Has Your Year Disappeared?
How the chronic stress and monotonous days of lockdown have warped memory formation and time perception
When you look back on 2020, a year that forced the majority of the population to endure the longest stretches of isolation and chronic stress of their entire lives, do you remember it as having gone by at the usual pace, or is the whole thing condensed in your mind into something that lasted approximately 2 minutes? Do you still accidentally date things with 2020 instead of 2021? Are you finding it difficult to remember to do menial tasks like send an email or buy something at the store?
The pandemic has left many of us disoriented, with our internal clocks gone haywire and our brains neglecting to remind us of the things we’re supposed to be doing.
“Everyone at work is saying they still feel like it’s March of last year,” my mom told me on a phone call recently.
I’ve heard similar complaints from a few other people I know, and memes and jokes about the issue have popped up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds.
While we can take comfort in the fact that this experience is common, and not a sign of a neurological issue, why have so many of us been grappling with temporal distortions and gaps in our memories?
There Isn’t Much to Remember
The number of memories we form over any period of time plays a major role in our retrospective perception of that time period’s duration. As author and psychology lecturer Claudia Hammond said in her BBC article on the subject, new memories are how we judge how much time has passed.
We gauge the pace of time’s passage in the current moment, and also estimate the duration of past events in retrospect. Often, our recollection of how long an event lasted doesn’t match how fast or slow we felt time was passing while it was happening.
Think back to one of your past novel experiences, like a vacation to somewhere you’d never been. The days probably passed quickly, yet does the memory of that period of time seem lengthier than it really was? You may have returned home feeling like you’d been gone a month rather than a week.
Conversely, when you’re spending every day in the same location doing the same thing, the days blur together and less new memories are created. Without get-togethers, after-work drinks, dinner dates, or celebrations for special occasions to punctuate the weeks and months, there’s much less content for your brain to use to differentiate between them. A lack of novel stimuli over a period of time causes hours or days to essentially evaporate from your memory.
Tons of people last year faced monotony unlike they ever had before, creating a time warp phenomenon. Most New Yorkers, myself included, were subject to lockdown measures beginning in March of 2020, and many subsequently reported feeling that April flew by at warp speed while they were stuck at home.
Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego, explained in a Reuters article that “if you think of every salient event as ticks of the clock, there weren’t that many ticks in April so it feels like time went by really fast.”
Even if you‘ve been busier than ever working from home, you still may not have been able to escape the phenomenon of “time suppression”, as one Zoom meeting after another can get pretty same-y. We recall repeated or familiar tasks as having taken up little time due to how the brain lays down neural networks, Stanford University neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman told LiveScience. The neural network formed from a task you’ve done 20 times before will be less dense than a network for a novel activity, which makes the memory of the task feel quicker.
Indeed, studies have shown that repetition can compress subjective time, possibly due to a smaller neural response to the repeated stimuli.
This may explain why many people feel that their days in lockdown have passed quite quickly, but the pandemic time distortion has sometimes been observed to have a two-pronged effect. That is, you may have felt your days passing slowly in the moment, yet retrospectively they seem short.
Monotony Slows Down the Clock
The monotony of lockdown has augmented many people’s sense of time, not only due to the lack of new memories formed, but also because of pure boredom and idleness.
Without the distractions that everyday life normally provides, we tend to pay more attention to the passage of time. One study published in Nature explored how an individual’s attention affects their time perception, and if engaging one’s working memory alters one’s subjective temporal experience.
The study had participants estimate the amount of time that had passed between the flashes of a red dot on a screen. Half the participants were focused solely on the timing, and the other half had to split their attention between time estimation and a task involving their working memory.
The results found that the participants who were engaged in the working memory task tended to underestimate the duration between the red dot’s appearances, while those who were focused on time alone tended to overestimate it.
When we’re idle, we may pay more attention to the passage of time, anticipating the arrival of each subsequent second. This may partially explain the temporal distortions, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Monotony is not the only culprit in making the days of lockdown feel slow and arduous. The long-term stress we’ve been subjected to could significantly distort time perception as well. Though some people found their work-from-home arrangements to be beneficial to their mental health, as they could work at their own pace and reclaim the time in their day that was once spent commuting, many of us have been subject to a plethora of potential stressors.
We’re All Stressed Out
Our mood and stress level have long been known to affect how we experience time, and for plenty of people, anxiety, fear, and low mood have become ubiquitous to their daily lives. Cases of depression are surging, and many people are reporting constant feelings of stress and uncertainty, as well as insomnia, burnout, and difficulty concentrating.
Essential workers in particular have been grappling with poor mental health and severe chronic stress.
