Yes, Time Does Feel Different Since The Pandemic — And There's A Reason Why

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic now four years ago, on March 11, 2020. It feels like yesterday, last month and decades ago all at the same time.

Running out of toilet paper feels like a distant memory. Wiping down groceries, doing elbow bumps instead of handshakes and being unable to find Clorox wipes in any store — it’s unfathomable that it was really just a few years ago. (And, truly, I can’t even remember the other things we dealt with in 2020. It has all blurred together.)

If you can relate, you’re hardly alone. All over social media, and in real life, people are expressing the same sentiment — that the passage of time feels forever changed.

Research is ongoing to determine how exactly the coronavirus pandemic warped our sense of time, said Cindy Lustig, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan — though it’s safe to say it did. But a few things are likely contributing to that sense of distortion.

“In general, for any event in our autobiographical memory we experience this thing that’s called telescoping… some parts of our memory get stretched out in time, whereas others get squished together,” said Lustig.

Additionally, “big changes or surprising events create ‘event boundaries,’” Lustig told HuffPost, “Our minds expand the time between different events, and compress time within an event.”

So, the beginning of the pandemic, which was a surprising event, seems like forever ago, she explained, while life before the pandemic feels even further away. This is because of that “event boundary” that the start of the pandemic created.

“However, when people try to place the events that happened during lockdown on a timeline, they remember them as closer together than was really the