A Monday Is a Tuesday Is a Sunday as COVID-19 Disrupts Internal Clocks (scientificamerican.com) 49
A global natural experiment examines the time warp of life under quarantine. From a report: In April Jenny Rappaport sat down to inspect her calendar because she could not tell how many days had passed since New Jersey's stay-at-home order took effect. Before COVID-19, her life had structure and a pace, and she knew the day of the week without giving it a second thought. The pandemic has changed all of that. Several research groups have taken advantage of this unplanned natural experiment to gauge the psychological impacts of time distortions and, in turn, their effects on mental health. Psychologists know that time sense links to well-being. Its perceived slower passage can represent signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Rappaport's feelings jibe with the findings of preliminary studies. Overall, people seem to be experiencing time more slowly, according to data that are beginning to be compiled. In a not yet peer-reviewed preprint paper, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a time perception researcher at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France, and her colleagues show that people there report the clock moving more slowly during the lockdown. The researchers also document feelings of sadness and boredom and tie them to the overall feeling of deceleration. "Their findings directly support the emotional connection with time perception," says Philip Gable of the University of Alabama. He is also using survey data to examine how people across the U.S. experience time during the pandemic. "It's a societal event that's going to have a profound psychological influence on us," Gable says, adding that the temporal shift is an integral part of our feelings about what is happening. He plans to collect data over the next nine months, but so far has found evidence that the everyday tempo now lags. Nearly 50 percent of people experienced time dragging during March, whereas about 24 percent perceived it to be speeding up.
Rappaport's feelings jibe with the findings of preliminary studies. Overall, people seem to be experiencing time more slowly, according to data that are beginning to be compiled. In a not yet peer-reviewed preprint paper, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a time perception researcher at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France, and her colleagues show that people there report the clock moving more slowly during the lockdown. The researchers also document feelings of sadness and boredom and tie them to the overall feeling of deceleration. "Their findings directly support the emotional connection with time perception," says Philip Gable of the University of Alabama. He is also using survey data to examine how people across the U.S. experience time during the pandemic. "It's a societal event that's going to have a profound psychological influence on us," Gable says, adding that the temporal shift is an integral part of our feelings about what is happening. He plans to collect data over the next nine months, but so far has found evidence that the everyday tempo now lags. Nearly 50 percent of people experienced time dragging during March, whereas about 24 percent perceived it to be speeding up.
Sounds like my reitred life (Score:2)
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I do not know about you, but it does feel terrible to me - weekdays, weekends, public holidays - all muddles into a big pile of "I'm at home anyway, in front of a screen most likely", and that makes it meaningless. It makes it harder to disconnect from work, to relax etc. - it might be different if you have, say, a yard, a dog, or some other place to change the scenery once in a while, but for people like me, living in an apartment in the middle of a city, told to only leave the house if absolutely neccessa
Re: Sounds like my reitred life (Score:2)
Agreed. As a guy who has worked from home for the last 10+ years anyways, it has still been hugly impacting to productivity.
Now being parttime teacher to my kids at hone and reduced bank, grocery store hours etc is very noticable during 9-5.
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It's much more fun to make fun of the basement dwellers when you're not one of them, eh?
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Well, the thing is - I LIKE to be a basement dweller (old-school PnP player here) - it just is more fun if the other morlocks can come play. ;)
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Yes. What they're really worried about is that people will get used to it. Thus the line that you require structure, and your life flying by means you're not depressed!
Re: Sounds like my reitred life (Score:2)
It's funny in a way. I immediately thought back to a time when work was so behind I'd spend some days working round the clock; stopping for a minute and being suprised it was night time/the next day etc.
It's kind of born of the same thing I guess. Without a regular schedule to revolve around daily structure it's just a thing of less importance. Unless you miss the bank closing or something.
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I was thinking that, but we still have to remember what day to take the trash out unless you're fortunate enough to have someone do that for you. Also, I look at the calendar to make sure I pay bills on time. I'm pretty certain today is Thursday.
There have been times when I must admit I had no clue. It's funny to me that medical professionals will ask you if you know what day it is as a test of...your awareness of reality, I guess. Even more annoying is when they ask you who the President is.
Obviously, I'v
No shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Remove contact, remove ways in which people can order the hours/days, and people easily lose time. It's one of the reasons why prisoners in solitary confinement can suffer severe mental damage, and the effect is also often used in torture (keep lights on or off all the time, vary time between meals, etc).
