How did COVID warp our sense of time? It’s a matter of perception

(NPR) [Listen to Audio] The pandemic did something strange to our sense of time. For Ruth Ogden, lockdown spent confined to her 3-bedroom duplex in Manchester, England, with a newborn and two boys home from school, “was like climbing a mountain that never ended.” Time stood still, she says, filled with children moaning of boredom, and her yearning for bedtime. “It was absolute hell,” Ogden says. “I could not believe there were 24 hours in the day; it dragged like a massive concrete block behind me.” And yet, with the pandemic receding a bit, Ogden says the distortion of that time feels different. “It seems like it didn’t really happen,” she says. “Like: I can’t really remember anything about it, so in some ways it seems quite short.”