‘Heart attacks spike when the clocks go forward’: The astonishing power of our perception of time

When lockdown came in 2020, I was a university student, and the days dragged endlessly as I waited for my life to resume. Returned to the house where I grew up, with little to do, I was a teenager again, and at the same time suddenly a “proper” adult, eating dinner with my family and going to bed at sensible hours.

Five years on, I’ve learnt that true adulthood is when the days as well as whole weeks and months fly by ever more quickly. I wish that I could have back those lockdown weeks: they felt so long, but now they all fold up into a thimble in my memory.

Each March, when the clocks change, I think about time and its bendiness – how we depend on it, but how easily it’s changed by how we live our lives. Nearly half of Britain wakes between 7am and 8am each morning and a similar number head to bed between 10pm and 11pm. A million people shuttle in and out of central London for work every day, three million more watching the evening news at 6pm.

Clocks keep our routines consistent, the movement of time orderly, but our reliance on them causes us problems: when they go forward each spring, heart attacks spike by as much as 24 per cent on the Monday, due to the stress that comes from disrupted sleep.

The constant presence of the clock is a fact of life that I resent, but not everyone feels the same way. “I love routine. I’m routine-obsessed,” says Ruth Ogden, professor of the psychology of time at Liverpool John Moores University. In March 2020 she was on maternity leave with her third child, “and it was hell on earth”. With no lectures or meetings with students, and none of the usual visits from family and friends to see the new baby, “the days felt like they went on for ever”.

Having studied how people perceive time for 15 years by then, Ogden “wanted to see whether this slowing down was something that we all experienced in the pandemic, or something that was just for time nerds like me”. A survey she ran, of more than 800 people in Britain, found that eight in 10 of us experienced some change in how we perceived time during the second Covid lockdown.

“They were split down the middle,” Ogden recalls. Time slowed down for 40 per cent of people, like Professor Ogden and me, but for another 40 per cent, time was flying faster than ever before. People who found lockdown tough and isolating had a “slow pandemic”. Those who baked bread, binged Netflix and held Zoom parties had a “fast pandemic”, and “probably quite liked the change”.

Ogden wasn’t very surprised by her findings, though their symmetry was peculiar. In reality, society is always split between fast-livers and slow-livers. “There is an intricate relationship between emotion and our experience of time in the present moment, as we’re living it,” she says. Time flies when we’re having fun, but sadness, paired with its familiar monotony, makes time pass slowly, and then dissolve into a speck after it’s lived. “When we ask patients with depression or chronic pain to reflect back on their lives, they say that time is absolutely flying by. The days drag, but the years speed by in an instant,” Ogden adds.

‘We’re living in the wild west of time’

The only thing that makes time seem to crawl more slowly than pain is waiting – for lockdown to end, for the phone to ring, for 6pm to roll round. We remember our worst waits as having been long, too. Half of us will be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime, an experience with more waiting to it than any other, as sales director Sam Brandon, 41, knows well.

Before being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the spring of last year, “I felt incredibly time-poor,” Brandon says. “There was never enough time in my weeks to do the things that needed to be done.” With a stressful job and a young family at home, his days flew, blurring into each other. Then a coughing fit at a restaurant led him to have an endoscopy, where doctors found “a massive tumour in my throat”.

In the fortnight he spent waiting for a formal diagnosis, time “was in free fall”, Brandon says. “I was focused on the absolute immediacy of the situation, and at the same time, I was aware of all the time in front of me that had just disappeared.” Later, with his children at school and the days to himself, signed off from work, “the hours stretched out so much it was unbearable”. 
By January, Brandon was in remission. It was as if he had won the lottery after losing a million pounds. Now, “I find it incredibly calming to watch time as it passes, listening to my heart beating and my breath.”

More of us than ever are living life like Brandon did before his diagnosis – filling our days with work and feeling time-poor. Our free time started to disappear in the 1960s, despite technology beginning to take away many of life’s time burdens. These days “we’re living in the wild west of time”, Prof Ogden says. “Lots of people work from home and can’t switch off at the end of the day. They work later, absorb themselves in their business for longer. Life moves more quickly as a result.”

Living in such a constricted way is equivalent to giving up a 100-year life for one that ends at 20, estimates Steve Taylor, senior lecturer in social psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He tells me to imagine a set of twins: one, whose life is “very repetitious”, and the other, who travels the world, moving from place to place and meeting new people. “If they die on the same day, the second twin will have lived a life that felt about five times as long,” he says.

