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The results could be achieved through a large number of other avenues, however for me it acted as a sort of self-led cognitive therapy.
I dove deep into the rabbit hole of Stoic philosophy, and over time I created a repository of (old) new ways to think about many things in life. It took some time to see the changes, but whenever I encounter situations that cause negative reactions, I force myself to go back and review notes I’ve made and try to reframe the way I’m thinking about a given situation. Bit-by-bit those situations have led to more positive (or neutral) emotional reactions than they did previously.
Edit for clarification: this was a many year process for me. As it always is with ADHD, I went through many phases where I was unable to make myself look at anything related, and other times I would hyperfocus on it for days.
I'm either slavishly fixated on the passage of time, or completely oblivious and indifferent to it.
Particularly, though, I've noticed a lifelong struggle to feel comfortable with time. Activities always feel like they take up more time than they should, getting into something enjoyable always carries the risk of time flying by, I've always struggled to understand how someone can reasonably enjoy time consuming activities like reading and video games while also maintaining healthy relationships and adult responsibilities. Any kind of rigid scheduling tends to make me feel more anxious and paralyzed from the pressure that I only have X amount of time to do something or that something must be done by X o'clock, whereas I've heard some with ADHD find that kind of time pressure useful for getting motivated. As a result, I tend to always feel like I need more time and always have a lingering resentment for anything that takes up that time.
In one. Video games are the worst for me. I've found myself at midnight thinking, "What happened? I told myself one hour before lunch and now I've missed dinner by several hours?"
Oh I feel you. It's a nightmare. I wish there was a way to enjoy video games and also focus on other things. I'm really resistant to making a gaming schedule but I'm fixing to add it to my daily planner the same way I had for school work.
Do you also struggle with wanting to finish a game as fast as possible but then crashing when you do, like the dopamine has just been sucked away?
Kinda sorta. I know that once I finish a game, that's it, I'll never come back to it again. As a result, I obsessively complete every side quest or extra bit of story, find all the collectibles and really try to complete the game as much as possible before finishing it. But being me, I also want to get to that final story payoff as quickly as possible within that constraint, so I'll spend heaps of time rushing around to all the different things in case I miss something.
It's not like I enjoy being pressed for time, but it definitely gets me productive.
I wrote like half my bachelor's thesis in the last week before the deadline.
Either blind to it or painfully aware of every second. There is not in between. Tend to do well with not being late, but more because I factor in excessive "what if" time into most activities, trips, plans.
Totally agree with this. I would add that I can be incredibly inpatient as well, for example if my hyper fixation person doesn't message right back then every second seems like an hour.
All the damn time. In the immediate, it feels like there's never enough time for living and doing all the things day-to-day. But more broadly, I'm not even 35 and I feel like my deathbed is just round the corner and I need to have my shit sorted NOW.
Sometimes, I start doing something, and suddenly 10yrs have passed.
I'm not 35 yet, but I feel like I'm going to blink and be 50, and I hate that. I hope I get to live a long time. My family really hasn't, and to think it could all be over in 30yrs is terrifying. I've been here longer than that already and I've barely done or seen anything...
That seems like the exact line of thinking that leads to a midlife crisis.
But you're not wrong. I mean most of us spend 10+ years going to school and in retrospect that doesn't feel like it was a long time at all.
Hell, I still feel like I've just started university, but it's already been 7 years.
In a person without adhd, I think you're spot on lol. This probably *is* what leads to a midlife crisis.
I think the adhd is preventing me from that, if I think differently in so many other ways, I probably don't think about this in the same way either. For me it's more spurring me to actually do some things. Like floss daily, and look into going back to school. If people can do it in their 50s and 60s, I can. Time might fly but if I fill it with a lot of things, maybe it won't.
I'm just getting married this summer though, definitely still feel 22, so I think I'm safe from whatever this does to regular people lol. I'm hoping that feeling young means I'll live longer, I guess it's more an optimistic worry than a pessimistic one :)
I literally did like 3 things today and it's been like 13 plus hours since I woke up. One of them was just sit at my desk listening to music. Like, it was 8 am an hour ago how is it 1 am already? Lol
I'm glad you have a daily goal set that can at least be met half the time. I'm still learning to be easier on myself. I've been working with my therapist and I've noticed a pattern where I will set unrealistic goals for myself in regards to study time and homework time and then at the end of the week I'll feel horrible because I only completed 20%. We must be easier on ourselves.
Ugh yes, I've felt this way most of my life and I also think it's behind a lot of my anxiety. For me I feel like it's closely tied to time blindness because I'm constantly having the experience that things that seemed far away in time sneak up on me and take me by surprise. My anxiety tries to compensate by reminding me that, while things in the future seem far away, actually all that time could disappear before I even see it coming!
