#temporal disintegration

If you don't know what day it is, you're not alone. There’s a term for what you're feeling: temporal disintegration.  It’s a phenomenon, explains Dr. Alison Holman, a psychologist and associate professor of nursing at University of California, Irvine, in which people are unable to retain and organize information relating to time, how to do things in a sequential order, or what happened yesterday or the day before. “For people who are staying in all the time,” she said, “the days meld in all together. There’s no distinction between the work week and weekend and you lose sense of time and what time it is.” Amid a global coronavirus pandemic, people are Google searching "what day is it," and also tweeting about their confusion. One morning news show in Cleveland has the answer and a timeless scene in the NBC sitcom "30 Rock" that has been repurposed. The term of temporal disintegration originated with Stanford psychiatrist Frederick Melges, who studied the phenomenon in the '70s and '80s. Holman has used the term to describe people who have lost their homes to a fire, a drastic, life-changing event. Some experienced "slowing down at a really odd pace, feeling somewhat disoriented, not having a sense of the future." Dr. Ruth Ogden, a senior lecturer and researcher at the school of psychology at Liverpool John Moores University in England, explained that the emotional effects of coronavirus caused by stay-at-home orders and social distancing mandates — loneliness, suspicion, purposelessness — create "the sensation of time dragging by." "This is because our sense of time is governed in part by the emotions that we experience and the actions we perform," Ogden said. People tend to have heavily-regimented days, with set work routines, meetings and social excursions that aid in keeping track of our days. You may have a weekly trivia night with friends on Tuesdays, a pilates class on Thursdays and church on Sundays. This is all lost when we're stuck at home. Couple that with heightened stress about our immediate futures, Holman says, and it's little wonder that we've lost track of something as simple as what day it is.  Both Holman and Ogden said that this feeling of days getting mixed together likely will end once we're able to start making plans and return to our old routines. But there's a very real possibility, both caution, that the "new normal" may remain long after we've returned to our usual routines. A life-changing event like the ongoing pandemic, said Holman, can alter how an individual lives even when it's over, especially if they are exposed to high amounts of stress, such as working in the frontlines of a hospital. "The more intense the stress is, the more they’re gonna have to focus and cope on the present moment, the harder it will be to overcome it," she said. "This pandemic is a chronic stressor that's punctuated by acute stressors ... the more people experience that stress, the more they're likely to face temporal disintegration."