Why Does Time Feel Both Slow and Fast After Trauma?

Have you ever felt like time was dragging unbearably slow while something distressing happened? Or maybe it feels like moment-by-moment things are moving so slowly, but somehow, time is still flying by? Strange shifts in how time feels are surprisingly common after traumatic experiences, including in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But why? Let’s explore! 

Time is A Subjective Experience 

The first thing we need to remember about time is that it is a subjective experience. While the clock ticks the same for all of us, each moment goes by differently.

Many things shift our perception of time from our cultural upbringing (interesting article here, if you want to learn more about culture and time), to our mood, to who we are with and, of course, traumatic events.

In healthy circumstances, our brain tracks past, present, and future in a coherent way. Though not perfectly, we know the order of events in our past, what’s happening in the present and what’s likely to occur in the future.

Think of this morning as an example: you can likely put these things in to the order in which you did them: eating breakfast, getting dressed, brushing teeth, getting to work/school.

After trauma though, that sense of time can become fragmented, disjointed, or distorted; it can feel slow, fast and all together "weird". You may be able to recall moments of what happened, but not be able to recall in what order. For example, if something traumatic happened while getting ready to go to work, you might know that you got dressed, and vaguely recall eating Cheerios, but you might not be able to recall which happened first and which happened second.

If we look at time and memory across a lifetime, a person without PTSD can, fairly easily, explain the order of events in their childhood, know that those times are done and understand that anything that happened in the past is unlikely to show up in the future.

For a person with PTSD, chunks of their childhood may be missing, they may not recall the order of what happened, they may believe that these things are still occurring in the present and that they will occur again in the future. They also report time as both being subjectively slower than those without PTSD and faster.

While sometimes difficult for those without trauma to grasp how someone cannot recall if an event happened when they were 7 or 10 years older, people who have experienced trauma often do not have a timeline to tether their experiences to. 

Why Time Feel Slow and Fast During and After Trauma

So how does trauma impact how the brain subjectively understands the passage of time? This isn’t perfectly understood quite yet, but there seems to be a few reasons:  

1. The Brain Focuses on the Present Threat

During intense stress or fear, the brain’s survival systems prioritize what’s happening right now, at the expense of your sense of past and future. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: attention is tuned to immediate danger so you can survive it. 

Consider it this way: when the traumatic event is happening, all you care about is surviving that moment. You put all of your mental resources to staying safe, and no resources to properly encoding time and the memories. 

After the event is, if you do not (consciously or unconsciously) go back to the event and tether it to a timeline, the memories and events may remain “floating”. Especially if someone experienced prolonged trauma (i.e. for their entire childhood), many of their memories may “float” in time. 

2. Memory and Attention Get Disrupted

Trauma affects the hippocampus and the organization of memories.

Time perception is closely linked to how we form and recall memories. Trauma affects the hippocampus, a brain region involved in organizing memories and where they fit in your personal timeline. When that system is disrupted:

• Events may feel just like yesterday even if they happened months ago

• It’s hard to chronologically order what happened and when

• The past feels “alive” rather than in the past (i.e. you fully re-experience moments from the past, rather than distantly, like you might with another memory)

This kind of disruption has been documented in PTSD and looks different from other conditions; trauma survivors often show more disturbance in the flow and organization of time than even people with other psychiatric diagnoses.

3. Emotional Intensity Alters Time Experience

High emotional arousal, like fear, panic, or helplessness, changes how long events feel. Some lab studies and clinical reports suggest that time can feel slower during a traumatic moment or more fragmented later on because your brain processes the experience differently. 

This simple quote by Einstein captures it well: Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. 

Concrete Ways People Describe It

Here are some common themes that show up in real-world accounts (and research mirrors many of these patterns):

• Time feels stretched or slowed: you feel stuck in the same moment, even as minutes tick by.

• Time speeds up: suddenly months seemed to fly past without meaning or recall.

• Days blur together: weekdays, weekends and months all feel the same, with little boundary between them.

• Uncertainty about future time: it feels hard to picture what’s ahead or make plans.

Trauma and the Sense of Self Over Time

One fascinating insight from research is that trauma doesn’t just change how long time feels, it can actually disrupt your internal narrative across past, present, and future. Some newer therapeutic approaches are even testing ways to help people “re-tether” their sense of self along a timeline so that their story feels more connected and less disjointed.

What This Means for Healing

Firstly, understand that your experience of time is neurobiological and psychological. What this means is that this is not just “made up” but literally your brain is changing and interpreting information differently. So, we have to help your brain grounded to the present and learn that the past is in the past. 

• Grounding in the present moment: Techniques that help orient you in time (like noting date/time, routines, or landmarks) can gently retrain your brain’s temporal sense over time. For example, when having an emotional flashback, naming the year can be helpful; this may be because it helps your brain differentiate the past from the present. 

• Narrative or timeline approaches in therapy: Some therapeutic modes help reconstruct a coherent sense of self across time. This might look like being asked what happened before the traumatic event began, before processing the event itself. This simple question can help connect the trauma to the events prior to the trauma, thus tethering it in time.

  This is likely why many people feel a strong urge to talk about the story of a traumatic event after it happened; they may naturally be trying to tether the event to the circumstances occurring before and after it happened. 

• EMDR: Trauma effects our neurological sense of time, not just our psychological. EMDR is a neurological approach to healing that helps your brain re-wire itself, so that it can connect to time in different ways. 

A Final Note

Time is deeply personal and deeply embodied. Trauma can warp that sense not because you’re imagining it, but because your brain’s survival systems are prioritizing safety, attention, and memory in ways that don’t always fit with the clock.

If you need support in managing your trauma and/or PTSD, and are located in BC or Kamloops, we are a team of counsellors and therapists here to help you! Reach out today.