Why Does Time Go So Fast? The Psychology of Time Perception After 2020

Google Trends data shows that starting in 2020, searches like "time feels weird," "what happened to time," and "why does time go so fast" spiked dramatically — and never really came back down. Millions of people, across different countries and cultures, began asking the same question almost simultaneously. That kind of collective shift does not happen because a few individuals got older. Something bigger broke.

The Simple Answer That Is Not Quite Enough

There is, of course, the classic explanation. When you are two years old, a single year is half your entire existence. At thirty, a year is a thirtieth. At sixty, a sixtieth. The French philosopher Paul Janet formalized this idea back in 1877, introducing the proportional theory of time perception. He argued that our subjective sense of a time period is directly proportional to the total life we have already lived. Each new year occupies a smaller and smaller slice of the whole pie.

This psychological concept is real, and it is measurable. But it cannot completely explain what happened in 2020. People of all ages — teenagers, college students, middle-aged adults — began reporting the exact same sudden temporal distortion at the same time. Age-related acceleration is a gradual, lifelong process. This shift, however, was abrupt. Something else was at work.

The Pandemic Broke Our Internal Clocks

The COVID-19 pandemic did not just disrupt economies and healthcare systems. It fundamentally disrupted the mechanics of how human beings experience time itself.

Researcher Ruth Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University conducted one of the most comprehensive studies on this phenomenon. Her findings, published in PLOS ONE, revealed that during the lockdown, over 80% of participants felt that their perception of time had become heavily distorted. For many, the daily hours dragged painfully — but weeks and months collapsed into nothing. The same monotonous environment, day after day, actively starved the brain of the raw material it requires to construct a reliable sense of duration.

A parallel study by Sylvie Droit-Volet and her colleagues in France found remarkably similar results: people in lockdown experienced what they called "dying of boredom," yet paradoxically felt that large chunks of time had simply disappeared. The days were long, but the months were short. It was an agonizing contradiction.

Here is the underlying cognitive reason why this happens. Your brain does not record time the way a mechanical clock does. It does not tick off seconds and store them neatly in a file. Instead, it measures time retrospectively by counting distinct, consolidated memories. The more unique, emotionally vivid, and spatially varied your experiences are, the more "timestamps" your brain creates — and the longer that specific period feels when you look back on it.

During the lockdown, the timestamps stopped entirely. Every day looked exactly the same. Same room. Same screen. Same sweatpants. Your brain, scanning backward for familiar landmarks, found almost nothing. So it compressed everything. Months' worth of lived experience got filed away as a thin, highly forgettable smear.

The War on Memory You Did Not Sign Up For

The global pandemic was the ultimate trigger, but social media and digital overload have been quietly eroding our collective sense of time for much longer — and they continue to do so today.

Think about the last time you spent an uninterrupted hour scrolling through short-form video content on your phone. You probably watched dozens, maybe even hundreds, of micro-clips. Your brain received an absolute firehose of stimulation. But here is the critical psychological detail: almost none of it required any genuine cognitive effort. You did not have to think deeply, make complex decisions, move your body, or engage socially. You just swiped.

This creates a devastating modern paradox. You successfully eliminated boredom — which, in its own uncomfortable way, actually helps stretch our perception of time — while replacing it with effortless consumption that creates almost zero memorable content. The result is a kind of temporal black hole. The time is completely gone, and you have nothing to show for it. Not even a functional memory.

Contrast this passive state with reading a difficult book, having a challenging intellectual conversation, navigating an unfamiliar city, or learning a brand-new skill. These activities demand real cognitive effort. They force your brain to build new neural pathways, encode complex spatial information, and process genuine novelty. They create the robust timestamps that make human life feel rich and full.

The Kappa Effect and Why Your Couch Is Shrinking Your Life

There is a fascinating perceptual illusion known as the Kappa effect that helps explain another vital piece of this puzzle. In controlled laboratory experiments, when two signals — say, two flashing lights — appear far apart from each other in physical space, people consistently perceive the time interval between them as longer than when the exact same signals appear physically close together. The objective timing is identical, but the human brain naturally interprets spatial distance as temporal distance.

This neurological quirk has immense real-world implications. If you spend your entire day confined to one single room, your brain encodes significantly fewer spatial transitions. Fewer spatial transitions mean fewer perceived time markers. Consequently, the day shrinks. On the other hand, if you move through multiple distinct environments — walk through a local park, drive to a different neighborhood, visit a friend's house, sit in a busy coffee shop — your brain logs each physical transition as a brand-new chapter. The day effortlessly expands.

During lockdown, billions of people suddenly stopped moving through space. And their days, predictably and measurably, collapsed.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome and the Fragility of Time

If you have ever had a dangerously high fever and felt your hands swell to an impossible size, or sensed that mere minutes were stretching into agonizing hours, you have brushed up against something clinical called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. First formally described in medical literature in the 1950s, this neurological condition can radically distort a person's perception of size, physical distance, and — crucially — time. In extreme cases, affected patients report that time nearly grinds to a halt or accelerates wildly out of control.

You do not need a clinical medical diagnosis to experience milder, everyday versions of this. Your core body temperature, surging stress hormones, current emotional state, and even the ambient room temperature can all nudge your internal biological clock faster or slower. Time is not an objective reality that we passively observe. It is a highly subjective experience that our brains actively construct, moment by moment, from incredibly imperfect sensory data.

Chronic Stress Destroys the Quality of Memory

Here is something critical that does not get talked about nearly enough in discussions of mental health. It is not just that boring or highly repetitive experiences create fewer memories. Chronic stress actively degrades and damages the memories you actually do manage to form.

People who reported high levels of anxiety or depressive symptoms during the pandemic actually remembered more distinct events than their calmer counterparts — but the underlying quality of those memories was significantly worse. The recollections were highly blurry, generic, and very hard to place on a chronological timeline. Strong negative emotions, when they become a chronic baseline, do not sharpen your memory. They corrode it. The fine details wash out completely. You are left with a vague, lingering sense that something bad happened, but you cannot confidently reconstruct when it occurred, or in what specific order.

This means that for anyone living through prolonged periods of intense stress — a global pandemic, severe economic uncertainty, political upheaval, or a personal health crisis — time does not just speed up. It smudges. The pages of your life's diary are not blank; they are water-damaged.

How to Get Your Time Back

The accumulated scientific research points to a surprisingly actionable set of principles. If your conscious sense of time is constructed from memories, and those memories are built from novelty, cognitive effort, and spatial variety, then the psychological prescription writes itself:

• Move through space. Walk a completely different route to work. Visit a neighboring town you have never been to before. Even simply rearranging your living room furniture can create a small but effective jolt of spatial novelty for your brain.
• Do hard things. Read something that genuinely challenges your worldview. Learn a complex skill that heavily frustrates you at first. Your brain builds much stronger, more durable memories when it is forced to do the heavy lifting.
• Break routines deliberately. Eat lunch somewhere entirely new. Talk to someone unfamiliar in your community. Take the long, scenic way home. Each deliberate break in your daily pattern acts as a timestamp your future self will thank you for.
• Put the phone down. Effortless, infinite scrolling is the single most efficient way to permanently destroy time. It entirely eliminates boredom without creating a single durable memory. It is fundamentally the worst cognitive trade you can possibly make.
• Seek genuine experiences over comfortable ones. Rewatching a favorite television show for the eighth consecutive time is emotionally soothing, but it registers as almost nothing in your brain's autobiographical memory center. Watching something brand new, something that makes you think deeply — that actually leaves a permanent mark.

Your Life Is Not Measured in Hours

Your life, in the very end, is not measured by the sheer number of biological hours you were kept alive. It is measured by the number of hours you can actually remember living. If your life were a physical book, the blank pages would not count toward the meaningful total. Only the ones with actual writing on them matter.

The last five years felt incredibly short because, for many of us, they truly were. Not in objective clock time — those 1,826 distinct days each lasted their full, mandatory twenty-four hours. But in subjectively experienced time, in the psychological currency that actually matters, many of those days unfortunately left no deposit.

The incredibly good news is that this neurological state is not permanent. Time did not actually speed up. Your brain simply stopped hitting the record button. And the exact moment you give it something truly worth recording, the tape automatically starts rolling again.

References

• Ogden, R. S. (2020). The passage of time during the UK Covid-19 lockdown. PLOS ONE, 15(7), e0235871.
  A large-scale survey of over 600 UK residents during lockdown, finding that more than 80% experienced significant distortions in time perception, with social isolation and reduced activity as key predictors.
• Droit-Volet, S., Gil, S., Martinelli, N., Andant, N., Clinchamps, M., Parber, L., ... & Dutheil, F. (2020). Time and Covid-19 stress in the lockdown situation: Time free, "dying" of boredom and sadness. PLOS ONE, 15(8), e0236465.
  Examines how emotional states — particularly boredom and sadness — during the French lockdown affected subjective time perception, with boredom paradoxically slowing present-moment time while compressing retrospective duration.
• Friedman, W. J., & Janssen, S. M. J. (2010). Aging and the speed of time. Acta Psychologica, 134(2), 130–141.
  Investigates the widely reported feeling that time accelerates with age, finding that while people endorse the idea in general, their judgments about specific recent periods do not consistently show this pattern — suggesting the phenomenon is partly a cultural narrative.
• Janet, P. (1877). Une illusion d'optique interne. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger, 3, 497–502.
  The original formulation of the proportional theory of time perception: that subjective duration of a period is experienced relative to the total lifespan already lived.
• Cohen, J., Hansel, C. E. M., & Sylvester, J. D. (1953). A new phenomenon in time judgment. Nature, 172, 901.
  The foundational paper documenting the Kappa effect — the perceptual illusion in which spatial distance between stimuli influences the perceived temporal interval between them.
• Wittmann, M. (2009). The inner experience of time. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364(1525), 1955–1967.
  A comprehensive review of how subjective time is constructed by the brain, covering the roles of attention, emotion, body states, and memory in shaping temporal experience.