Our sense of time never stays the same throughout our days, and science isn’t quite clear on what physical processes in the brain are responsible for how we perceive time. It’s becoming apparent, though, that there isn’t one single mechanism; no “biological stopwatch”, but rather a large neural network that influences our subjective time perception. And the more researchers learn about how we process time, the more our emotional and arousal states stand out as hugely influential for how we feel the seconds and minutes ticking by.
Our sense of time has been theorized to be a “function of the intricate interplay between specific cognitive functions and of our momentary mood states”.
Extremely stressful or traumatic events have been shown to distort one’s sense of time such that the negative stimuli seems to last longer. Fear-inducing situations that cause physiological arousal lead to time dilation.
A 2011 study which tested the impact of fear on time perception had participants watch sad, neutral, or fear-inducing (horror-themed) sets of video segments. The participants also had to observe a blue dot on a screen and estimate its duration before and after watching each set of segments. After watching the horror clips, participants tended to overestimate the blue dot’s duration.
High anxiety directs attention away from the task at hand, shifting it towards worrisome thoughts or scattering it across other irrelevant stimuli perceived as threatening. Severe, chronic stress and worry can decrease a person’s ability to accurately judge time duration.
Worry, uncertainty, and anticipation of a possible negative event creates a more unstable sense of time. And as Alison Holman, who studies trauma and time perception at the University of California, Irvine, told The Verge, the stress and the uncertainty of the pandemic has taken away another anchor for our time perception: our ability to imagine the future or predict what’s in store for us.
The “temporal disintegration” of a fearful present and an unpredictable future has led to some of us getting stuck on our trauma, unable to move forward since what lies ahead is so murky.
Stress and Memory
On top of these fun temporal distortions, you may have noticed you’ve been more forgetful lately. If, over the course of this pandemic, you‘ve ever found yourself walking into a room with intent, only to feel utterly clueless as to what you were trying to do once you’re through the door, rest assured you’re probably not losing it. It’s become a phenomenon; otherwise healthy people, too young to worry about age-related dementia, fearing their minds are going. But just as repetitive days and chronic stress affect your sense of time, they can also do a number on your memory.
Both your ability to remember past events, and keep track of things you intend to do in the future (so-called prospective memory) can be affected.
As the aforementioned Claudia Hammond explained in her BBC article on lockdown’s effect on memory, not only have we had less events to remember over the past year, but we’ve missed out on the daily in-person social interactions we were used to, in which we shared what’s been going on in our lives with friends and co-workers.
These casual conversations helped us consolidate and reinforce some of the less consequential experiences we had throughout our days, so without them, our experiences may not be as well mapped out.
The monotony of lockdown and the general lack of new memories made has, of course, also made it more difficult to recall what has happened to us. When all days are mostly the same, separating one day from another with very few distinguishable mental landmarks is nearly impossible.
Every day being the same can hinder prospective memory as well, with fewer visual or location-based cues around. While having a separate workspace from your home can provide reminders for things you need to do, like running into a coworker you have a meeting with later in the day, being sequestered in your home office leaves you with little to go off of in terms of physical memory triggers.
Social isolation and lack of sensory stimuli may lead to a reduction in hippocampal volume, which, in turn, could impair learning and memory. The hippocampus is a region of the brain vital for memory consolidation, spatial navigation, and emotional behavior.
Stress causes elevated levels of corticosteroids, such as cortisol, in the brain. These hormones are responsible for our physiological response to stressors; they put us in a state of fight-or-flight, preparing us for danger. While this serves a purpose in the short-term, chronically being stuck in fight-or-flight mode and subjected to elevated levels of corticosteroids has been shown to have neurodegenerative effects on the hippocampus.
Since the biological purpose of stress is to prepare you to deal with the stressor at hand, trying to focus on tasks unrelated to the stressor are therefore more difficult. Due to the inherent functionality of the stressed-out brain, the pandemic has massively hampered many people’s ability to concentrate on, or remember to do, everyday tasks. We have been in constant fight-or-flight mode for an entire year.
Depression has also been associated with decreased cognitive performance, memory, and executive function. People who are depressed tend to ruminate on negative thoughts as well, which takes up neural energy.
All this being said, it’s no wonder memory issues have become commonplace.
Time distortion and memory issues have become a phenomenon during the pandemic. Many have reported feeling their days pass slowly in the moment, but in retrospect the months have flown by. If you have been experiencing issues with memory or are feeling unsettled by a distorted sense of time, know you’re not alone.
There are ways to manage or cope with the changes in time perception, and research is being conducted on exactly how and why our collective trauma has altered our experiences so drastically. The more we come to understand about this unique situation, the better our strategies for mitigating the effects of our stress will be.
It is so important that we are compassionate towards ourselves and each other during this time. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: we’ve been through a lot. But hopefully as the stress eases up, we will each recover a more “normal” sense of time and feel better able to concentrate.