Taylor’s fascination with time began when he was 24, after eight months spent living in East Germany, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when “everything was new and fascinating”. When he came back to Britain, “it felt like it had been eight years. I was amazed that people were still working in the same jobs, shopping at the same shops.” Chasing those endless weeks, Taylor now tries to stretch out his time to its limits. “Novelty is part of what makes time slow down, so I spend as much time as I can in nature,” he says. A few hours spent hiking in the Lake District, a change of scenery and a break from his routine, “can really make the days last for a long time”.

Time has “bent” for him in other ways too. In 2014, Taylor was involved in a car crash, where time “opened out like a panorama. In reality, the crash only lasted a few seconds, but in my mind, it seemed to go on for maybe a minute,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, I’m going to be seriously injured, my wife’s seriously injured. Maybe we’re going to die. But I was very calm. It gave me the space to try and manoeuvre the car, to control the situation and try to make things safer in some way.”

He calls episodes like these “time expansion experiences”, where for a brief moment time balloons out dramatically. For Taylor, time “really did slow down”, but his wife experienced the event at its normal speed, and was much more distressed. Three in four of us have had a time expansion experience, he says, typically in a life-threatening situation. To this day, Taylor still puzzles over how and why it happens to so many of us.

“One argument is that we’ve evolved the ability to shift into a different sense of time in order to survive disaster,” he says. “But that makes it difficult to explain why time can expand just as much when people are having spiritual experiences, or they’re in deep connection with nature, or they’ve taken psychedelic drugs.” Neuroscientists suggest that adrenaline could be responsible for slowing down how we perceive time, “but that doesn’t explain why there’s usually a sense of calmness” as the hormones released by our brains under threat “produce an anxious, agitated response”, according to Taylor.

‘You don’t realise how important it is until it’s gone’

Severe “bends” in time can also reveal that things have gone wrong elsewhere in the chemistry of our brains. They can be an early sign of psychosis. In December 2016, Rachel* from Sussex, now a mother of two, was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis after the birth of her first child. In the days after his birth, “everything in my head was on fast-forward, and it seemed like everyone around me was moving in slow motion”, she says. Later she “lost all sense of time”.

Admitted to hospital over the new year period, Rachel watched the fizz and bang of fireworks from her window. After a spate of silence, the fireworks came again, and again after that. Eight years on, “I still don’t know which was the real midnight,” she says. Along with the fireworks she hallucinated a red analogue clock, ticking down infinite seconds to zero.

Rachel bought a watch to track when she had fed her son, and for when the nurses would come to help her, always feeling that she was “either too early or too late” for their visits. A prescription for the anti-psychotic drug Risperidone finally put her “back in real time” after nearly a month spent in hospital – an enormous relief for a woman with no history of mental illness, who “was the sort of person who liked to be organised and on time”.

Even though we all live by our own clocks, the ability to keep to the one on the wall means that we feel sane, normal, a part of the world. “I kept telling people that I needed to reset my system, just like a computer, I just needed to restart everything,” Rachel recalls. “Everything is centred around time, everything in the whole world. You don’t realise how important it is until it’s gone.” 
What we all have in common is that our years feel shorter the older we get. Each is a smaller proportion of our lives than the last, and seem to pass by more quickly as a result – one year is a quarter of the whole life of a four-year-old but it’s a tiny fraction of an 80-year-old’s existence. If I live to be 76, that whole year will last as long in my mind as the ordinary summers I spent between university terms, when time felt so gooey and endless.

“We can’t perceive the movement of time more accurately than this because there’s no evolutionary need for it,” says Dr Caspar Addyman, a developmental psychologist who studies the minds of babies. “The natural world runs on seasons and daylight, not weeks and years.” Our animal brains are pre-programmed with the circadian rhythms that control when we wake and sleep, but they are shockingly bad at tracking time in any other way.

“If you ask people to judge an interval that’s 10 seconds long, their errors might be two seconds either way. At 20 seconds, their errors are twice as big, and an 18-month-old is about as good at this as you or I,” says Addyman. He knows this because, in 2014, he carried out an adorable experiment: babies aged between four and 14 months were shown teddy bears on a screen at three- or five-second intervals, and his team measured their predictions of when the bears would reappear. “The babies would look at the screen and their pupils would widen when they expected the teddies to pop up, their errors showing the same pattern as adults,” he says.

Addyman has worked to disprove the theory that all of us have an accurate internal pacemaker that tracks time as it moves. “If there were clocks inside of our heads, as scientists used to believe, then everyone would be more accurate for longer intervals, but we aren’t,” he says. He believes that instead we place ourselves in time using our memories, measuring the time-distance of an event by its fuzziness, and how difficult it is to recall, whether it happened 10 years or 10 seconds ago.

