Does mood lighten or darken as clocks go back? Britons urged to join study

Does the prospect of darker evenings make you feel gloomy, or will you relish the extra hour in bed for one morning? Scientists are launching a study to better understand how the annual switch back to winter time affects people’s wellbeing and time perception – and they need your help.

In the UK, the clocks are due to go back at 2am on Sunday 27 October. Previous studies have largely focused on the negative effects of the spring transition to daylight saving time (DST) on people’s sleep, cognitive performance and propensity to accidents, but less is known about the impact of the autumn change – or how these biannual events affect our perception of the passage of time.

“I’m interested in trying to understand how it feels when your day-to-day sense of time is disrupted by an external force: do you feel like you’ve got more or less time, and higher or lower levels of wellbeing?” said Prof Ruth Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University, who is leading the study.

“Time is a hugely overlooked element of psychology. Our lives are structured by a clock and we all have an internal representation of time, yet we have really poor understanding of how people perceive time and whether we could potentially modify people’s experiences of time to create improvements in wellbeing.”

The study is part of a wider project exploring how external disruptions can affect people’s sense of time. Ogden became interested in this field of research after being involved in a car crash at university, during which she experienced a sense of time slowing down.

Since then she has investigated how other emotionally salient events – including Covid lockdowns – can distort people’s time perception. “I found that people who were coping well, and had lower levels of anxiety, depression or stress, experienced a relatively fast lockdown, whereas the people who had a slow lockdown were those who were more socially isolated, depressed, or less satisfied with their levels of social interaction,” said Ogden.

Separate research has found that people who are struggling with chronic pain also experience a distorted sense of time. “It raises this interesting idea that our experience of time is embedded in trauma,” said Ogden.

The study is open to all UK adults and involves completing an online survey about their day-to-day lives and the amount of time pressure they are experiencing. It can be completed either during the week before or after the clock change, or both.

One question Ogden and her colleagues hope to answer is whether socially marginalised groups, or those who are struggling with time pressures, such as busy parents, experience the clock change differently to people who have more control over their time.

“We’re particularly interested in the relationship between time and power, and how when other people are in control of time, it can create various types of injustice for certain groups,” said Prof Patricia Kingori, a sociologist at the University of Oxford’s Ethox Centre, who is leading the overall project .

For instance, Kingori and Brazilian colleagues are working with women whose children are experiencing long-term problems as a result of catching the Zika virus . Under international law, there is only a short window during which such individuals can lodge a claim against the state, “yet, when people have experienced trauma, they’re often unable to marshal the resources to get things done in time to meet this deadline, even though they may also feel as if time has slowed down”, she said.

Another example is the societal pressure many women feel to have children during a very narrow window of their fertile lives – generally between their mid-20s and mid-30s. “I’ve worked with both teenage mums and older women attending IVF clinics, and one of the interesting things is that in both cases, women often felt that they were caught in the ‘wrong time’, even though biologically, they could have children,” said Kingori. “Time control is a kind of a soft power that acts on us in ways that can often make us feel late, inadequate or not quite right, and yet we often don’t see it as a form of power.”

The long-term goal of the project is to identify strategies that could help address such inequalities, potentially leading to improvements in individual and societal wellbeing.

“For me, the clock change gives us a little insight into what happens when time changes for everybody else, but it hasn’t quite changed in the same way for you, or when society imposes some restriction on your time,” Ogden said. “It also raises interesting ideas, like should we have a human right for time?”