sleep. This has been my routine ever since the beginning of quarantine; my hours, days, weeks, and even months have all been a mesh to me. I find myself constantly checking my calendar app to see what month we are in. Before isolation, I could tell you what day of the week, month, and the year we were in without giving it a second thought, but now I have lost all notion of time. I am walking mundanely through quarantine. This phenomenon is not only occurring to me, but to millions of people worldwide. Because of social isolation and quarantine, time has adopted a feeling of being ‘warped’.
Time, as a definition, is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole. This idea of time, although it may seem very simple on the surface, it is very complex. Even though this definition seems very rigid, many philosophers and psychologists have debated over the notion of time being fluid. There are countless amounts of research and studies yet we have only scratched the surface on what we know about time.
The philosopher, Aristotle, once mentioned how time was not a type of change, but instead, something that was dependent on change. Time cannot exist or be categorized on its own, but it relies on what changes and what stays the same. It is observed from the perspective of before and after, in the present and in the past, in the beginning, and in the end. This is a clear example of the 2020 pandemic; the coronavirus is the definition of change itself. Now, because of the constant worry, time has lost its measurement of days and has adopted a measurement of coronavirus cases and deaths. Recently, psychologists have taken an interest in the effects of this psychological time warp and have begun studies to better understand it.
Ruth Ogden, a psychologist that focuses on the psychology of time perception at Liverpool, made a survey on the relationship between those self-reported experiences of time with respect to mood, physical activity, levels of isolation, anxiety, and depression. The results were interesting, Ogden mentions that “half say it’s going quickly, half say it’s going slowly”. This can be explained with retrospective and perspective time. Dan Zakay, a professor at the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, explains this same concept. Retrospective time perception evokes the recollection of past events and how long they lasted, and prospective time involves judging the duration of an event at the present moment. Therefore, in quarantine, since time is retrospective, those who stay indoors might believe that their days are long, but in the bigger picture, since they have not done much, their months feel short. On the other hand, frontline workers who are constantly working, find their days short, but they are months long since they are constantly stacking memories of their events.
Another research mentions how these types of time distortions can be closely related to mental health problems. Psychologists have found that the sense of time can be linked to the health of each individual. Those who show signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder are said to perceive time slower compared to those who did not. Another health psychologist Alison Holman from the University of California Irvine, mentions how there has been an increase in mental health disorders due to the psychological effects of COVID-19. Just like the previous research, she also found that these people also sensed time deaccelerating. She worries that this pandemic will be a defining trauma that will cause a significant amount of psychological effects on the population.
This coronavirus pandemic has brought a lot of uncertainty into the lives of everyone. We do not know if we will spend Christmas with our family, we do not know if there will be a vaccine soon, and we are stuck with hopes of a change. No one is sure if we are just at the beginning of this headache or if we are in the final stretch; there is so much that remains to be seen. Our sense of time has not only warped because of fear and worries but because we do not know what we are up against.
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