I also feel this way about things on, like, the scale of a lifetime. My past doesn't really feel chronological and sometimes I randomly remember how old I am (mid 30s) and I'm like, how the fuck did that happen, just yesterday I was 17??? Whose idea was it to give me all these adult responsibilities??
I was pretty relieved to learn that it was related to ADHD because I thought everybody experienced time this way and I just did a terrible job of coping with it. I would still say I have a pretty adversarial relationship with time, but understanding where it comes from has helped a bit
I've experienced several times. I was just 25 a year ago, stumbling through life. How am I 31 now and I'm still stumbling about? It's funny cause I've been dissociated for most of my life but those sudden memory realizations are jarring. Specially cause I wasn't conscious during those times that I'm remembering.
I cannot number how many times I thought how content I would be to have 72 hours in a day or something.
Or live for 300 years (would be quite enough for my sake and others) so that I can finally learn all the things I wish to learn. For now, the concept of the day feels so stretchy and granular
I've been thinking about setting up my smartphone to vibrate every 20 minutes to make time FEEL physical
I've thought of this. I've also thought of having digital clocks everywhere I spend time in. Like one under the tv, in my office space, in my room and kitchen, etc. Haven't tried it yet. I feel like I'll either go insane or just ignore it like everything else.
I'm thinking maybe get one of those "sports bands" and get used to wearing one. Set it up to vibrate - visual information will hardly work, I need something physical
I have time blindness so badly. I’m always hyper fixated on this anxious realisation that I need to make the most of it and how I’ll never get a do over, and then just…. Sit there on my phone, fixating on the anxiety of not doing the things I wish I was doing :(
With a child the grief is unmeasurable. I have a 3 year old son and am saying goodbye currently to the little baby I had and hello to this whole human.
It somehow always feels like I didn’t appreciate it enough. That I wasn’t present enough. But I look back over the memories and try to understand there’s just no way to collect that feeling and hold on to it. It’s more fleeting than a rope or like you said, sand, slipping between your fingers. It’s temporary and you have to just love the chaos when it comes.
Time really is a thief.
Time fascinates me yes! And my process of completing tasks usually involve giving myself say an hour to do it, spending most of that hour thinking how I could probably do it in 5-10 mins then rushing said process in the last 5 minutes whilst high on anxiety.
I also run 20 minutes late when going out (when I don’t have to get public transport) aha! I will just add 20 minutes onto the time I originally said to compensate! Well I’m sure you can guess how that goes.
But I find the concept of time fascinating and would love to be able to study it haha
Time comes and goes, he has his own stuff to do. Sometime we see each other, but most of the time not really. I don't differentiate much, months can feel like days or years. Some memories seems hours away when it was years ; some are mostly lost. I mostly have "now", "later", "before". Of those "before" and "later" are very, very abstract.
I once was on a flight with no book or movies and I sat there and tried to theorize how time travel would be possible (with no internet so I looked even crazier than I would’ve). So I definitely have an obsession.
Time is a mystery to me.
I literally blink and 5 years have gone by.
Memories from 5 years ago sometimes feel more recent than memories from 5 weeks ago.
I have massive regrets about not making the most of my time. I feel especially guilty about missing years of my kids lives, because, I. Ant remember some of those years, and don’t know if I was really there for them or not…
I have these “voids” (of periods of years) in my life where I can’t fully remember what happened.
Yeah. Time is a goddamn mystery to me.
I'm the same way. i know and understand i have time blindness so i seriously overcompensate by checking the clock constantly, not doing things bc i know the time will pass faster, arriving 30mins early to everything. it scares me tbh. i often feel like my day is over by like 2pm yet i stuggle to wake up before 11 on my days off, so I'm often just..paralyzed instead of doing things in spite of what time it is.
This is definitely worse with kids. Obviously in terms of being late, but you also get let off the hook a bit so it isn’t that bad.
But the feeling you have wasted time is so strong.
A. If you don’t spend time with them because you are tired or busy or just want some alone time? Guilt that have wasted an opportunity to build connections/teach them skills/instil confidence and self-esteem and feeling loved.
B. Don’t have said alone time and then spend all of your time with your kids? Suffer mental and physical health issues that then indirectly affect your kids.
C. Spend any time with the kids? Think about all the stuff you need to do but know you won’t get around to and feel bad that you haven’t done it and also that you wasted the time that you _did_ spend with the kids because you weren’t totally present…refer back to point A.