Like social psychologist Steve Taylor, Addyman tries to make his time stretch out to its fullest. His preferred method is meditation. “Experienced meditators report that time slows down when they’re meditating, an effect that slips into everyday life too,” he explains. Research suggests that those who regularly meditate measure small intervals with the same degree of accuracy as everyone else, but that time really does pass more slowly and feel less scarce for them day-to-day.

Zen monks, who meditate in Buddhist temples across the world for up to several hours each day, “seem to have a much more baby-like sense of time”, Addyman says. “As a baby, without a big bank of memories, whatever you’re experiencing is probably very new and very exciting, very salient. Part of why babies are so happy seems to be because they’re so present.”

‘I felt connected to the past and the future’

Ask a Buddhist monk about time, though, and you’ll see just how complicated things can get. Genjo Marinello, Zen abbot of the Chobo-ji monastery in Seattle, remembers one morning in his dorm room at UCLA in 1975, when he was 19. Having recently begun to meditate, he says he felt time “disappear. I was a part of forward time and backward time, as though time and space were not limited to me as an individual,” he recalls, 50 years later. “Past and future, before and after – those distinctions seemed to have melted away.”

Having grown up in an Italian-Irish family, rather than in an Asian country with a Buddhist tradition, his encounter with time was unexpected. “It was pretty infectious,” Marinello says. “I wanted more of it.”

He believes that there are “four different kinds of time”. One, he calls “trauma time”, encountered when life is so painful that we wish the world would disappear. Marinello’s fascination with timelessness brought him to sit his first sesshin, a week-long meditation ritual, “which was incredibly painful, and so confronting that I felt like I was going to die, and I wanted time to stop completely – the minutes that I sat meditating dragged on for what felt like hours”.

The monk soon discovered “harmony time”, when he accepted that he’d keep meditating until the end of the week, “even if it killed me. Then the hours went in a flash. I fell into time perfectly, and I was just so happy to be alive.” Sometimes we encounter that harmony “when we’re totally absorbed in the pleasure of something simple, like riding a bike”, says Marinello.

Then there’s a sort of time that Buddhism has a distinct word for: samadhi, a state of enlightenment where time feels infinite. Marinello bumps into this sort of time only very occasionally, but it’s not always so esoteric. Sam Brandon felt it in a kitchen in Maidenhead, in 2019, alone for the first time after becoming a father. “I realised that something about time had changed,” he says. “I felt connected to the past and the future. It hit me in my chest. It was the most powerful moment of my life – like stepping outside of the normal way the world works.”

Last, there is what Marinello calls “linear time”, the scheduled kind with clock hands, that never seems to move as we want it to. Surely if anyone can control its runnings, it would be him? “I don’t think I’ve got any greater control over time, but I feel less bothered by it than other people seem to be,” he says. As well as being a Zen monk, Marinello works as psychotherapist. When his patients find it painful just to live, “I try to show them that time will still pass, and that things will go back to normal again.”

Eighty per cent of us experienced the wobbles of linear time in lockdown, so who are the mysterious few whose sense of time held firm even then? Would we all be happier, letting time ebb and flow as it does, if we could be more like them? Professor Ogden imagines that some “wouldn’t have seen their lives change much, so time didn’t change much either”. Others “might have been super-flexible individuals, who don’t need a routine to feel safe, and who feel that things will just happen when they’re meant to”.

Time moved on in the same ways for Marinello during lockdown, almost as strict in Seattle as it was in Britain. “But I’m an introvert, and I’m married to someone that I love, so I didn’t mind being at home,” he says.

Back in Sussex, Rachel, who was expecting her second child when lockdown was announced, found this worldwide disruption to time to be a huge relief.

Though she had made a full recovery from postpartum psychosis, she experienced a “horrible glimmer” when her youngest was born, and she was given preventative medication to stop her symptoms from progressing. “Having an enforced lockdown stay at home was for us a blessing in disguise,” she says. “We could slow everything down, not stress in lots of ways we might have otherwise had to. Time did feel slower, but I attribute that to our lives being far simpler.”

Her symptoms stayed at bay. To have time move on so regularly was a blessing and a relief. “I wear a watch every day, which I never did before I became ill, and occasionally I find it hard to look at black and red analogue clocks,” she says. “But I live in the moment more now than I ever did before what happened to me. I focus on my children, making a safe place for them to grow up happily. I bake bread, spend time outside, and knit. I do a lot of volunteering at the local school. I do what I can with the time that I have.”

More information about postpartum psychosis and support can be found at Action on Postpartum Psychosis