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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Your sense of time
Two things follow. When the task is dull, expect your sense of how long you have been at it to fall well short of the truth, so use a timer instead of your gut. When the task is absorbing, set the alarm before you begin, because you will not surface on your own. Neither of these is a moral matter. It is what you do about a gauge you know reads wrong.
By the declining day (Quran 103:1). An oath is sworn on time itself, which gives the passing hour more weight than our sense of it does.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In an experiment, induced anxiety made time seem to pass more quickly, while fear did not do the same. What carries over is narrow but real: emotional state shifts time estimation in particular directions rather than randomly. It was a laboratory manipulation in a general sample, not a study of boredom or absorption in ADHD.
Sarigiannidis I, Grillon C, Ernst M, Roiser JP, Robinson OJ. (2020). Anxiety makes time pass quicker while fear has no effect.. Cognition doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
How engaged you are changes how long an hour feels, so the more unusual the state, the less the feeling is worth trusting.
Think of your sense of the future as how far out to sea you can spot a ship. How far depends on your eyesight, and also on how big and bright the ship is and what the weather is doing.
If the internal clock is not there, put clocks in the room. Somewhere the child can see without turning round, a timer on the desk, one on the wall by where they work.
A child who is blind to time is not ignoring the deadline. They are living in whatever is happening right now, with no sense that the bell is close or that Friday's test has anything to do with today.