How Grief Makes Time Feel Strange

One of the quietest, most disorienting parts of grief is the way it distorts time. Days stretch. Hours contract. Weeks disappear. Moments feel too long or too short or somehow both. You lose track of ordinary rhythms. Your sense of pacing becomes blurred.

Grief doesn’t move through time in a straight line.

It moves in waves, loops, pauses, and spirals.

When someone is grieving, time becomes emotional rather than chronological. You might suddenly feel as though something happened yesterday even if it’s been months. Or you might feel like years have passed in the space of a week. You may experience whole days where you’re moving through thick fog, followed by hours that feel painfully sharp and fast.

This is because the nervous system becomes untethered.

Its usual anchors - routine, certainty, emotional stability - have shifted.

Grief pulls the system inward. When that happens, the usual markers of time lose their meaning. You may forget what day it is. You may feel out of sync with the world. You may find that tiny tasks take forever while big ones feel impossible.

Time becomes less like a clock and more like a tide.

People often describe:

• feeling like they’re moving in slow motion

• losing track of hours

• sensing that days blur together

• sudden pockets of intensity

• feeling detached from the pace of others

• a strange quietness inside

• difficulty planning ahead

None of this is a sign that you’re not coping.

It’s simply the way grief rearranges your inner world.

The emotional body goes offline for a moment. It reorganises itself. It tries to make sense of a reality that no longer matches the one it knew. While that integration happens, your sense of time shifts too.

Grief slows you down because your system is doing something important.

It’s metabolising loss.

It’s absorbing impact.

It’s integrating change.

It’s protecting you from overwhelm.

Time distortion is part of that process.

It’s also why grief often feels lonely. The world keeps moving at its usual pace, but you’re living inside a different rhythm entirely. You’re suspended between what happened and what comes next.

As you begin to find your footing again, time gradually becomes familiar once more. Not because the grief disappears, but because your system adapts. The nervous system settles. The emotional body finds new anchors. Your days start to take shape again.

There is nothing wrong with the way grief changes your relationship with time. It’s part of the body’s attempt to help you survive something overwhelming.

If you know someone who may benefit from breathwork for grief, or if you’d like guidance on how to support a loved one through something heavy, you’re welcome to explore my grief-tending breathwork sessions. They offer a gentle, embodied way for the nervous system to release some of what it carries.

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