What day is it again? Overcoming the time warp effects of intense stress

“What day is it again?”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, jokes and memes about the blurring of time were common. For many people, weeks and months blended together, making them hard to differentiate as years passed.

But it wasn’t just a joke. The perception of time really can change during periods of stress, instability, or unpredictability. A person may feel a strange, disorienting sense that the days are unusually fast or slow. And it’s not unique to large-scale events like pandemics, recessions, and disasters. Someone’s sense of time can be influenced by smaller, more personal situations, including conflict at home, financial hardship, overwork, social isolation, and mental health conditions.

When this happens, how can we change that disconcerting feeling and reclaim control over the calendar?

Uncertainty and our perception of time

“When there’s uncertainty, time feels elastic,” says Mike Dow, PsyD, PhD, a psychologist in Los Angeles and author of The Brain Fog Fix. Early in the pandemic, for example, many people felt uncertain and even adrift, with little idea of how it might progress or when it would end.

That free-floating feeling can give rise to anxiety—which, in turn, can lead to elevated levels of stress hormones, including adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol. “Adrenaline makes the heart beat fast, norepinephrine sharpens the mind, and cortisol presses the gas pedal of our stress response to the floor,” explains Dow.

In most real-life scenarios—say, you have a deadline at 5 p.m. this afternoon—this hormonal activation enables us to move quickly from a calm “rest and digest” mode to an energized “fight or flight” state, Dow says. It can also distort one’s sense of time.

“While ‘time flies when you’re having fun,’ it can seem to pass much more slowly when you’re in a high-stress-hormone state,” Dow says. If that gnawing stress comes alongside feeling unchallenged or bored for long stretches of time—a familiar feeling to many during COVID lockdown—then the days and weeks can drag on.

Overcoming the time warp

This melding of weeks, months, or years can affect your health. It could muddle your long-term memory. You may mix up important information, like your medical history or the timeline of a particular health issue—when it began, how it developed, and how long it’s been bothering you. This can make it harder for your healthcare provider to determine the best path of care for you.

If you’re going through a difficult experience or stressful period of your life and feel chronologically unmoored, try these tactics to make the passing days feel a little more normal.

Find your flow

When you’re feeling relaxed while doing something, whether it’s work, a creative project, or being physically active, it’s much easier to achieve what Dow describes as “a magical space where your intelligence, training, and interests are challenged at just the right level and time just floats away.”

That state is known as “flow,” a name coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, in his best-selling book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Some research has shown that accessing that feeling—also described as being “in the zone”—brings focus to whatever you’re doing and has the added benefit of making the hours fly, in a good way.

But if you feel like losing yourself in immersive experience is impossible to attain these days, you’re not alone. In this day and age, there are so many things tugging at our attention, says Dow. “We know from brain scans that when people are ‘multi-tasking,’ they’re actually rapidly ‘single-tasking’ and the brain is switching back and forth between tasks,” he notes.

So, if you’re trying to finish a virtual meeting, write a to-do list, check your social media account, and your child or significant other wants your attention—remember that trying to do these things simultaneously is likely preventing you from entering that state of relaxed focus.

As much as possible, try to attend to one thing at a time. Doing so will help you not only regain more control over your schedule, but it will also improve your productivity, which research suggests drops by as much as 40 percent when you’re trying to do several things at once. It may even help you lower your stress levels.

Keep your Saturday and Sunday

Instead of losing weekends to stressful situations, try to draw a line. Make a conscious effort to keep up your usual social habits, like joining pals for a Friday night happy hour or having a nice Saturday dinner with your partner. It might also help to develop new routines, such as setting aside time for reflection, prayer, or meditation, or taking a calming walk in nature.

If you work from home, draw a clear line between work and “off” hours during the week, too. “That could mean getting out of your PJs during the week or reminding yourself, ‘After I come back from walking the dog in the morning, I’m in work mode,’” suggests Dow. “As silly as it sounds, you could even get in your car, drive around the block, and pull back into the garage, saying when you get home, ‘I’m crossing the threshold to the work ‘me.’”

During stressful periods of your life, it’s especially important to remember the purpose of weekends. Between working and caring for yourself and others, you deserve downtime. “There’s a reason we oscillate between work and recovery,” Dow says. “Having a weekend to look forward to allows your body to recharge.”

Get rest

Chronic stress can cause cortisol levels to stay elevated at night, notes Dow. And reading news or work emails on your phone at the end of the day can contribute to poor sleep. That’s partly because the blue light released by devices depresses the sleep-inducing effects of melatonin. Poor sleep may, in turn, increase cortisol levels, setting off a vicious cycle.

A good pre-sleep plan starts during daylight hours:

• Get outside into natural light whenever possible.
• Avoid caffeine in the afternoon or evening.
• Keep your daytime naps short—stick to a 20-to-30-minute catnap in the afternoon.
• Put away the phone at least a couple of hours before you head to bed.
• Limit or avoid alcohol, especially before bedtime.

While you’re out getting some sunlight, work in some physical activity. Raising your heart rate reduces stress levels and sets you up for a better night’s sleep. Even 30 minutes a day of moderate exercise like brisk walking is useful, and you can break it into smaller chunks of 10 or 15 minutes if need be.

Ultimately, we can only do so much to control the stressful situations in the world around us, or even in our own lives. But by reinforcing healthy habits and applying extra intention to the way we structure our hours, we can escape the time warp and help restore some normalcy to our days.