Why We Lose Track Of The Days Of The Week During Festive

The festive season is always a period of the year to look forward to. Whether your tradition is visiting relatives and grandparents, exchanging gifts with close family, traveling or just downright debauchery, most of us can agree that festive season offers us the chance to unplug from our all too familiar routines and experience life differently, away from the capitalism hamster-wheel that we are exposed to for 50 weeks of the year.

Apart from that, the other thing we can agree on about festive is that in the days between Christmas Day and a few days post New Year's Day, something really weird happens to our perception of time—more specifically—days of the week.

The festive season time warp phenomenon!

As you can see from the infographic above, our perception of time in those days somehow gets warped. As any person what day of the week it is during any of the days and I am willing to bet a dollar that they would either completely not know or they will not be entirely sure and would require a few seconds to trackback and try to remember.

Back when I was still a kid, I used to think that the phenomenon was confined to me only and was caused by the fact that I was so excited for the festive season and couldn't care less about what day of the week it was but as I grew up and read more, I discovered that unfortunately, I was not so special (welp!).

"Mind Time", as the phenomenon is scientifically known, happens to most of us because of several reasons. According to this article of Mashable, for those who don't necessarily visit family over the holidays but instead go on vacation, the time-warping can be caused by the distortion between what we normally use for monitoring the time we spend between leisure and productivity—like bedtime, weekends, workdays— and the fact that those markers are not in place on a vacation and are instead replaced by our experiences of new sights, sounds and experiences. This sudden change in our markers for measuring time causes this warped perception of time. we experience.

So instead of going through the week by counting down the days until the weekend—during the holidays—,because there is no need to countdown to the weekend as every day feels like a weekend anyway (amaright!), our usual means of perceiving the days of the week goes into limbo and we are left with no other default mode of perceiving the progression of the days of the week.

For those who spend the holidays with family and still experience the "mind time" phenomenon, the article has an explanation for that too. I have to admit that I found the latter explanation quite confusing (like trying to remember days of the week during festive amiright!) but regardless, all the explanations point to the one thing we have always known—time is nothing but a social construct!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!

PS: It is Monday the 30th, by the way. You are welcome!