How living in a pandemic distorts our sense of time

For instance, two surveys of more than 5,600 people taken during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States showed that roughly two-thirds of respondents reported feeling strangely out of sync. Days felt as if they were blurring together, the present loomed overly large and the future felt uncertain, researchers reported in August in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy. “All of a sudden everything went on stop.… We could not be the people we were used to being in the world anymore,” says health psychologist [and professor] Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine.