Can time feel different when we are struggling?

Have you ever felt that time seems to move differently depending on how you are feeling? An hour can pass quickly when we are enjoying what we are doing, but feel extremely slow when we are bored or upset. Watching an interesting show can make time feel like it is “flying by,” while sitting in a long lecture can make every minute feel stretched out. This happens because time is not only something measured by clocks, but also something we feel and experience in a subjective way, a concept known as psychological time. When we are struggling with mental health challenges, how we perceive time can also be affected. Feeling hopeless or overly critical of ourselves can make time feel like it is dragging, while burnout from work and being unable to do things we enjoy can make it feel like our lives are slipping away quickly.

What is psychological time?

Time and how we experience it are among the biggest mysteries in life. When we look at how time feels, it doesn’t feel as simple as understanding the number on the clock. Psychological time refers to this type of subjective experience of time. Our subjective perception of time can include how long things seem to last and how quickly time passes for us. It also includes how we can organize and mention events in the past, present, and future, and how much weight we give to each of these in our minds. Importantly, our psychological time, or how we feel and sense time, is flexible and may not always match the clock time. According to common psychological time models, our subjective sense of time can have the following key dimensions:

• Duration: How long an interval feels
  • For example, even though a one-hour-long lecture and a one-hour brunch with a really close friend have the same objective duration, one can feel like it took forever, while others can feel like it passed in minutes.

• Passage of Time: How fast or slow time seems to move
in the moment
  • While duration means our estimation of the interval of an event, passage of time refers to our sense of pace and speed, for example, feeling that time it’s moving when we are in the moment. For example, when we are doing something, time can feel like it is flying by or dragging on. When we are busy, time can feel like days fly by, but if we are standing in a long queue, time can feel like it is dragging and really slow.

• Time Perspective: How we tend to think about the past, present, and future

  • For example, some of us tend to focus primarily on the present, while others focus more on events that happened in the past or may happen in the future. This aspect of our perception of time can significantly affect our decisions. If we are those who think more about the future, we may tend to plan more than enjoy the present moment.

• Lifespan Subjective Time: How we see our place in life

  • For example, how much life we feel lies behind us, or how much time we feel we have left, does not always match the objective time that has passed. Not only can different people with the same life span feel differently about it, but our own judgments about our life span can also change over time. When we are enjoying life in college, it feels like it will never end, but when we graduate and face the dread of the job market, we may no longer agree with that judgment.

Factors that influence our psychological time

How time feels for us can be affected by many factors, including but not limited to:

• What we pay attention to (e.g., our own racing thoughts or what our friends are saying to us)
• How much information are we processing (e.g., folding laundry vs learning a new language)
• Sensory richness of the experience (e.g., being in nature with many sights vs. being in a quiet parking lot with few changes)
• Whether the experience is novel or familiar (e.g., our first day at work vs. our normal work day months later)
• The vividness and emotional intensity of the experience (e.g., a break up vs. walking about the weather)
• Our physical and emotional state (e.g., being tired, stressed vs excited, or relaxed)
• Our level of engagement or boredom (e.g., watching an interesting show vs. sitting in a long meeting with nothing to do)
• Expectations and context (e.g., anticipating something will be fun vs. anxiety-inducing)

Overall, our perception of time is shaped by a lot of external (environment, people, places) and internal (our own emotions and physical state) information, such as how rich, new, demanding, or emotionally intense an experience feels. That is why even simple activities like folding laundry can sometimes feel longer than more engaging ones like hiking, depending on what we enjoy, how engaged we are, and the attention we give to the experience.

How do mental health challenges affect time perception?

Mental health conditions can also affect how we experience and feel about time. They can affect both how fast or slow time passes and our ability to judge durations or the order of events, and can create an unbalanced past-present-future focus, among other effects. These changes appear common across different diagnoses, from depression to ADHD. For example:

• People who experience depression often report that they feel like time is moving slowly and that everyday activities drag on. In fact, some studies describe this experience as “depressive time dilation,” where time can feel like it is dragging and meaningless, and the future may feel distant or hard to imagine. However, studies also show that people who experience depression are usually just as accurate as others in timing tasks, suggesting the issue is mainly how time feels, not how well it is measured.
• People diagnosed with schizophrenia tend to report experiencing time as unstable or distorted. These changes can often be associated with symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, where hallucinations involve sensing things that are not actually present (such as hearing voices), and delusions involve strongly held false beliefs that are not based in reality.
• People with bipolar disorder tend to report changes in their sense of time depending on their mood. For example, during manic episodes, time can feel faster, while during depressive episodes, it can feel slower.
• People with ADHD also tend to experience alterations in their perception of time, including difficulty estimating how long a task will take, which can contribute to stressful moments of indecision and overwhelm in daily life.
• Similarly, mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety can shift our attention toward negative past events or fears about what may happen in the future. This can make time feel distorted, such as feeling as if the past is constantly replaying or the future feels uncertain and overwhelming, which can exacerbate low mood, increase negative or repetitive thinking patterns, and make it harder to concentrate and more.

How can therapy help?

Although there are currently few therapeutic interventions that directly target time perception itself, our understanding of psychological time and how it is affected during mental health challenges continues to expand through research. 

Still, many existing therapeutic approaches appear to indirectly improve time-related impairments. This might be because our symptoms are often linked to one another and to their underlying causes, and therefore receiving care and support can help us experience greater balance across different aspects of our experience, including time perception. 

For example, certain approaches might be leading to a more balanced sense of time, as in the following:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) based approaches tend to challenge our negative thoughts about the past and the future, and help us create a more balanced view of certain events in our lives
• Mindfulness-based approaches and practices, such as meditation, can improve alterations in our time perception by enhancing our attention and focus, and help us feel more present in the moment, and by increasing our awareness of our body
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
based approaches can support us through our skill-building, including emotion-regulation skills, which can lessen the sense of time distortion that could be associated with stress and emotional dysregulation

Similarly, as many therapeutic approaches support us holistically, help us manage the negative effects of our different symptoms, and help us build more balanced coping skills, they can indirectly improve the alterations we might be experiencing in our sense of time and how it feels. In turn, having a more balanced sense of time can improve our overall emotional well-being, support clearer thinking and decision-making, and help us feel more grounded and in control of our daily lives.

Takeaways

• Psychological time refers to our subjective experience of time, which doesn’t always match clock time. It includes how long things feel (duration), how fast time passes (passage of time), and how we think about the past, present, and future (time perspective) and how we see our place in life
(lifespan subjective time).
• Our perception of time is shaped by many factors, including what we focus on, how much we are doing or processing, how interesting or emotional the situation is, our mood and energy, and whether we are engaged, bored, or expecting something to happen, and more.
• Mental health conditions can distort how we experience time, affecting perceived speed, time estimation, and focus on the past or future, such as feeling time as slower in depression or difficulties in time estimation in ADHD.
• Therapy can indirectly improve time perception by reducing related symptoms, building helpful coping skills, improving attention, supporting emotional regulation, and more, which can lead to a more stable and balanced sense of time.

References

• Cai, M. (2026). Altered time perception in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). International Journal of Education and Humanities, 22(1), 160–165. https://doi.org/10.54097/36pq5676
• Hinault, T., D’Argembeau, A., Bowler, D. M., La Corte, V., Desaunay, P., Provasi, J., Platel, H., Tran, J., Charretier, L., Giersch, A., & Droit-Volet, S. (2023). Time processing in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 154, 105430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105430
• Kondo, H. M., Gheorghiu, E., & Pinheiro, A. P. (2024). Malleability and fluidity of time perception. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 12244. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-62189-7
• Mura, F., Catrambone, V., Valenza, G., Van Wassenhove, V., Mioni, G., & Gentili, C. (2025). Emotional blunting and time estimation in depression. Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science, 6(1), 100626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsgos.2025.100626
• ​​Stolarski, M., Czajkowska-Łukasiewicz, K., Styła, R., & Zajenkowska, A. (2024). Time matters for mental health: a systematic review of quantitative studies on time perspective in psychiatric populations. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 37(4), 309–319. https://doi.org/10.1097/yco.0000000000000942
• Thönes, S., & Stocker, K. (2019). A standard conceptual framework for the study of subjective time. Consciousness and Cognition, 71, 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.04.004

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At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy. 

Whether you’re seeking guidance on a specific issue or need help navigating difficult emotions, we’re ready to assist you every step of the way.

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This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.

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