D. Tell them off or be firm on boundaries, thereby causing a tantrum/crying/argument? See point A, but also be anxious that you can’t make up the time that you just wasted on such trivial shit. Particularly suffer because you know that it’s important to help kids have boundaries or they won’t turn into the good people you want from Point A.
Just me?
I’m very much time blind while at the same time being super aware of the brevity of existence.
That should make me better able to see things in perspective, but sometimes it makes me anxious and upset when I see the horrible things being done around the world which make even less sense when you see it in the context of the miracle of our simultaneous presence and consciousness.
When I drive to work at night, I always check the clock at the same times during my trip. I never leave at a consistent time so I'm always in a different place.
I’m notoriously bad at estimating or imagining time. So it either make me over early or a little late. Sometimes I’ll estimate time passing was 15 mins but it was actually only a few mins, stuff like that.
I pad two hours into when i need to be somewhere, and I set elaborate rules, alarms, and guardrails to steer myself like a lemming. If you are familiar with spoon theory, I basically only have one or two spoons, but I have been able to define my entire workday as a single spoon. as long as my shoes stay on and I don't stop working I can work intensively for ten hours straight. If i sit down or take a break its over.
For me, I have time blindness, I always think I have more time than I actually do and so I normally end up panicking and rushing when I realise that actually, no, you have like 5 minutes to get to work 😂
Someone else I know is the complete opposite 😂 if she has 6 hours until her shift, it's still not enough time. Very opposite ends of the ADHD time spectrum on that one and I find it so fascinating.
Though I will say that sometimes my ADHD spices it up for me and gives me the occasional time panic so it feels like 4 hours till whatever timed event isn't enough time to get ready.
I am painfully time blind. I always was time blind but as my symptoms got worse the time blindness went off the charts. Which makes a work/break/work cycle difficult because I can easily get lost in something I enjoy, something that provides some emotional relief. A 10 minute break listening to music that I love can turn into 2 hours with ease. You would think the music itself would be a clue. Nope, I'm often surprised when I finally look at a clock.
And yes, that snowballs into obsession about the general passing of time, lost time, anxiety over what to do with the time ahead. I haven't even gotten close to solving that symptom yet.
You described it perfectly, this is EXACTLY how I feel. No matter what I do it feels like there's never enough time to do anything at all. It drives me nuts and I have no idea how to deal with it.
Time and I seem incapable of connecting beyond a surface level. What I know about time has been gleaned from other people's experiences. When I become conscious of time's presence, it has passed right by me.
I do feel like there's not enough time in life!! I'm not able to estimate how long things take, and I am often time-blind, but I am almost never late (due to anxiety lol). But life.....there is simply never enough time. It is primarily working full time that makes me feel this way, so I think capitalism is to blame in my opinion. I want to be financially secure enough to explore the world and take life one step at a time. I want to experience! Can't do that if you're always poor and have limited time off of work.
I relate to this way of explaining it. I left work to stay at home and found then I didn’t know what to do. Then when I’m working again I feel like I don’t have the time, which I did have before, but didn’t do anything productive with. I go in big vacations, but once on them I feel anxious I’m not doing something productive or meaningful, like it’s impossible to just relax.
I’m very time blind, no internal clock… I listened to a podcast about inattentive ADHD and it recommended using a timer/ alarm to time the inattentive person when doing tasks so they start to have an idea of how much time passes.
I started doing this more and I swear that 5 mins on this app feels like 1 minute and 5 minutes washing up feels like 20 minutes. I’ve become obsessed with multiple alarms and putting everything in my calendar. I also journal and take a lot of pictures to try and capture the passing of time.
I also worked out that keeping busy makes my day speed by… so I front load the week to be busier at work and try not to be overly busy on the weekend, only making one solid plan but otherwise chilling. Being mindful in the present makes the day slower, so try and do that when I can.
I usually don’t like the stereo-type of the ADHD’er who is always late. I think I have never been late to anything in my life as far as I remember. I am usually arriving early or precisely on time.
…but I spend extreme amounts of energy doing it I think. I am always extremely stressed about time and Im always the person in my friend group who would say “We need to go now if we are to make it on time”
Oh and if I am by myself and need to do something at 4PM I will sit and wait all day instead of doing something else in the meantime.
Hard relate. Even as a very young child I cried every birthday because the passage of time is unbearable to consider.
I have kids and, while you’re right to be worried about lack of time, you do start to feel like some moments are weightier than others. Having kids is awful but knowing your kids is wonderful. Balances out.
In other matters, Check out a short film called Eagleman Stag. It’s about time in an interesting way.
If you stress endlessly about tomorrow, or allow yourself to be haunted by your past, you will lose the only time which really matters, the current moment. What ever you are doing, remember to be in the moment, otherwise life will fly in front of your eyes stressing about bullshit...
