Anxiety makes time pass quicker (but fear doesn’t)

“Time is an illusion,” Einstein said.

It often seems necessary to ignore this fact, like when we are planning meetings, setting alarm clocks, or waiting for the microwave to finish. But new neuroscience research is shedding light on how the illusion of time depends on how we are feeling and thinking.

We all know this from experience: time slows down if we are in a dangerous situation, and “flies” when we are having fun.

But what are the mechanisms in the brain that explain this? And what happens specifically when we feel anxious? 

Let’s start with some definitions. 

Fear is an immediate and negative state where thoughts and feelings are directed towards a specific event, e.g. fear of failing an exam. 

Anxiety on the other hand is less directed, more prolonged, and more likely to be about an unpredictable event, e.g. what will happen when starting a new job. 

“when people feel anxious, they underestimate how much time passes. ”

Researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL wanted to understand whether anxiety and fear might have opposite effects on how we perceive time. 

To test this, they made people wait while knowing that they might receive an electric shock (anxiety), or while knowing that they will receive an electric shock (fear).

They then tested their perception of time.

The researchers found that when people feel anxious, they underestimate how much time passes. In other words, anxiety makes time pass quicker. On the other hand, some people tend to slightly overestimate it when they feel afraid.

This means that if you have ever been in a dangerous situation where it feels as though time stops, or slows down, it may be because you were feeling fearful, and not anxious - i.e. that the thing that was scary was very clear to you, and happening at that moment.

The authors suggest that this is because of how the attention systems in the brain work: that our perception of time is influenced by whether it is helpful for us to pay attention to the timing of the negative event.

This, they suggest, is the case with fear.

For example, keeping track of the time is important if a car is speeding towards you, so that you can take action to avoid it.

On the other hand, accurate perception of time may be less important in situations where you feel anxious. There is an ongoing debate about whether this is true, and what the reason might be.

What is know for sure is that anxiety biases our attention, and thereby heavily influences our experience of reality.

Anxiety causes our brain’s threat detection system to become hypersensitive, which means that our attention is quickly and automatically drawn to things we find threatening.

In the context of social anxiety, this might be towards someone laughing - if we are anxious, we might think they are laughing at us.

It could also be someone looking at their phone, which we might interpret as a sign that they bored with us, or it could even be our own body: our blushing or trembling might feel so embarrassing that we assume that others will look down on us.

Either way, it’s not our fault that we sometimes feel anxious. What this study suggests is that our experience of anxiety is a result of how our brains evolved to protect us.

Anxiety therefore is a natural, normal, and even healthy part of the human experience.

You can access the full paper here: LINK