Does the prospect of darker evenings make you feel gloomy, or would you enjoy the extra hour in bed for one morning? Scientists are launching a study to better understand how the annual switch to winter time affects people’s well-being and time perception – and they need your help.
In the UK, clocks will go back at 2am on Sunday 27 October. Previous studies have largely focused on the negative effects of the spring transition to daylight saving time (DST) on people’s sleep, cognitive performance and accident proneness, but less is known about the impact of the autumn change – or how these biannual events affect our perception of the passage of time.
“I’m interested in trying to understand how it feels when your day-to-day sense of time is disrupted by an external force: do you feel like you have more or less time, and higher or lower levels of well-being? ” said Prof Ruth Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University, who is leading the study.
“Time is an extremely overlooked element of psychology. Our lives are structured by a clock and we all have an internal representation of time, but we have a very poor understanding of how people perceive time and whether we can possibly change people’s experiences of time to create improvements in well-being. “
The study is part of a wider project investigating how external disruptions can affect people’s sense of time. Ogden became interested in this field of research after she was involved in a car accident in college, during which she experienced a sense of time slowing down.
Since then, she has investigated how other emotionally salient events – including Covid restrictions – can distort people’s time perception. “I found that people who coped well, and had lower levels of anxiety, depression or stress, experienced a relatively rapid curtailment, while the people who had a slow curtailment were those who were more socially isolated, depressed or were less satisfied with their levels of social interaction,” Ogden said.
Separate research has found that people who struggle with chronic pain also experience a distorted sense of time. “It brings up this interesting idea that our experience of time is embedded in trauma,” Ogden said.
The study is open to all UK adults and involves the completion of a online survey about their daily lives and the amount of time pressure they experience. This can be completed during the week before or after the clock change, or both.
One question Ogden and her colleagues hope to answer is whether socially marginalized groups, or those who struggle with time pressures, such as busy parents, experience the clock differently than people who have more control over their time.
“We are particularly interested in the relationship between time and power, and how when other people are in control of time, it can create various kinds of injustice for certain groups,” says Prof Patricia Kingori, a sociologist at the University of Oxford’s Ethox . Center, which leads the overall project.
For example, Kingori and Brazilian colleagues work with women whose children experience long-term problems as a result of catching the Zika virus. Under international law, there is only a short time during which such individuals can bring a claim against the state, “but, when people have experienced trauma, they are often unable to muster the resources to get things done in time to not meet this deadline. , even if they also feel as if time has slowed down”, she said.
Another example is the societal pressure many women feel to have children during a very narrow window of their fertile lives – usually between their mid-20s and mid-30s. “I have worked with both teenage mothers and older women attending IVF clinics, and one of the interesting things is that in both cases, women often felt that they were caught at the ‘wrong time’, even though they could biologically have children. ” said Kingori. “Time control is a kind of soft power that acts on us in ways that can often make us feel late, inadequate, or not quite right, and yet we often don’t see it as a form of power. not.”
The long-term goal of the project is to identify strategies that can help address such inequalities, potentially leading to improvements in individual and societal well-being.
“To me, the clock change gives us some insight into what happens when time changes for everyone else, but it hasn’t changed quite the same way for you, or when society puts a limit on your time,” Ogden said. . “It also raises interesting ideas, like should we have a human right to time?”