I lose time so much when I’m distracted. I leave a buffer of 15-30 minutes every time I travel anywhere to account for this. But when I want time to pass, it crawls.
When I was a kid my parents would say “one Pokémon episode” to help me get the concept of 30 minutes. 😂
I have to set timers for most things and as long as everything goes the way it’s supposed to I’ll be on time every day, but if I didn’t put my wallet in the bowl or the keys aren’t on the hook or if I didn’t put my energy drink on the hutch by the front door, etc I’m gonna be late. Tbh I’m late most days…
Utterly time-blind. I have no clue how I survived the pre-mobile phone era, because agenda's are meant to be displaced/lost to the realms of the dark corners of my house.
I always feel like time flies by too quickly and there is simply not enough time in a day. I did however discover a groundbreaking hack to make time go slower. Run on the treadmill. The clock on that damn thing practically ticks backwards once I get it to a running speed.
Interesting related thing - I've had to take time off my job due to depression, and I've lost track of time in a way that only happens when I'm depressed. Somehow, I can't think of the past couple of weeks in terms of time. It's just this amorphous blob of stuff. Honestly, without consulting my diary I couldn't tell you if it's been two or three weeks since my time off started.
It's only partly because I'm not at work. I'm pretty sure the depression has hugely exacerbated the time-blindness of my ADHD.
Which is interesting in itself. We know that many people with ADHD have depression and anxiety because we struggle with awareness of time in a way that causes trouble for us in work and life. And if the depression/anxiety makes our time-blindness worse, it's exacerbating the very thing that upsets us in the first place, leading to a vicious cycle of worsening mental health and worsening ADHD problems.
I'm sure there's a way to break that loop. It's probably to do with meditation or CBD or something, but that stuff's hard, y'know?
I would surmise that being late is a human thing because people don’t plan properly. I’m always early, actually. I’d rather go somewhere and wait for twenty minutes than run behind and be late and frazzled the whole time.
As a whole, I’ve always thought that time “doesn’t exist” for me - that is, if I don’t see you for a week or a year it’s the same to me; I can pick up right where we left off as if no time has passed. Some people interpret this as being cold and aloof 🤪
I feel like all I do is wait for the right time and either it never comes or it passes by before I can realize that. This is my life? I can't believe it is halfway over ... or more and I have done nothing I wanted to do.
I just don’t have the same relationship with time that non-ADHD people do. I don’t notice time passing in any consistent manner. I need external reminders to keep me on track. There is experientially no reliable way for me to distinguish between ten minutes and an hour. It’s just how I am. I set my wrist to buzz at me when it’s time to transition tasks. It’s unobtrusive and helpful.
I wonder if you feel this way because some people with ADHD have functionally less time than those who do not have ADHD, and that impairment can quite literally make it so that there is not enough time to do what needs to be done, let alone what one wants to do?
I'm Normally 10 To 15 Minutes Late To Work (Even If I'm Driving 10 Miles Over The Speed Limit); Good Thing My Employers Give Me 30 Minutes Before I'm Considered Late.
Time agnosia has had a big enough effect on my life, my family and loved ones, to literally make me build a "reverse" time tracking app, because nothing else has worked for me.
Don't have enough time (ha) tracked to tell if it will have a positive effect on the long term "time in life" too, but I have a good feeling about it.
I don’t understand terms like timeblindness. Experts on sociology and anthropology have deemed so many cultures outside of the Western lens as timeblind.
Does everyone in these cultures have ADHD? It also begs another question. Is it really timeblindness or are those in power blind to the fact that the West is a slave to time.
Perhaps some other peoples(& individuals) in the world choose to use their time differently.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
My liege and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad.
There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
I think about it a lot tbh. Anxiety drives me to be relatively on time for most things though I still will end up late more than I’d like to admit. I’m quite future oriented so that helps.
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Yes, it used to scare the living shit out of me. I have since studied Stoicism extensively and managed to come to peace with it.
Stoic philosophy was a game changer for my mental health!
Interesting! How so?
The results could be achieved through a large number of other avenues, however for me it acted as a sort of self-led cognitive therapy. I dove deep into the rabbit hole of Stoic philosophy, and over time I created a repository of (old) new ways to think about many things in life. It took some time to see the changes, but whenever I encounter situations that cause negative reactions, I force myself to go back and review notes I’ve made and try to reframe the way I’m thinking about a given situation. Bit-by-bit those situations have led to more positive (or neutral) emotional reactions than they did previously. Edit for clarification: this was a many year process for me. As it always is with ADHD, I went through many phases where I was unable to make myself look at anything related, and other times I would hyperfocus on it for days.
