Time has slowed to a crawl.

The days are a blur.

Two weeks ago feels like two years ago.

As a health crisis of staggering proportions unfolds around us, there’s been a lot of talk — socially distant social media talk — about how it feels as though we’ve been caught in a time warp or living through the plot of a sci-fi novel during this COVID-19 pandemic. All of us are holding our collective breaths, as if we’re about to witness a car wreck and everything is moving in slow-motion, as we wait to see what happens next.

Hollywood actress and singer Bette Midler, whose Twitter bio now says “stuck at home just like everyone else,” captured the disquieting sentiment.

“It’s Saturday. I think,” she tweeted. “Like you, I find my days a blur, one day very similar to the next ... news, housework, bad news, emails, worry, phone calls, cooking, eating. It’s surreal, only real. Am I in an episode of a reality show?”

It wasn’t so long ago that we were complaining about how there’s never enough time in a day to get things done and bookstores were flooded with self-help guides on how we might “reclaim” our time.

So how to explain this current time-bending phenomenon?

The answers aren’t as straightforward as you might think, requiring us to draw from psychology, cognitive science and even physics, experts say. Sure, boredom from hunkering down at home plays a role. So does news overload. But so, too, do our involuntary eye movements and the way we process visual information.

‘Subjective time’

Unlike clock time, “subjective time” is very malleable. The way we perceive a period of time in the moment can be very different from how we perceive that same period of time in hindsight.

Anne Wilson, a professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, says she recently had an online discussion with her grad students about their perception of time.

“The majority of my students who commented on time noted that time felt like it has slowed down — and they felt like ‘pre-COVID’ seemed like forever ago,” she said.

Wilson says there are different factors contributing to this feeling.

“When it seems like a lot has changed since a past point in time, that time seems subjectively very distant. The world looks very different than it did a month ago, which is likely why for many of us, February seems like ancient history,” she said.

Our emotions can also affect perceived time. Typically, unpleasant times drag on, while pleasant times fly by, she said.

And, of course, there’s boredom. She says those of us who are experiencing emptier-than-usual days and not a lot of new experiences are likely to feel their days are dragging. There’s more time to focus on the passage of time.

But that’s where it gets interesting. When we eventually look back on the same time period, our perception of that time may actually flip.

“If we look back on an empty week where not much happened, it may seem quite short because we don’t have many distinct memories to fill the time period,” she said.

“Conversely, the busy period that flew by as it happened might seem quite long in retrospect, because we can remember many distinct events and experiences that stretch out the temporal landscape.”

That’s been Wilson’s personal experience in recent weeks. She’s been working full-time, learning new technology to teach online, helping to home-school her kids, and accommodating her panicked students.

“I’m kind of looking forward to a little more boredom once my teaching semester is done.”

Too much COVID-19 news

Launa Leboe-McGowan, a University of Manitoba psychology professor specializing in cognitive science, says there’s something else that could be influencing our perception of time — how much COVID-19 news we’re digesting.

Let’s face it: We’ve been deluged with a lot of information in recent weeks. At first, coronavirus was this distant crisis affecting China. Then it spread to other parts of Asia. Then we heard about its impact on cruise ship passengers. Then infection rates started soaring in other parts of the globe.

Remember when all of Italy shut down?

Then our attention was seized when high-profile people started getting infected, such as actor Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, as well as Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, wife of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Then came the travel restrictions, the orders to self-isolate, the bans on large gatherings and directives to practise social distancing.

So while some people who are stuck at home without anything to do may feel, in retrospect, as though not much time has passed, others may experience the opposite distortion, if they spend a lot of time paying attention to all of the incremental media stories, Leboe-McGowan said.

“In that case, thinking about these days in retrospect would tend to lengthen how much time seems to have passed, because of the rapidly-changing and very unusual circumstances that we find ourselves in. … If we reflect on world events, there is a lot going on, making our sense of previous time periods seem longer.”

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And this is where a bit of physics comes into play.

Eyes like cameras

Last year, Adrian Bejan, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, published a paper examining why the days seem shorter as we get older. He centred his argument on the way our processing of visual information changes over time.

Our eyes operate like cameras, constantly taking clicks or frames that are then transmitted from the eyes to the brain, he said.

When we’re young, everything we see is new to us; there’s an avalanche of stimuli. So each second, we’re processing many mental images. That’s why when we think back to our younger years, there’s a tendency to think of that time period as moving more slowly.

As we age and our body grows in size, the pathways that transmit information from our eyes to our brain are longer and the speed of travel is slower due to degradation, meaning we capture fewer “frames per second” between sunrise and sunset. That creates the perception that time is moving more rapidly — or that the sunset has arrived quickly.

How is this applicable to the current environment we’re living in and the prevailing sentiment that time seems to have slowed down?

“Unusual events, such as tragedies like this one we’re now experiencing … is an opportunity for your clicking camera to bombard your brain with impressions and news that you have not been expecting,” Bejan said. “This is why, because of the multitude of news, the same brain has the feeling that sunset will arrive later than usual.”

Bejan compares the current situation to a musician who once wrote to him to say that every time he comes up with a winning song, it’s as if time stops, because of the novelty of the event.

The same thing happens when he gets together with his former basketball teammates to reminisce. They’re able to remember details of when one of them scored unexpectedly and the crowds erupted.

“We don’t remember the jerseys, the names of the referees or even the names of other teammates. We remember even less the score. But we remember the moments when time stopped,” he said.

“We remember the past in a punctuated fashion — the points of punctuation are these clicks of greatest novelty and least expectancy.”

So that explains some of the reasons why we might perceive time passing slowly or quickly. But is there anything we can do in our own lives to influence that perception?

Yes, experts say.

Inject novelty into your day

Enter Sam Maglio, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Toronto.

He recently penned a column for the Washington Post titled “This doesn’t have to feel like an eternity.”

In it, he shared how “looming uncertainty” — like what we’re going through now, constantly clicking the refresh button on our coronavirus news feeds — can make it feel as if time is dragging.

He cited an experiment he once did in which he strapped a GoPro camera to his forehead and recorded himself going on an eight-minute drive. He then asked students to watch the video and guess how long the ride lasted.

Those who were given the destination ahead of time estimated the drive took about seven minutes. Those who were kept in the dark guessed that the trip took nine minutes.

“Lately, we’re all in the second, unsure condition,” he wrote. “The best guess as to how long life as we know it will be put on hiatus looks to be ‘indefinitely.’ It’s like Charlie Brown’s football, only instead of yanking it away, Lucy lets him kick it but then moves the goalposts back. And frustration tacked onto uncertainty compounds how badly time drags.”

But by injecting a bit of variety — or novelty — in our daily lives, something that’ll engage our attention and allow us to think about something else, we can make this time of uncertainty seem less long and more fulfilling, he told the Star.

“If you watch paint dry all day — it’ll be the longest 16 hours you were ever awake. Tomorrow when you look back on it, you’re pretty disappointed with how you spent your day,” he said.

“So a good strategy is to make sure you’re doing something other than effectively nothing.”

Rather than watch Netflix or Pornhub, he suggests taking an online class, learning a language, trying a new recipe, taking the dog to a new park or reaching out to a friend you haven’t talked to in a while. Volunteering to help others also is a good way of creating a sense of control over your life and your time.

“However we can find a way to do it, the science says do it.”

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