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Although time is a set duration of hours, minutes and seconds, the perception of time can vary dramatically based on the individual and especially during times of high stress and uncertainty such as disasters, recessions and most recently the COVID-19 lockdown. For example, ask anyone when a specific event occurred during the pandemic and they are likely to respond with, “That happened three months ago. Or did that happen three years ago?”
While there have been studies on the feeling that there is not enough time or experiencing time as moving too slowly, Baylor University sociologists Matthew Andersson, Ph.D., and Paul Froese, Ph.D., investigated this sense of multifaceted time perceptions during the pandemic and their effects on mental well-being. Their findings – using national Gallup data collected in spring 2021 in the middle of the pandemic – were published in the journal Time & Society.
“We know from existing research that people often experience time in altered ways whenever disasters strike, and we wanted to see if that was true during the pandemic as well,” Andersson said.
The Baylor researchers found that Americans during the pandemic generally reported some degree of feeling rushed while also perceiving multiple types of time distortion involving slowness, quickness and days and weeks blending together. This disorientation also was frequently reported alongside other pandemic-related stressors, including economic strain, working from home, homeschooling a child and severe household conflict.
Together, they complicated how people perceive time by disrupting routines and creating experiences of trauma, adding to the decline in mental well-being and an increase in feelings of loneliness.
Time disorientation and mental well-being
The top three findings of the study all demonstrate the connection between altered time perception and the mental states of an individual.
“If time does not seem to be moving ‘normally,’ it is generally related to lower levels of mental well-being, such as increased depressive, anxiety symptoms or a lessened sense of control,” Andersson said. “We think this is because people tend to feel grounded or calm when they feel like time is moving as it should.”
Secondly, the researchers found that individuals can often experience these time disorientations in multiple and contradictory ways, which can be related to even lower well-being.
“Feeling rushed and feeling that time is slow are kind of opposites, but they are both related to having this sense of multifaceted blending of time,” Froese said. “We can show very clearly how these new stresses that were brought on by the pandemic created heightened senses of disorientation in terms of time.”
More importantly, they found these time disorientations were affected by social, familial, physical and work situations, which created lower levels of mental well-being.
“Specific forms of stress we were seeing during the pandemic, such as financial hardship, homeschooling, working from home and severe household conflict, all had relationships to experiencing different kinds of time distortions,” said Andersson.
This was more evident in younger people “because it [lockdown] probably upended their daily routines in a much more dramatic way than it would have in somebody who's retired,” said Froese.
Experience of time
The rushed pace of industrialized society existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the stressors associated with the pandemic added to the feelings of time being out of control.
“Our approach to capturing experiences of time rests on the assumption that individuals relate to time in complex ways,” Froese said. “We found original evidence to suggest that experiences of quickness, being rushed, slowness and indistinct boundaries of days all coincide, and that these multiple disorientations each relate to diminished mental wellbeing, to objective work and family demands, and to widespread exposures to pandemic-related stressors.”
The survey was conducted as part of the Baylor Religion Survey, one of the most extensive national surveys of American religious beliefs, values and behaviors that produces unique data concerning religion, health and community in America today. The 2021 data collection by Gallup contained a section devoted to how the pandemic affected Americans’ activities, including how the pandemic changed the emotional lives of Americans.
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Dr. Paul Froese is a professor of sociology and a research fellow for the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has been teaching and researching at Baylor since 2002.
Dr. Matthew Andersson’s research focuses on health inequality as it unfolds across the life course. Specifically, he researches educational and socioeconomic inequalities in mental and physical well-being as they relate to childhood, adolescent and adulthood factors.
Both experts are available to speak with media about this important topic - simply click on either expert's icon to arrange an interview time today.