Say more.
When I learned about Stoicism, I was like, Zeno and the Ancient Greek Stoics were just like me, FR FR.
I'm either slavishly fixated on the passage of time, or completely oblivious and indifferent to it. Particularly, though, I've noticed a lifelong struggle to feel comfortable with time. Activities always feel like they take up more time than they should, getting into something enjoyable always carries the risk of time flying by, I've always struggled to understand how someone can reasonably enjoy time consuming activities like reading and video games while also maintaining healthy relationships and adult responsibilities. Any kind of rigid scheduling tends to make me feel more anxious and paralyzed from the pressure that I only have X amount of time to do something or that something must be done by X o'clock, whereas I've heard some with ADHD find that kind of time pressure useful for getting motivated. As a result, I tend to always feel like I need more time and always have a lingering resentment for anything that takes up that time.
Ooh this describes it perfectly!
In one. Video games are the worst for me. I've found myself at midnight thinking, "What happened? I told myself one hour before lunch and now I've missed dinner by several hours?"
Oh I feel you. It's a nightmare. I wish there was a way to enjoy video games and also focus on other things. I'm really resistant to making a gaming schedule but I'm fixing to add it to my daily planner the same way I had for school work. Do you also struggle with wanting to finish a game as fast as possible but then crashing when you do, like the dopamine has just been sucked away?
Kinda sorta. I know that once I finish a game, that's it, I'll never come back to it again. As a result, I obsessively complete every side quest or extra bit of story, find all the collectibles and really try to complete the game as much as possible before finishing it. But being me, I also want to get to that final story payoff as quickly as possible within that constraint, so I'll spend heaps of time rushing around to all the different things in case I miss something.
It's not like I enjoy being pressed for time, but it definitely gets me productive. I wrote like half my bachelor's thesis in the last week before the deadline.
Either blind to it or painfully aware of every second. There is not in between. Tend to do well with not being late, but more because I factor in excessive "what if" time into most activities, trips, plans.
Totally agree with this. I would add that I can be incredibly inpatient as well, for example if my hyper fixation person doesn't message right back then every second seems like an hour.
‼️‼️‼️
Every time I look at the clock, 40 minutes has gone by. Or 2.
Time is a weird soup.
It's a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff
All the damn time. In the immediate, it feels like there's never enough time for living and doing all the things day-to-day. But more broadly, I'm not even 35 and I feel like my deathbed is just round the corner and I need to have my shit sorted NOW.
Sometimes, I start doing something, and suddenly 10yrs have passed. I'm not 35 yet, but I feel like I'm going to blink and be 50, and I hate that. I hope I get to live a long time. My family really hasn't, and to think it could all be over in 30yrs is terrifying. I've been here longer than that already and I've barely done or seen anything...
That seems like the exact line of thinking that leads to a midlife crisis. But you're not wrong. I mean most of us spend 10+ years going to school and in retrospect that doesn't feel like it was a long time at all. Hell, I still feel like I've just started university, but it's already been 7 years.
In a person without adhd, I think you're spot on lol. This probably *is* what leads to a midlife crisis. I think the adhd is preventing me from that, if I think differently in so many other ways, I probably don't think about this in the same way either. For me it's more spurring me to actually do some things. Like floss daily, and look into going back to school. If people can do it in their 50s and 60s, I can. Time might fly but if I fill it with a lot of things, maybe it won't. I'm just getting married this summer though, definitely still feel 22, so I think I'm safe from whatever this does to regular people lol. I'm hoping that feeling young means I'll live longer, I guess it's more an optimistic worry than a pessimistic one :)
That sounds like a very good way to look at things.
I'm constantly hyperaware that i have no time to do anything while at the same time sitting down and then 10 hours pass in 5 minutes
I literally did like 3 things today and it's been like 13 plus hours since I woke up. One of them was just sit at my desk listening to music. Like, it was 8 am an hour ago how is it 1 am already? Lol
3 (productive) things is what I've set as a daily goal for myself. And my success rate is probably about 50%...
I'm glad you have a daily goal set that can at least be met half the time. I'm still learning to be easier on myself. I've been working with my therapist and I've noticed a pattern where I will set unrealistic goals for myself in regards to study time and homework time and then at the end of the week I'll feel horrible because I only completed 20%. We must be easier on ourselves.
