At ADHD Pirates, we’re passionate about making the science behind ADHD accessible and practical. Time blindness is a common experience for many adults with ADHD, but why does it happen, and how can we work with our brains instead of against them?
To dig into the neuroscience behind time perception and ADHD, we’ve teamed up with Dr. Ludovico Saint Amour di Chanaz—a neuroscientist, ADHD specialist, and fellow ADHDer—who brings both science and lived experience to this topic.
What’s Time Blindness in ADHD?
To understand what time blindness is, we must first understand what time perception is. It’s the subjective experience of the passage of time. Upon this perception we organise our lives, which include tasks, habits, and responsibilities.
In ADHD, this perception is disrupted, in what we call time blindness. This inability to perceive time as passing can create issues for people with ADHD, like predicting how long any task takes.
For example, if we underestimate the necessary efforts to complete a task, we may start it too late, and end up being perceived as lazy, or unprepared. But if we overestimate its duration, it often can look like a mountain, and we may struggle to get started in the first place. But that’s not all. Did you know about hyperfocus? That’s linked to time too.
When we find something interesting, time flies. Have you ever focused on something you liked and realised hours later that you were hungry and thirsty, but it felt like only a few minutes had gone by? That’s time blindness.
Similarly, we perceive boring things as “taking forever” – which is why one of the core symptoms of ADHD is having difficulties waiting. We seem impatient, or restless.
But imagine if a 5-minute queue felt like 3 hours every single time. That is also time blindness in action. A 2021 study found that time perception difficulties are not just a side effect of ADHD but a fundamental part of the ADHD experience (Weissenberger et al., 2021).
ADHD Symptoms and Time Blindness
If we take some of the basic symptoms of ADHD, we can see that there’s often an element of time-perception that comes into play.
People with ADHD approach organisation and prioritisation differently. Estimating how long something takes is directly connected to our internal process of evaluating how many resources we have to spend to complete something.
If you know that doing the dishes takes 5 minutes, sending an e-mail takes 2, and cleaning your house takes 2 hours, you may want to prioritise things by how easy they are – or how long they take.
But what if your brain told you that each of these tasks held the exact same weight? Suddenly deciding which one to do first seems impossible, and the decision may be random, or based on interest, rather than usefulness – does this sound familiar?
A 2022 study (Morsink et al., 2022) showed that people with ADHD perceive time as passing more slowly when they are bored. Imagine being in a work meeting and it feels like it is taking forever.
Suddenly you become more aware of the mild back pain you have since this morning, you may move, or squirm on your seat to get more comfortable, or get distracted by the weird tie Joe is wearing today. In your head, 2 hours went by, but in real life, 5 minutes passed.
From the outside, you appear as restless, hyperactive, and distracted.
Daily Life issues:
In our day-to-day, where prioritisation, organisation are core to our personal and professional life, having issues with time perception can have disastrous consequences. People with ADHD may arrive late to meetings, underestimate how long something takes and miss important deadlines – or start working at the last minute on a vital task. This all has long-term consequences such as a heightened stress level, but some life-altering ones like being fired from a job, or missing a bill or tax payment.
But what is it all due to?
How do dopamine and norepinephrine influence our perception of time, particularly in the context of ADHD?
Perception of time is regulated by neurons that we call “clock cells” and fire at regular intervals. Neuromodulators like dopamine, noradrenaline, acetylcholine or serotonin all contribute to the distortion of this perception (Faber 2017). This is why a class in school seems to drag on, but a night with friends goes by fast. Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Because the perception of time is linked to our reward system, among others.
In people with ADHD, dopamine and noradrenaline networks are less active, which affects how they perceive time. A Study by (Fung et al., 2021) found that dopamine plays a crucial role in our experience of time passing—when dopamine levels are low, time feels slower, which may explain why many people with ADHD use strategies like stimming, doodling, or engaging in stimulating activities to manage their experience of time.
Are there effective strategies or tools to help individuals with ADHD improve their time management skills?
