Illumination, barometric pressure, anxiety, stress, pain, anticipation, and feeling overwhelmed by tasks and deadlines can all affect our sense of time. Caffeine and thyroxine decrease the estimation of time, and amphetamines, marijuana, and opium increase it. Because earlier cultures saw life as continuous cycles of the days, months, and seasons, speculation has arisen about when modern societies began to see time as linear. When life-threatening disease looms over us, everything changes. Patients often talk of the moment when they heard they had cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, or leukemia as a heart-stopping thud, a Wagnerian chord, as if time stopped.
Serious illness changes all of that.
Because most of my patients have multiple sclerosis, I have become aware of how this particular chronic disease changes their sense of time, and I find that I can be a better advisor for them if I learn how they see their new life with illness. Episodes of symptoms drag on, progression moves quickly, the memory of a past healthy and vigorous life compresses and fades, and the future seems to shorten. Suddenly, the way they saw time, how time was intricately entwined with their lives and went off in a line forever into the future, was changed forever, as suddenly as if a distant thread was cut. Although physicians are not comfortable with such questions, patients must ask them to reorient life to a new sense of time. As a physician, I am aware that my sense of time in my life has changed as the years have passed.