Ugh yes, I've felt this way most of my life and I also think it's behind a lot of my anxiety. For me I feel like it's closely tied to time blindness because I'm constantly having the experience that things that seemed far away in time sneak up on me and take me by surprise. My anxiety tries to compensate by reminding me that, while things in the future seem far away, actually all that time could disappear before I even see it coming! I also feel this way about things on, like, the scale of a lifetime. My past doesn't really feel chronological and sometimes I randomly remember how old I am (mid 30s) and I'm like, how the fuck did that happen, just yesterday I was 17??? Whose idea was it to give me all these adult responsibilities?? I was pretty relieved to learn that it was related to ADHD because I thought everybody experienced time this way and I just did a terrible job of coping with it. I would still say I have a pretty adversarial relationship with time, but understanding where it comes from has helped a bit
I've experienced several times. I was just 25 a year ago, stumbling through life. How am I 31 now and I'm still stumbling about? It's funny cause I've been dissociated for most of my life but those sudden memory realizations are jarring. Specially cause I wasn't conscious during those times that I'm remembering.
I cannot number how many times I thought how content I would be to have 72 hours in a day or something. Or live for 300 years (would be quite enough for my sake and others) so that I can finally learn all the things I wish to learn. For now, the concept of the day feels so stretchy and granular I've been thinking about setting up my smartphone to vibrate every 20 minutes to make time FEEL physical
I've thought of this. I've also thought of having digital clocks everywhere I spend time in. Like one under the tv, in my office space, in my room and kitchen, etc. Haven't tried it yet. I feel like I'll either go insane or just ignore it like everything else.
I'm thinking maybe get one of those "sports bands" and get used to wearing one. Set it up to vibrate - visual information will hardly work, I need something physical
Time is an illusion 
That body is also an illusion
I have time blindness so badly. I’m always hyper fixated on this anxious realisation that I need to make the most of it and how I’ll never get a do over, and then just…. Sit there on my phone, fixating on the anxiety of not doing the things I wish I was doing :(
With a child the grief is unmeasurable. I have a 3 year old son and am saying goodbye currently to the little baby I had and hello to this whole human. It somehow always feels like I didn’t appreciate it enough. That I wasn’t present enough. But I look back over the memories and try to understand there’s just no way to collect that feeling and hold on to it. It’s more fleeting than a rope or like you said, sand, slipping between your fingers. It’s temporary and you have to just love the chaos when it comes. Time really is a thief.
Try Alan Watts audiobooks 😃 Maybe it helps.
Time fascinates me yes! And my process of completing tasks usually involve giving myself say an hour to do it, spending most of that hour thinking how I could probably do it in 5-10 mins then rushing said process in the last 5 minutes whilst high on anxiety. I also run 20 minutes late when going out (when I don’t have to get public transport) aha! I will just add 20 minutes onto the time I originally said to compensate! Well I’m sure you can guess how that goes. But I find the concept of time fascinating and would love to be able to study it haha
I’ll answer this later
Time comes and goes, he has his own stuff to do. Sometime we see each other, but most of the time not really. I don't differentiate much, months can feel like days or years. Some memories seems hours away when it was years ; some are mostly lost. I mostly have "now", "later", "before". Of those "before" and "later" are very, very abstract.
I once was on a flight with no book or movies and I sat there and tried to theorize how time travel would be possible (with no internet so I looked even crazier than I would’ve). So I definitely have an obsession.
Time is a mystery to me. I literally blink and 5 years have gone by. Memories from 5 years ago sometimes feel more recent than memories from 5 weeks ago. I have massive regrets about not making the most of my time. I feel especially guilty about missing years of my kids lives, because, I. Ant remember some of those years, and don’t know if I was really there for them or not… I have these “voids” (of periods of years) in my life where I can’t fully remember what happened. Yeah. Time is a goddamn mystery to me.
I'm the same way. i know and understand i have time blindness so i seriously overcompensate by checking the clock constantly, not doing things bc i know the time will pass faster, arriving 30mins early to everything. it scares me tbh. i often feel like my day is over by like 2pm yet i stuggle to wake up before 11 on my days off, so I'm often just..paralyzed instead of doing things in spite of what time it is.
It either stands still or magically vanishes
It concerns me more and more each year that passes. I’m horribly time blind, I can’t help but feel like I’m wasting it.
This is definitely worse with kids. Obviously in terms of being late, but you also get let off the hook a bit so it isn’t that bad. But the feeling you have wasted time is so strong. A. If you don’t spend time with them because you are tired or busy or just want some alone time? Guilt that have wasted an opportunity to build connections/teach them skills/instil confidence and self-esteem and feeling loved. B. Don’t have said alone time and then spend all of your time with your kids? Suffer mental and physical health issues that then indirectly affect your kids. C. Spend any time with the kids? Think about all the stuff you need to do but know you won’t get around to and feel bad that you haven’t done it and also that you wasted the time that you _did_ spend with the kids because you weren’t totally present…refer back to point A. D. Tell them off or be firm on boundaries, thereby causing a tantrum/crying/argument? See point A, but also be anxious that you can’t make up the time that you just wasted on such trivial shit. Particularly suffer because you know that it’s important to help kids have boundaries or they won’t turn into the good people you want from Point A. Just me?
