Have you had this experience?
I was talking with some friends the other day and during the conversation one of the us mentioned the last time we saw each other.
That triggered the pandemic mind struggle for everyone, determining just when that event happened. Last year? Two years ago? Was it really three years ago?
Yep, thanks to COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines and working from home, the past two years (three if you count the slow return to normal) have blurred into one and it’s difficult to pull them apart.
What’s happening and will it get better as life returns to a more pre-pandemic state?
It turns out the science behind why time goes by fast or slow indicates a strange but true fact: while time is a constant (there’s a specific way to measure it) time is also relative and subjective.
Bottom line: the pandemic has taken away what scientists call our temporal anchors.
“Temporal anchors are regularly occurring events, like weekends or birthdays which help orient us in time,” explains Key Maitra, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at The University of North Carolina Asheville. “The idea is that people take certain events during the week or even the year that are cyclical and anchor themselves to it. But without temporal anchors, we lose our perception of time because days and weeks meld together and everything feels the same. We feel adrift because we don’t know when ‘now’ is.”
Maitra believes as we begin to reconnect with families, friends, and co-workers and as our temporal anchors return, we’ll regain our sense of time moving forward. However, those two to three pandemic years, will likely remain a blur.
“Actually, remembering the pandemic years with as little detail as possible might not be all bad,” said Maitra. “So much of our lives is forgetting the past, for both good and bad reasons. Many people just compress it and then retrieve it when it is really needed.”
Here’s the other problem I discovered during that get together: my memory isn’t as sharp. It turns out you can blame the pandemic for that as well.
You encounter a lot of information every day and your brain doesn’t store all of it away. Information that you use often, information that was used recently and you took time to engage with, and information that is similar to earlier information you gathered, will more likely be remembered.
Now think about pandemic life.
Stress and anxiety made it difficult to concentrate. There were a lot of short-term engagements (binge watching shows anyone? Also quick encounters with people wearing masks). In addition, while the days working from home were mind-numbingly similar, there likely was very little engagement.
Maitra believes our memories should also improve in non-pandemic times. She does suggest that even if your workplace allows you to work from home after the pandemic eases, it’s probably worth still finding ways to get out of the house or work from other locations to engage the brain and your memory.
That way you won’t feel like you’re still stuck sometime in 2020.