Has your sense of time been a bit ‘off’ over the last two years?

One moment time seems to be endless, then the next three hours disappears in the blink of an eye. Last month feels simultaneously like yesterday and eons ago. Time simply feels weird and distorted.

I recently came across an article on refinery29.com which talks about why our sense of time has been out since the pandemic. And no, it’s not because we’re losing our grip on reality…

The article talks about the main cause being the change to working from home for many people. We just don’t have the usual physical and emotional separations between work and our home time.

By this I mean the daily rituals that create conscious and unconscious signals. For example, departing from home, commuting to the workplace and interacting with people other than those with whom we live. We then leave the office and re-enter the home; another transition signal. Without such signals we are not experiencing the subtle or implicit indicators of time that mark out the day.

And it’s not just the daily signals that have been missing. Rituals like holidays and celebrations with family didn’t happen either for many people.

The result of all of this is a sense of time that is strangely elastic and disorientating. It is either sped up or slowed down.

But it doesn’t end there. Since coming out of a (very) long lockdown in Melbourne late last year, a lot of people felt the need to speed up. Maybe it is to make up for lost time, I’m not sure.

What I do know though, is that it is dangerously seductive and infectious. Now it literally feels like we’re on steriods, that time has kicked up a notch and we’re having to go faster than ever before.

If you resonate with this, rather than you speculate on whether you’re becoming slightly unhinged, I’ve been inviting the women I work with to notice all of this and to not pretend that we can get out of it because we are all still plugged into the system.

At the same time recognise that we have the ability to be still, reconnect, be present, and be mindful. The cliché really is true: it’s important to slow down so you can speed up.

How do we do this? As always, practices such as mindfulness, breathwork, heart-centred meditation, and being out in nature are paramount. Not just on a physical level but also spiritually speaking, because if you haven’t noticed, humanity is experiencing a HUGE spiritual awakening right now and it’s easy for all of us to get off track and caught up in the material world, to feel like we have to achieve and attain.

For those who have been on a spiritual path for a while, this is a reminder to slow down, to maintain a sense of connectedness to the human realm while at the same time connect to your inner essence so we can, as they say, slow down to speed up.

Much love,

Deb x