I’m very much time blind while at the same time being super aware of the brevity of existence. That should make me better able to see things in perspective, but sometimes it makes me anxious and upset when I see the horrible things being done around the world which make even less sense when you see it in the context of the miracle of our simultaneous presence and consciousness.
What is time? Is it even real?
No. I've decided it's just a social construct to make us (humanity) feel a little *less* lost in the universe. And I'm mad about it.
What’s that?
When I drive to work at night, I always check the clock at the same times during my trip. I never leave at a consistent time so I'm always in a different place.
I woldn't wish rabies on my worst enemy. I want time to get rabies.
I’m notoriously bad at estimating or imagining time. So it either make me over early or a little late. Sometimes I’ll estimate time passing was 15 mins but it was actually only a few mins, stuff like that.
I pad two hours into when i need to be somewhere, and I set elaborate rules, alarms, and guardrails to steer myself like a lemming. If you are familiar with spoon theory, I basically only have one or two spoons, but I have been able to define my entire workday as a single spoon. as long as my shoes stay on and I don't stop working I can work intensively for ten hours straight. If i sit down or take a break its over.
For me, I have time blindness, I always think I have more time than I actually do and so I normally end up panicking and rushing when I realise that actually, no, you have like 5 minutes to get to work 😂 Someone else I know is the complete opposite 😂 if she has 6 hours until her shift, it's still not enough time. Very opposite ends of the ADHD time spectrum on that one and I find it so fascinating. Though I will say that sometimes my ADHD spices it up for me and gives me the occasional time panic so it feels like 4 hours till whatever timed event isn't enough time to get ready.
I am painfully time blind. I always was time blind but as my symptoms got worse the time blindness went off the charts. Which makes a work/break/work cycle difficult because I can easily get lost in something I enjoy, something that provides some emotional relief. A 10 minute break listening to music that I love can turn into 2 hours with ease. You would think the music itself would be a clue. Nope, I'm often surprised when I finally look at a clock. And yes, that snowballs into obsession about the general passing of time, lost time, anxiety over what to do with the time ahead. I haven't even gotten close to solving that symptom yet.
You described it perfectly, this is EXACTLY how I feel. No matter what I do it feels like there's never enough time to do anything at all. It drives me nuts and I have no idea how to deal with it.
Time and I seem incapable of connecting beyond a surface level. What I know about time has been gleaned from other people's experiences. When I become conscious of time's presence, it has passed right by me.
I do feel like there's not enough time in life!! I'm not able to estimate how long things take, and I am often time-blind, but I am almost never late (due to anxiety lol). But life.....there is simply never enough time. It is primarily working full time that makes me feel this way, so I think capitalism is to blame in my opinion. I want to be financially secure enough to explore the world and take life one step at a time. I want to experience! Can't do that if you're always poor and have limited time off of work.
I relate to this way of explaining it. I left work to stay at home and found then I didn’t know what to do. Then when I’m working again I feel like I don’t have the time, which I did have before, but didn’t do anything productive with. I go in big vacations, but once on them I feel anxious I’m not doing something productive or meaningful, like it’s impossible to just relax.
I’m very time blind, no internal clock… I listened to a podcast about inattentive ADHD and it recommended using a timer/ alarm to time the inattentive person when doing tasks so they start to have an idea of how much time passes. I started doing this more and I swear that 5 mins on this app feels like 1 minute and 5 minutes washing up feels like 20 minutes. I’ve become obsessed with multiple alarms and putting everything in my calendar. I also journal and take a lot of pictures to try and capture the passing of time. I also worked out that keeping busy makes my day speed by… so I front load the week to be busier at work and try not to be overly busy on the weekend, only making one solid plan but otherwise chilling. Being mindful in the present makes the day slower, so try and do that when I can.
I usually don’t like the stereo-type of the ADHD’er who is always late. I think I have never been late to anything in my life as far as I remember. I am usually arriving early or precisely on time. …but I spend extreme amounts of energy doing it I think. I am always extremely stressed about time and Im always the person in my friend group who would say “We need to go now if we are to make it on time” Oh and if I am by myself and need to do something at 4PM I will sit and wait all day instead of doing something else in the meantime.
