Does mood lighten or darken as clocks go back?

With the clocks going back at the weekend, scientists at LJMU have launched a study to understand how the switch affects our wellbeing and time perception.

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.

Much has been made of the negative effects of the spring switch 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.

Launching the study with an article in The Guardian, Professor Ruth Ogden, of the School of Psychology, said: “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?

“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.

Ruth and her team have investigated how 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,” she said.

One question they 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.

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,” Prof Ogden said. “It also raises interesting ideas, like should we have a human right for time?”

In the UK, the clocks are due to go back at 2am on Sunday 27 October.