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If this is what torture is like, bring on the waterboarding.
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If this is what torture is like, bring on the waterboarding.
It's obviously worse than this, but some classic tactics are always leaving lights on (affects sleep as well), varying times between guard patrols if they are roving, and varying time between meals (sometimes 12 hours between meals, sometimes 1 or 2 hours). It prevents routines from developing which prisoners can do to order their days and helps lead to disorientation and mental/physical breakdown.
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Try me. That's basically my life you're describing there.
I never thought I'd be mentally unbreakable.
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I can go for a few days without eating, that's no big deal. A few days without drinking on the other hand is not exactly a delight.
And back from my student life, I know that 10 minutes is all it takes to eat whatever is put in front of you. The trick is to not waste time chewing.
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Why?
Why not eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired, fuck when you are horny, and do whatever you want to do whenever the mood strikes to do that particular thing? Why do you think there "needs to define a purpose, a schedule, and a structure"?
It seems to me (and always has) that the Obsessive-Compulsive need for a "schedule" and a "purpose" is an acquired mental disorder (OCD).
Life begins at the beginning and ends at the end. There is no schedule, there is no purpose, and there is no meaning.
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If you've always had someone else imposing structure on you, from your parents to your school to your employer, you never learn to do it yourself.
Welcome to being a grownup, people. Find a sense of purpose beyond "someone told me I have to."
Re:No shit (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the thing - unstructured time makes people go loopy because well, most people have very structured lives.
Now that you shelter at home, you suddenly have a lot of unstructured time, and for a lot of people, it's unsettling.
But I see it as a good thing - the same way that the most creative time for kids is when they are bored. The brain craves structure, but also needs unstructured time. Unstructured play for kids is something that is lacking - thinking we need to avoid boredom at all costs. Yet kids mysteriously find things to do when bored. It may be just free play where it involves running around with no particular purpose of destination, but is that a bad thing?
Adults typically need some unstructured time as well - just the daily bustle of life prevents much of it from happening
Nothing wrong with being bored. You'll find something to do surprisingly enough. If you're the workaholic, you'll find a chore. If you're imaginative, you'll probably go through your bookshelf and find a book you've been meaning to read but never have.
And before you know it, hours have passed and your mind feels oddly refreshed because you've done something because you wanted to, and kept doing it because it was fun without the stress or worry of a deadline or schedule or alarm to pull you back to reality.
The brain loves it when this happens as it freely does what it needed to do in the background.
Unless you have an appointment to keep, does it really matter what day it is?
It's time to bring back unstructured time.
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Go and structure your life if you need that, why is that so hard for people? Are they so used to being led along by the hand that they can't even do the simplest of tasks themselves?
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One huge difference between me and the guy in solitary is that I have some control. I was never actually locked down. Sure, the 24 hour grocery store that I liked to go to at 3 AM was no longer open 24 hours and I had to suffer wearing a mask and I voluntarily went from grocery shopping 2-3 times a week to only once a week or so, but I still enjoyed and do enjoy a lot of freedom of movement.
I could go for a walk or a drive anytime I wanted. I could wander through a lot of stores and buy anything I could thi
Purpose, Schedule, Structure (Score:1)
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Some of the problem here is that retirees usually start filling by doing things they wanted to do but could not because of schedule conflicts. Maybe its see the grand kids after school, or join a book club at the local library station, get a gym membership and actually go, etc.
A lot of it is about interacting with other people in person, all the stuff the COVID-stay-at-homers are screaming at anyone who tries it over.
We are social animals, telling people "define a purpose" while they are also being told to
Temporal Distortion (Score:2)
More proof that the virus was engineered by time travelers from the past. Is it not a strange coincidence that, as confirmed by scientists, that the virus appears similar to viruses discovered in the past?
Subjective time (Score:4, Interesting)
When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein — knowing that his own time was also running out — wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s family. “Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote of his friend’s passing. “That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
quanta [quantamagazine.org]
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Yes, and in the words of Douglas Adams, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
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"Whenever anything tells me it's just another random permutation of DNA, like my lunch, I take its word for it."
Apparently time just reverted back to my previous sig.
Can't work from home, I assume (Score:4, Insightful)
I can still tell the days of the week since I work from home now. There's definitely still weekends.
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Same here.