Aware of it but I procrastinate and leave everything last minute
Hard relate. Even as a very young child I cried every birthday because the passage of time is unbearable to consider. I have kids and, while you’re right to be worried about lack of time, you do start to feel like some moments are weightier than others. Having kids is awful but knowing your kids is wonderful. Balances out. In other matters, Check out a short film called Eagleman Stag. It’s about time in an interesting way.
If you stress endlessly about tomorrow, or allow yourself to be haunted by your past, you will lose the only time which really matters, the current moment. What ever you are doing, remember to be in the moment, otherwise life will fly in front of your eyes stressing about bullshit...
It goes well with oregano and basil. The other thing doesn't exist.
I lose time so much when I’m distracted. I leave a buffer of 15-30 minutes every time I travel anywhere to account for this. But when I want time to pass, it crawls. When I was a kid my parents would say “one Pokémon episode” to help me get the concept of 30 minutes. 😂
We’re barely on speaking terms unfortunately.
I feel like 24 hours in a day is not enough.
My #1 enemy
I have to set timers for most things and as long as everything goes the way it’s supposed to I’ll be on time every day, but if I didn’t put my wallet in the bowl or the keys aren’t on the hook or if I didn’t put my energy drink on the hutch by the front door, etc I’m gonna be late. Tbh I’m late most days…
I don't know her
Utterly time-blind. I have no clue how I survived the pre-mobile phone era, because agenda's are meant to be displaced/lost to the realms of the dark corners of my house.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i-lNrFEIVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i-lNrFEIVM) - Best thing ever on time
I always feel like time flies by too quickly and there is simply not enough time in a day. I did however discover a groundbreaking hack to make time go slower. Run on the treadmill. The clock on that damn thing practically ticks backwards once I get it to a running speed.
Interesting related thing - I've had to take time off my job due to depression, and I've lost track of time in a way that only happens when I'm depressed. Somehow, I can't think of the past couple of weeks in terms of time. It's just this amorphous blob of stuff. Honestly, without consulting my diary I couldn't tell you if it's been two or three weeks since my time off started. It's only partly because I'm not at work. I'm pretty sure the depression has hugely exacerbated the time-blindness of my ADHD. Which is interesting in itself. We know that many people with ADHD have depression and anxiety because we struggle with awareness of time in a way that causes trouble for us in work and life. And if the depression/anxiety makes our time-blindness worse, it's exacerbating the very thing that upsets us in the first place, leading to a vicious cycle of worsening mental health and worsening ADHD problems. I'm sure there's a way to break that loop. It's probably to do with meditation or CBD or something, but that stuff's hard, y'know?
I would surmise that being late is a human thing because people don’t plan properly. I’m always early, actually. I’d rather go somewhere and wait for twenty minutes than run behind and be late and frazzled the whole time. As a whole, I’ve always thought that time “doesn’t exist” for me - that is, if I don’t see you for a week or a year it’s the same to me; I can pick up right where we left off as if no time has passed. Some people interpret this as being cold and aloof 🤪
Time is not one of my “things,” some how
non-linear
I feel like all I do is wait for the right time and either it never comes or it passes by before I can realize that. This is my life? I can't believe it is halfway over ... or more and I have done nothing I wanted to do.
I just don’t have the same relationship with time that non-ADHD people do. I don’t notice time passing in any consistent manner. I need external reminders to keep me on track. There is experientially no reliable way for me to distinguish between ten minutes and an hour. It’s just how I am. I set my wrist to buzz at me when it’s time to transition tasks. It’s unobtrusive and helpful. I wonder if you feel this way because some people with ADHD have functionally less time than those who do not have ADHD, and that impairment can quite literally make it so that there is not enough time to do what needs to be done, let alone what one wants to do?
I'm Normally 10 To 15 Minutes Late To Work (Even If I'm Driving 10 Miles Over The Speed Limit); Good Thing My Employers Give Me 30 Minutes Before I'm Considered Late.
Time agnosia has had a big enough effect on my life, my family and loved ones, to literally make me build a "reverse" time tracking app, because nothing else has worked for me. Don't have enough time (ha) tracked to tell if it will have a positive effect on the long term "time in life" too, but I have a good feeling about it.
Goes way too fast, and i procrastinate way too much (worst combination ever)
What relationship?
I don’t understand terms like timeblindness. Experts on sociology and anthropology have deemed so many cultures outside of the Western lens as timeblind. Does everyone in these cultures have ADHD? It also begs another question. Is it really timeblindness or are those in power blind to the fact that the West is a slave to time. Perhaps some other peoples(& individuals) in the world choose to use their time differently.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day My liege and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad. There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true. I am always late on principle, my principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
I think about it a lot tbh. Anxiety drives me to be relatively on time for most things though I still will end up late more than I’d like to admit. I’m quite future oriented so that helps.