He discovered that without any external time cues, he started to lose track of the minutes, hours, and days. He went into the cave on July 16, and had planned to come out on September 14. His team alerted him when the day arrived, but according to his estimation it was only August 20. “I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two,” he said in a 2008 interview .

In 1962, a French geologist, Michel Siffre, descended into a cave more than 400 feet below ground and stayed there for two months. He left his watch, and any other indicators of time, at the surface to experience what life was like "beyond time."

We are not currently plunged into darkness—in a cave with no natural light—nor are we stripped of our phones or watches. But many people are feeling, with social distancing and the world grinding to a halt, that time has similarly started to lose its meaning. Monday, Saturday, Wednesday; 10 AM, 4 PM, midnight—who knows what day or time it is? Last week, Stephen Colbert tweeted : “The last two weeks have been a strange ten years.” One cable news channel even launched a segment called “What Day Is It?,” announcing triumphantly one recent Tuesday: “And if you said Tuesday, you're right.”

These factors are mixing with how those of us with 9 to 5 lifestyles are usually subservient to the clock, and are now being challenged to consider how to structure our days in ways that feel worthwhile. This is fodder for jokes and funny memes, but may have larger implications: Research has suggested that how you think about and perceive time also affects our decisionmaking and perspectives on the future. Instead of letting time lose all meaning, there are some ways to bring back a sense of normalcy—and maybe even remember what a Friday feels like.

Because of the deluge of news, anxiety and stress, along with the lack of change in our environments and activities, time could be stretching and twisting to feel much longer than it normally does. There’s so much uncertainty about when this will all end and what the future looks like; with social isolation dates continually being pushed back, it leaves us stuck in a never-ending present.

First, a reminder that if you’re stuck at home, starting to feel a senselessness in the passage of time, it is a privilege to feel this way—many essential workers are still bound to the clock, and healthcare workers are feeling a different kind of timelessness as they work long hours in overwhelmed hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients. But for the rest of us, something strange is happening to our sense of time.

It's like, as Siffre said, in a 2018 interview : “The brain grasps no time because there is no time. Unless you write down what has happened, you forget it immediately."

Our relationship with time is governed by our lifestyles and our cultural perspectives. As J.T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, once wrote, “Tell me what to think of time, and I shall know what to think of you.”

Based on what we think about time right now, one might conclude that we're feeling lost and confused.

This is caused by several changes to our daily lives that influence how we experience time, said Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at UCLA who has studied how perceptions of time relate to the choices people make. One is that we’re paying attention more than we usually do. A couple of weeks feels incredibly long because we’ve taken in so much new information, from Twitter, online news, or TV.

“We roughly use the number of things that happen in a given period of time to tell us how much time has passed,” Hershfield said. “When way more things have occurred in a standard period of time, it makes it feel like that period of time has been longer than it actually was.”

On top of that, things that are unusual seem to last longer, called the “oddball effect.” When a psychologist at Dartmouth, Peter Ulric Tse, and his colleagues showed people the same flashing images, when a different one popped up, they said it lasted longer than the others—even though they saw it for the same amount of time.