Brain health · Sanctum

Time blindness

Five minutes and an hour can feel the same. You are late despite genuinely trying, you underestimate how long everything takes, and time slips by while you are mid-task with no sense of how much has gone.

This is time blindness, a difficulty feeling the passage of time the way others seem to. It is not rudeness or disorganisation for its own sake. The internal clock simply runs differently, so planning around time, judging it, and noticing it pass all take deliberate effort rather than happening on their own.

Because lateness reads as not caring, and lost time reads as carelessness, the real difficulty gets missed. People build alarms and lists and still feel they are fighting the clock, and assume everyone else finds it this hard and just copes better.

We treat time blindness as a real feature, not a bad habit, because it shapes work, relationships and stress far more than it gets credit for. None of this is a diagnosis. It is what we explore with you.

Written by Dr Asad RaffiConsultant Psychiatrist · Founder & Medical Director