Time, Experience, and Distress 

Human experience is entirely bound up with our sense of time. Time is so ubiquitous—the unquestioned background of everything—that we don’t often talk explicitly about its importance. There is evidence, however, that distress is notably bound up with distorted experiences of time. Early existential psychiatrists like Medard Boss as well as more recent research suggest that experiences like depression, anxiety, or mania all come with uniquely distorted experiences of time. Someone experiencing anxiety or mania, for example, may find their experience of time radically accelerated, with the future feeling radically open; anything can feel possible in the middle of a manic episode. When someone is experiencing depression, on the other hand, they may find time significantly slowed or ‘dilated’. This same research also notes that suicidal ideation is often accompanied by an intense slowing of time. 

I think it is important to explicitly take account of this connection between distress and the experience of time. I sometimes encourage clients to notice how time passes for them, and how distress affects their experience of time. Paying attention to time, however, is hard because the word ‘time’ has many different meanings. We are most familiar with measured time or clock time. There is also something that could be called body time. Attending to our experience of time is easier if we distinguish between these two types of time.

Clock Time, Body Time, and how the Former rules the Latter

We are all probably most familiar with clock time: the measured units through which we organize our lives. Clock time has become so ubiquitous that it often feels natural. It is hard to believe that someone invented clocks, calendars, and all the other ways that we measure the passage of time.

There is, however, a more fundamental sense of time which I will call ‘body time’. By body time, I mean the naturally occurring patterns and rhythms that our bodies require. We become tired, sleep, rise, eat, and do many other things in ‘natural rhythms’. People were not totally lost or disoriented before the invention of clocks. Things probably just moved more fluidly as people relied on the rhythms of the natural world and their own bodies rather than some external measurement. 

Our experience in the modern world could be characterized as the domination of body time by clock time. Many of us have heard, for example, of people who neglect their most basic bodily needs to ‘stay on schedule’ or ‘meet a deadline’. This might be an Amazon warehouse employee urinating in a bottle, a student pulling an all-nighter, or a CEO neglecting their personal and familial needs, all in the name of measured time. An especially striking example comes from studies of infants who were fed either according to a measured schedule, or based on when the infant showed signs of distress. Was the infant fed based on clock time or on body time? The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin reports that infants fed on body time schedules are more attuned to their mothers and develop a healthy and accommodating feeding schedule more quickly.

Indeed, there is an important and fascinating history to how our lives have been structured by the invention of clocks and calendars. The medieval historian Jacques le Goff explains how the development of clocks in Europe caused significant tension between growing mercantile classes and the church. The church had often been responsible for the rhythms of communal life: ringing bells to signify the meaningful passage of time, holding mass at specific times on specific days. The transition from medieval life to modern life has something to do with the victory of clock time over body time. No wonder so many of my friends, family members, and clients all talk about being busy, of feeling the weight of calendars and schedules.

Getting to Know Body Time through Focusing 

So far I’ve said two or three things. Human experience can be understood in terms of the quality of the passage of time. In the modern world our quality of time is dictated largely by forms of clock time: calendars, clocks, schedules, deadlines, and so on. This emphasis on clock time has left many of us estranged from the more natural rhythms of our body, so we struggle to know how we feel and what we are experiencing beyond the conventional surface.

The last thing I’d like to say is this: It seems to me that we need to engage not only with clock time (which is necessary) but must learn what it means to be grounded in the more natural temporal rhythms of nature and the body.

My main entry into the world of ‘body time’ is a practice known as Focusing. Focusing is a practice developed by the therapist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin. Gendlin defines Focusing very simply in his book Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. “Focusing,” he writes, “is just attending to the bodily uneasiness of a problem” (p. 304). This ‘bodily uneasiness of a problem’ could also be called our ‘felt sense’ of a problem. By attending to our bodily felt sense of a problem we hope to let the body tell us what would feel right in that particular situation. Say, for example, that I am deciding whether or not to confront a friend about something. I may sit quietly and notice how my body feels as I think about the situation. Once I have a sense of  the situation I may gently ask, ‘What would feel right here?’ And then I wait. Almost always some kind of information comes up, whether it is a word, phrase, image, or sensation.

Important here in terms of body time is that Focusing is about taking steps from a felt sense. It is a step, for example, to recognize that one has conflicted feelings about a situation, or that I need more time before confronting that friend. That single step may not solve the entire situation, but it is a crucial step that will then make other steps possible. Development, in life or in therapy, is always about little steps like this. To ‘take a step’ this way is to be working with an internal sense of time or process rather than some imposed external timeline. To be engaged with ‘body time’ is to let steps come from within, to let the pace of a process be set by something felt from the inside, not a measurement seen from the outside. It is widely acknowledged in Focusing communities that the practice comes along with a unique and expansive sense of time, and there is interesting research showing that the quality of our bodily attention can impact our experience of time.

All of us have some sense of where we ‘should’ be in the timeline of our lives. We may feel ‘behind’ or that there is ‘catching up’ to do. But thinking about our lives this way is to privilege clock time: to use external standards about how we ‘should’ be developing. To engage with body time is to slow down and accept that we are exactly where we are. From there we can find a process that fits our sense of things, find a rhythm of time that is aligned with our bodily living and knowing. 

Getting in touch with body time does not mean we won’t have to answer to clock time. I still have to manage my schedule and even sacrifice body time in the name of clock time: sometimes I won’t get enough sleep because of the demands of my schedule, and no, I won’t be able to use the bathroom until the end of a session. The goal seems to me to find a way that body time and clock time can work together. This means making room in our schedules for what we really need, recognizing that we aren’t machines that can work without rest, and making space to slow down, check in, and really ask ‘How am I doing, from the inside, in this body from which I’m living?’

Riley Paterson is a Self Space Seattle therapist who works with individuals who are healing from past traumas; who are looking to recover a sense of wholeness in the face of depression and demoralization, and those working to get a handle on anxiety. He is also interested in questions around queerness and/or gender.