How depression warps your sense of time
By Carolyn Gregoire, Huffington Post
Time may fly when you’re having fun, but it can feel as though it’s screeching to a halt when you’re depressed.
People with depression actually perceive time as going by more slowly than people who are not depressed, according to a review of studies published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in January.
To investigate the link between depression and time perception, German researchers analyzed data from 16 previous studies on more than 800 depressed and non-depressed people. Most of the studies assessed time perception by asking participants to gauge the length of time that they had engaged in different activities, such as watching a short film or pressing a button. The analysis revealed that people with depression reported a slower subjective experience of time — they often felt as though time was slowly dragging by.
