It’s Time

Older readers, familiar with the 1972 Australian Labor Party campaign slogan ‘It’s Time’ (and given my obvious interest in the upcoming American election), might think that this post is another political commentary. Younger readers, who are fans of the indie pop group, Imagine Dragons might think I am referencing the band’s 2012 anthemic Billboard hit song ‘It’s Time’ which features a dystopian video clip and lyrics that describe resistance to change in the face of great turmoil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENM2wA_FTg

Hearing a phrase like ‘it’s time’ may have a particular relevance for any one of us, depending on where and when it occurred in our lives. It revives memories and provides a signpost to thoughts, feelings and experiences in our personal histories. There are certain words and phrases that will be inextricably linked with the coronavirus pandemic: COVID, quarantine, herd immunity, PPE, ventilator, social distancing, lockdown, flatten the curve, deep clean, super-spreader, and zoom meeting, are just a few. When we hear these in the future, we will be catapulted back in time to 2020.

Other, more whimsical, words have also appeared: ‘covidiot – a person who ignores public health advice’, or ‘covexit – the strategy for exiting lockdown’, and, while excellent contemporary descriptors, they will probably not make the cut. However, one word which might usefully be added to the ongoing lexicon is ‘blursday’ – an unspecified day because of lockdown’s disorienting effect on time. The economic researcher, David Wessel, described this year as: ‘2020 is a unique leap year – it has 29 days in February, 300 days in March and 5 years in April’. This captures the essence of ‘blursday’.

During the pandemic, and particularly during lockdown, a number of commentators have described how our perception of time has changed. Daily routines have been sabotaged by the need to work from home; our isolation from family, friends and colleagues; the limitations on our ability to venture into the world; the round-the-clock availability of the virtual world; the lack of differentiation between weekdays and weekends; and the ongoing uncertainty of the future. The feeling of being ‘stuck in the present’, with an inability to plan ahead, has been called ‘enforced presentism’ by the American anthropologist, Jane Guyer, and it plays with our sense of time. ‘COVID time’ is now often measured using its own chronological metric – as the daily number of new cases and deaths, the amount of time spent in lockdown, or the timeframe for a vaccine to be available. This has been especially noticed during the second lockdown and the mental health consequences are being increasingly noted.

‘COVID time’ affects people in different ways. Some people feel as if their days are sped up, while others sense that time has slowed down significantly. A recent study by Dr Philip Gable (Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Alabama) found that in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, nearly 50% of people experienced time dragging, whereas 24% perceived it to be speeding up.

One of the reasons we easily relate to ‘blursday’ is because we have lost what cognitive neuroscientists call ‘temporal anchors’. Typically, we take certain events that are cyclical (for example weekends or our weekday routines) and anchor ourselves to them. The loss of these anchors challenges our ability to locate ourselves easily in time.

But time perception is also described as a tug-of-war between two concepts: prospective and retrospective time. Prospective time involves judging the duration of an event as it is occurring, and this is altered by our emotional state. Strong negative emotions like anxiety, fear or disgust, slow our experience of time. In immediate threatening situations, our internal sense of time speeds up relative to actual time. This is vital to prepare us to take action to protect ourselves or others. In these situations, ‘real time’ feels much slower. This distortion of time is particularly described by frontline workers in emergency services where they are constantly challenged to act quickly. It is not unusual to hear that ‘things seemed like they were in slow motion’.

Another form of prospective time where our sense of time is slowed, is when there is a lack of stimulation. The tedium of unstructured and uneventful days provides no hooks for time to be measured against and time seems to pass excruciatingly slowly. Most people who find ‘pandemic time’ to be ‘interminable time’ speak of the relentlessness of their situation, coupled with the anxiety and helplessness it evokes.  Unsurprisingly, the study of boredom has also become fashionable during the pandemic and there is a fascinating discussion of the topic in a recent New Yorker article ‘What does boredom do to us – and for us?’: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-does-boredom-do-to-us-and-for-us?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_082220&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea0be62ddf9c72dc8d2148&cndid=50760891&hasha=fcdb962c689d57dad2706b0d897ceaea&hashb=c2940a48cc27d985cf0ce314cc902c2982a249a8&hashc=169ae56accda17611ba0c9f6f350d744cf88dc8518dec515932b6b508513df1b&esrc=bounceX&utm_term=TNY_Daily

Conversely, prospective time can also be felt to pass very rapidly.  When actual time is filled with new positive emotional or cognitively challenging (but not distressing) experiences, time will seem to move much more quickly – think of how quickly ‘time flies’ when we are enjoying ourselves or immersed in an activity.

However, we also need to understand that time is experienced differently when we consider retrospective time. Retrospective time perception evokes the recollection of past events and how long they lasted. So, when we reflect back on emotionally-charged experiences – whether bad or good – they will seem to have lasted longer, as stronger memories are stored due to the dopamine-mediated emotional impact of the event. When new experiences are lacking, or emotion is not attached to our days (the boredom felt during lockdown), then looking back at these times feels curiously shorter as there are fewer memories stored due to the absence of a strong neurochemical emotional stimulus to encode the memory.

As Jackie Rocheleau points out in a recent article in Scientific American, ‘A Monday Is a Tuesday Is a Sunday as COVID-19 Disrupts Internal Clocks’, people experience both prospective and retrospective modes of time on different occasions. If we are bored and clock watching, the hours might seem to drag; however, with the passage of time, looking back on shutdown with its absence of memorable events differentiating one day from the next, the experience is not likely to feel nearly as long. This seems to be the experience of many of us reflecting on the first lockdown – it seemed to pass rather quickly.

Our warped experience of time raises the question: can we create a more normal sense of time during lockdown? The answer is ‘yes’. Establishing a routine and structure to our days reasserts control. Factoring in different ‘experiences’ on particular days establishes some new temporal anchors – even if these are just menial tasks.  

One important thing that can help is to create an emotional state called ‘approach motivation’ – the feeling we get as we set out to achieve a goal. Creating new goals and breaking these down into daily achievable tasks, helps time pass more normally. This is enhanced by embracing social isolation as an opportunity and not a chore. (I am not using this as a rationalization for blogging!).

I was wondering which artwork in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection might best exemplify this and I decided that ‘Grandfather clock’ by Maarten Baas is the perfect example. If we ‘accept’ that there is a real grandfather inside the clock steadfastly and studiously keeping time, then it ticks all the boxes. Clearly, he has embraced social isolation and has found a productive and vital role. His job keeps him attentive and engaged as it is both valued and open to scrutiny. Further, he is in his own small way, keeping track of the duration of the pandemic.