The week has a rigid schedule. Up at a set time. Shower, pet chores, breakfast, at computer at a set time. Breaks at certain points in the day. Shut down at a set time. The weekend is the same free-for-all it always was, with all the same "must do" chores because my weekdays are still busy. And while I have less "hey did you watch that movie that everybody's talking about" interruptions in the day, there's still plenty of interaction with online chats from coworkers, emails and phone calls.
I
Mondays (Score:2)
This whole year is filled with daily Mondays. Starts off the week on Monday, middle of the week is Monday, weekends filled with Monday.
Today? Isn't it Monday again? Sure feels like Monday.
Weekend is approaching, and again it will be filled with Monday. Sure feels like Monday is approaching.
Monday.
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Fact Checkers have confirmed it! Monday it is!
Funny (Score:2)
Some of us are still going to work (Score:2)
And therefore we definitely know what day it is.
Either way, Covid-19 isn't affecting internal clocks. Shelter in place is (or isn't.)
Typical fail of a headline. /Posted from the lunch room at work
Pressure (Score:2)
If some of you sad richie riches need someone to sit around doing nothing all day, week after week for you, let me know.
not news (Score:1)
Covid disrupted everything. How about a report on what it didn't disrupt. Now that would be news.
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As far as I know it hasn't had any disruptive effects on Jelle's Marble Runs [youtube.com] 2020 season. In fact, the argument could be made it had a positive effect if anything, as it got them a sponsor they likely never would have gotten if not for common sports being completely off-line right now.
TIme is Relative ... (Score:2)
All time is relative.
Sticking you hand in a deep fryer full of boiling oil, even though it may only be for a split second, can seem an eternity; a single night of hot sex can seem but an instant.
Time vanishing (Score:2)
It's not going faster or slower.
It's just vanishing.
I have repeatedly had the experience of getting to Sunday evening, and thinking about starting the new week on Monday morning, and then I look up and it's Friday afternoon. It's not amnesia. I remember all the things I did during the week. But somehow no time has passed.
And... (Score:2)
Up is down, left is right, wrong is right.
Just look at our security market for proof. How is it pricing forward risk? Must be a new paradigm.
Things are weird and fucked up (Score:1)
This article is right on the money. I'll think it's Tuesday even when it's really Saturday, even with the date and time right in front of my fucking face. I still go shopping, wear a mask, and try to do everything to continue to live a normal life, but everything feels off, like I am in the Twilight Zone.
This is why the whole "rich hiding in a bunker" thing is total bullshit. I don't care how much luxury they put into it, after a while it's going to feel like a solitary prison cell, and they will get to th
This is just working from home. (Score:2)
Shit headline (Score:2)
Quarantine disrupts internal clocks. The disease designated "COVID-19" by the WHO might disrupt internal clocks, but that's not what the piece is about.
Perceived time and memories (Score:1)
I read an interesting article some time back that said this is why time seems to go faster as you get older. You create less new memories every year (most of what you experience each day is stuff that you've done before, so it's not new) and each year is a smaller percentage of your total lifetime to date, so when you were a kid and school let out for the summer those two months were "forever". Today you look back on the past year and say, "Gosh, that sure went by fast. Didn't I wash those windows/plant t
What exactly is the problem? (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but is that really such a big deal? My life barely changed. If you need "structure" in your life, go and get some. It's not like that's hard to do, you do have watches. There's even one on your computer. Heed it if that's what makes you happy.
In the meantime, I'm happy that I'm free from that bullshit for now at least. I work when I feel like it, I don't when I don't feel like it. And as long as the work is done, my employer doesn't care whether I do it at 3am or 3pm on Tuesday or Sunday. And sin
DHL is also confused (Score:1)
My DHL tracking shows this:
All Shipment Updates
Friday
May, 28 2020
20:06 (UTC-05:00) | ARRIVAL DESTINATION DHL ECOMMERCE FACILITY
Grand Prairie, TX, US
Wednesday
May, 27 2020
08:07 (UTC-07:00) | DEPARTURE ORIGIN DHL ECOMMERCE FACILITY
Compton, CA, US
01:44 (UTC-07:00) | Processed
Compton, CA, US
Wednesday
May, 26 2020
22:58 Local time | EN ROUTE TO DHL ECOMMERCE
Electronic Notification Received: Your order has been processed and tracking will be updated soon
I miss the days when everything was shipped by UPS, Fed
What day is it? (Score:1)
My life now is driven by the calendar on my phone. It revolves around Wednesday evening when I take the trash to the curb. Other than that it is a to-do list and beeps to remind me of phone calls and video conferences.