If you experienced ‘Blursday’ during lockdown, you’re not alone
After two years of mask-wearing, hand sanitising, lockdowns and social distancing, it’s safe to say we’re all experiencing some side effects of going through a global pandemic.
If you feel like time has slowed down or Mondays feel like Wednesdays and Wednesdays feel like Fridays, you’ve likely experienced a feeling recently dubbed ‘Blursday’ - and you’re not the only one.
A team of scientists have now captured what living in ‘Blursday’ is like, and have published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Using data from surveys conducted in nine countries - gathered through 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks - during the first two years of the pandemic, the team of researchers found that feelings of isolation affected our sense of time, including feelings of time grinding to a halt.
Maximilien Chaumon, a researcher at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Épinière in France and coauthor on the study, told The Scientist of how a fellow researcher saw COVID as an opportunity to gain an insight into the complex phenomenon that is our perception of time.
“When we talk about our senses, [not] our sense of time but our sense of vision, touch, and so on, we think about those sensory receptors,” he explained.
“And time perception does not have such receptors. It is a psychological construct, actually, that has a very multifactorial origin that is very complex.”
Chaumon said the pandemic provided the perfect chance to collect data on this concept, explaining that our sense of time is incredibly influenced by our environment, emotional state and how isolated we are, which in turn can affect our wellbeing and mental health.
“This is sort of the angle that triggered this study, in the sense that this massive disruption that COVID-19 created, with its lockdown, on our daily routine, the way we use our time, the way time unfolds during the day, and initial reports of people reporting being lost in their week, not knowing whether it was today or whether it was Monday or Tuesday and so on,” Chaumon added,
By compiling a range of tasks to measure different aspects of our time perception, along with psychological scales that measure anxiety and depression, the team hoped to correlate the tasks and measures.
Wibbly wobbly time causes wibbly wobbly health problems
Theirs isn’t the first to study our perception of time or the effects the pandemic have had on it.
Another study published in 2022, based on surveys conducted in just the US, found that people have been losing their sense of time because of the pandemic, collective trauma caused by it, and additional challenges we’ve faced in recent times, including unemployment, financial hardships, supply shortages, death, and climate change.
E. Alison Holman, a professor in nursing at UC Irvine who has been studying the relationship between trauma and time perception and is a co-author on the study, said in a recent interview that not addressing this change in how we sense time can put us at greater risks in terms of our mental health.
“Having your sense of time get messed up to the extent that it really screws you up in terms of where you see yourself going in your life, in the context of the loneliness that people were experiencing and the social isolation, it’s an open question now that I’m trying to address,” Holman said.
“How does that alter your sense of time? How might the social isolation of the pandemic have contributed to that alteration in your sense of time because you’re spending all of this time by yourself?
"Given that distortions in time perception are a risk factor for mental health problems, our findings have potential implications for public health.”
What can we do to readjust our sense of time?
According to Holman, regaining a sense of time relies on reintegrating our past and present, as well as rebuilding our future.
“When you think about your life and who you are, you have a past. Your past is a big part of who you are today. We have a past, a present, which we are doing right now, and a future that we hope to get to,” Holman said.
“What happens to people is they end up getting stuck in the trauma. As time moves on, they don’t mentally move on.
“Being able to reintegrate one’s past with the present — knowing where I am now and where I’m going, the future. That’s really important for mental health.”
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