Does the prospect of darker evenings make you feel gloomy or will you enjoy that extra hour in bed one morning? Scientists are launching a study to better understand how the annual change to winter time affects people's well-being and perception of time – and they need your help.

In the UK, clocks are due to go back at 2am on Sunday October 27th. Previous studies have largely focused on the negative impact of the spring daylight saving time (DST) switch on people's sleep, cognitive performance and accident propensity. However, less is known about the impact of the fall change—or how these biannual events affect our perception of the passage of time.

“I'm interested in understanding what it feels like when your everyday sense of time is disrupted by an external force: Do you feel like you have more or less time and feel better or worse? ” said Prof Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University, who is leading the study.

“Time is a highly overlooked element of psychology. Our lives are structured by a clock and we all have an internal representation of time. Yet we have a really poor understanding of how people perceive time and whether we could potentially change people’s experiences of time to bring about improvements in well-being.”

The study is part of a broader project examining how external disturbances can affect people's sense of time. Ogden became interested in this area of ​​research after she was involved in a car accident at university that made her feel like time was slowing down.

Since then, she has studied how other emotionally salient events – including Covid lockdowns – can distort people's perception of time. “I found that people who were coping well and had less anxiety, depression or stress experienced a relatively quick lockdown, whereas the people who experienced a slow lockdown were those who were more socially isolated, more depressed or less satisfied with their lives were levels of social interaction,” Ogden said.

Separate research has found that people who struggle with chronic pain also have a distorted sense of time. “It raises the interesting idea that our experience of time is embedded in trauma,” Ogden said.

The study is open to all adults in the UK and involves taking part in an online survey about their daily lives and the time pressures they face. It can be completed either the week before or after the time change, or both.

One question Ogden and her colleagues want to answer is whether socially marginalized groups or people who struggle with time constraints, such as busy parents, experience the time change differently than people who have more control over their time.

“We are particularly interested in the relationship between time and power and how other people's control of time can produce different types of injustice for certain groups,” said Prof. Patricia Kingori, a sociologist at the University of Oxford's Ethox Centre, who conducted the Leads overall project.

For example, Kingori and Brazilian colleagues work with women whose children have long-term problems due to infection with the Zika virus. Under international law, there is only a short period of time in which such individuals can bring a lawsuit against the state, “but when people have experienced trauma, they are often unable to muster the resources to get things done in a timely manner, “To meet this deadline, even though they may also feel like time has slowed down,” she said.

Another example is the societal pressure that many women feel to have children during a very short period of their fertile lives – generally between their mid-20s and mid-30s. “I have worked with both teenage mothers and older women who IVF clinics, and the interesting thing is that in both cases, women often felt like they were trapped in the 'wrong time,' even though biologically they could have children,” Kingori said. “Time control is a kind of soft power that acts on us in ways that often make us feel late, inadequate, or not quite right, and yet we often don’t see it as a form of power.”

The long-term goal of the project is to identify strategies that can help address such inequalities and potentially lead to improvements in individual and societal well-being.

“To me, the time change gives us a little insight into what happens when time changes for everyone else, but time doesn't change for you in quite the same way, or when society limits your time,” Ogden said. “It also raises interesting ideas, like should we have a human right to time?”