“But, I would say that everybody's coping with a major stressor right now. “I don't know that I would say everybody is traumatised,” she cautioned. Holman says that there’s a major link between the trauma many people are living through - whether it is racial trauma, economic trauma, or the grief of having lost a loved one - and the loss of a sense of time. This impacts our sense of time.”Īfter an entire year of this (it was 10 months ago that journalist Helen Rosner tweeted about her therapist’s thoughts on the “ infinite present”), people’s distorted sense of time is taking a big toll on their mental health. Similarly, and on a larger scale, the usual seasonal rituals which reflect time like holidays, vacations, and celebrations have also been muted. We are not experiencing the subtle or implicit indicators of time. Thus, the daily rituals, unconscious and conscious signals - like departing from one's home, commuting to the workplace, interacting with people other than those with whom you live, leaving the office, and reentering home - are not present. “As many people work from home, they do not have the physical and emotional separations between their work and home time. “As people are extracted from their usual routines, they are not experiencing the usual transitional time which also helps signal changes and the passage of time,” Dana Dorfman, PhD, a psychotherapist in New York City, told Refinery29.
With fewer daily routines and significant events to mark the days, weeks, and seasons, it makes sense that people are feeling like their sense of time is off, experts say. Otherwise, I would have continued to have the disorienting sense that time is fake, slippery. Whereas previous months felt like they lasted a million years, March has felt relatively normal because I’ve developed a method through which I can literally see the passage of time in front of me. I schedule everything for similar reasons that others who are in their homes almost 24/7 during the pandemic have tried to get a handle on their lives by putting on work clothes or having a designated “office space” in their house: This ritual has actually helped me feel more grounded. Lately I’ve been structuring my whole day in Google Calendar, dedicating each neatly segmented block of time to writing a story, exercising, and even things like “find and order new duvet cover.” I’ve been making these actions into “events” not because I’m particularly organised (I tend to vacillate between hyper-organised Virgo and “chaotic is my middle name” depending on the day, task, and mood), but instead because I’ve been feeling increasingly like I’m losing my grip on time, and thus reality.
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