Time perception during the pandemic: A longitudinal study examining the role of indoor and outdoor nature exposure for remote workers

Time perception is an important psychological concept and many studies have established a link between time perception and wellbeing outcomes. Prior research and accounts of human experiences have shown that the onset of COVID-19 and related lockdowns led to distortions in time perception especially in the early months. This exploratory study was conducted longitudinally across three survey time points during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dec 2020 (N = 452), March 2021 (N = 302), and March 2022 (N = 228), focusing on remote workers in the US. This is one of the first studies looking to surface relationships between shifts in time perception in relation to shifts in nature exposure (both indoor and outdoor) during the pandemic. In this study we focus on four measures of time perception: overall perceived speed of time passage, day-to-day perceived speed of time passage, blurring of boundaries between time markers, and time perspectives. As hypothesized, our results show that during the pandemic, as time passed, people experienced a shift towards faster perceived speed of time passage, both overall and day-to-day, as well as a decrease in blurring of boundaries. We also found indoor nature exposure to be significantly associated with faster overall and day-to-day perceived speed of time passage, while outdoor exposure was marginally significantly associated with faster day-to-day perceived speed of time passage. This study is an initial step to understand how nature exposure might be a valuable way of mitigating temporal distortions, even in circumstances as adverse as a global pandemic.