There are lots of strategies to better manage time with ADHD. Many will advise planners or getting good with Google Calendar. Personally, I’ve never managed to make that work. Instead, I will advise another route that has always yielded positive and sustainable results: Music, that helps in three main ways.
- When we listen to music and we like it, our reward pathways are more activated, dopamine flows more in our networks, and the neurons responsible for tracking time are more well-balanced. Research suggests that music can help people with ADHD stay motivated and improve focus (Madjar et al., 2020).
- The rhythmic side of music can serve as training or as a blueprint for clock cells to synchronize to. Music therapy through the practice of an instrument or dance was shown to help with executive functions and reduce ADHD symptoms! (Zhang et al., 2017)
- I will never be able to tell someone how much time a task will take, but I’m a lot better at estimating how many songs it will take me to do something. Songs provide a measurable and distinctive unit of measuring time that does not disrupt our other activities. When I walked to school, I knew it took me two songs and a half to get there. I only realized that was roughly 10 minutes after 2 years of doing that walk every day. How many songs does it take you to send that dreaded e-mail? It doesn’t look so scary anymore if we think of it this way now, does it?
Can mindfulness or other therapeutic practices aid in enhancing time perception for those with ADHD?
Mindfulness helps a lot with emotional regulation and perception of one’s body. For Time perception I would instead turn towards rhythm-based therapies such as music, or animal-assisted therapy. I would like to note that while enhancing time perception can help in certain environments, having an accommodated ADHD; regardless of the perception of time can be even more helpful.
In that sense I would focus more on adapting our every-day life to this wonky perception of time where we can react peacefully to stimuli around us rather than spending a lot of resources into trying to bully our brain into a neurotypicality that will never be achieved.
How does emotional regulation interplay with time perception in individuals with ADHD?
One of the difficult aspects of emotional dysregulation with ADHD is the unshakeable certainty that the emotion that we are feeling in this very moment will last forever. This is also part of time blindness. If we were able to accurately perceive the passage of time, we would know in our bones that every emotion or state passes.
But with ADHD, it is often difficult to have that insight, and any emotion is felt so intensely also because it permeates our past, present and future. This is why we hyperfixate on certain relationships, or feel love early on in a relationship. This is also why anger or sadness can sometimes feel like the deepest pits of despair. Because we feel that it is never, ever going to stop.
Are there common misconceptions about ADHD and time management that you’d like to clarify?
The biggest misconception about time perception – but also ADHD in general – is that strategies that work for non-ADHD folks work for ADHD. They don’t and that’s fine, but we need to find other ways to accommodate our needs and organise our lives than the classic ones that haven’t been working for years.
I always take the example of this study about music because I find that it beautifully illustrates this concept. In an experiment on reading comprehension, children with and without ADHD were made to listen to music, with and without lyrics. Children with ADHD scored lower in reading comprehension than non-ADHD kids in the condition without music. With music, the trend was reversed.
If I had to give advice to someone with ADHD struggling with time blindness it would be to first of all be aware that you have this issue. When experiencing intense emotions, I find that being aware of my own time blindness helps a lot into calming down and not making rash decisions. Through awareness we gain a lot of power on ourselves.
One way to manage this is to consciously remind yourself that emotions and states pass. Having this habit ensures that when you’re in a heightened emotional state and it feels like it’s never going to get better, you’ll have a little voice inside of your mind that tells you that it’s just your time blindness, and that this too shall pass.
Don’t get me wrong, bad emotions will still be awful, but you will know that they aren’t going to forever, which by itself, brings some sort of solace and peace.
As more long-term strategies, exercise, music therapy, and getting into the sun all help. ADHD medication was also shown to improve time perception and reduce issues linked to it, but I’m aware that it’s not an option for everyone.
This article was generously written for ADHD Pirates by Ludovico Saint Amour di Chanaz, PhD.
He is the author of “The ADHD User’s Manual: From Understanding to Empowerment”, where he explores ADHD in a way that actually makes sense to those of us who live with it.
You can find more of his work at his website by clicking here.