Research Recap with Skye: Time Perception Deficits
Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today, I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what it says and how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Time Perception in Adults: Findings from a Decade Review." In this paper, they analyzed a decade of research—from 2012 to 2022—investigating the specific nature of time perception deficits for adults with ADHD. Time is a little bit more complex than we often think, so let's get into how complex it really is.
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/286
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William Curb: Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today, I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper, dive into what it says and how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Time Perception in Adults: Findings from a Decade Review." In this paper, they analyzed a decade of research—from 2012 to 2022—investigating the specific nature of time perception deficits for adults with ADHD. Time is a little bit more complex than we often think, so let's get into how complex it really is.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, this is an interesting one. I'm going to put the results at the beginning: we struggle with all of this when we have ADHD. We know this. The long literature review over a decade of research indicates that if there is a time struggle and you have ADHD, you probably struggle with it.
But the interesting piece is that time is not just one thing. We’re going to get a little bit esoteric here, but I want to keep it grounded with some examples because they specifically looked at three areas: time estimation, time reproduction, and time management.
William Curb: Yeah, I think a lot of people have an idea of what time estimation is—just "how long did this take?" Then there's time reproduction, where a person is asked to replicate a specific duration they were just exposed to. It's similar to time estimation, but you're being told, "This was just a minute. Now, show us a minute." That gives me anxiety just thinking about doing it.
Skye Waterson: Spoiler alert: we’re not very good at it.
William Curb: Yeah. And then there's time management. We know what that is; it’s just our ability to use our time how we want to be using it.
Skye Waterson: Which is important. If you've set goals for this year and you’re currently working on them, but find you massively underestimated how long something would take, that is a struggle with time management. That is very normal when it comes to ADHD.
I wanted to dig a little deeper here. One of the things they said was that struggles with time are such a big part of ADHD that it's now considered the Triple Pathway Model. We have different struggles: behavioral inhibition, cognitive inhibition, motivational factors, and then time perception. When we talk about how time is perceived, there is circadian timing, interval timing, and millisecond timing.
The millisecond timing is important for motor processes, speech, and music perception. They were looking specifically at your ability to adjust time in milliseconds. I wondered, Will, do you think that is one of the reasons why we struggle with interrupting? We’re just not very good at millisecond timing?
William Curb: It could be. I could see that as an add-on effect where our rhythm of timing is thrown off and we can't get back into where we were.
Skye Waterson: Yeah, I thought that was interesting. I think there are a lot of other reasons—daydreaming, dopamine regulation, etc.—but that was one of them. Then circadian timing is the internal body clock regulating bodily functions; that’s something that happens without us.
Then interval timing is our ability to track the passage of time in the seconds-to-minutes range. Like all these other things, we struggle with this. Should we give some examples of what this looks like?
William Curb: Yeah. Let’s start with interval timing. I think that goes hand-in-hand with time estimation. Deciding what I'm going to do next based on how much time I have seems like it should be an easy decision. And yet, making it to meetings on time or getting out the door is vastly affected by whether I can understand how long five minutes is actually going to take.
Skye Waterson: 100%. It's one of the reasons why we get told to use timers. Although I think timers are helpful, they are not always as helpful as you’d think for estimation. They tell you what time it is now, but you don't know when they're going to go off if you struggle with the sense of time passing.
William Curb: This is why I really love the Time Timer that has the visual aspect. I use those all the time. My kids borrow them constantly because they need them too; it's so helpful for them to see how long they have to get ready. They are vital for my own time management, especially when I want to take a break or divide my time. Otherwise, I just don’t have a sense of it.
Skye Waterson: Definitely. Those allow you to see a big swath of color that then ticks down. You're not just seeing when the timer will go off; you can visually see how much time you have left. This has always been my biggest recommendation: try to put more ways to see and visualize time into your world, or even use audio. I've had clients who use phones that announce the time every five minutes. Unlike other people, we cannot do this in our heads. It's not a thing that is happening internally for us.
William Curb: As for the music, that made me think of my daughter. She was very into K-pop, and we would often listen to the soundtrack on the way to school. It got to the point where I’d realize, "We are running late because we are too far into this playlist." The music gave me cues that I normally would not feel.
Skye Waterson: That's a great example. It's a big part of why we struggle. Often, people with ADHD are either 10 minutes late or 10 minutes early; the chances of turning up exactly on time are very low. That’s why people think a highly anxious person who turns up 30 minutes early doesn't have ADHD. In reality, that’s just a time estimation problem they are overcompensating for.
William Curb: Absolutely. Overcompensation is a major way people manage these issues.
Skye Waterson: I remember as a student, my professor was surprised when I said I couldn't meet at a certain time because I needed to catch a specific bus and train and needed a huge buffer in between. This was before I knew I had ADHD; I just knew if I didn't do those things, I would be late.
William Curb: It’s also funny to think that our internal circadian clock also has issues being "on time." A lot of people have a delayed circadian rhythm where they aren't waking up or sleeping when society dictates they should. I really wish school schedules could be shifted because it’s biologically worse for most people to be doing that so early.
Skye Waterson: It can make it really tricky. I also wanted to highlight motor timing—like reaction timing when driving—and temporal foresight, which is the ability to anticipate the consequences of a decision. They included that in "timing," which I thought was really interesting.
William Curb: It is, especially regarding impulsivity. Impulsivity often happens because we don't anticipate or plan for future consequences; we just do.
Skye Waterson: Which is why, when people say they can only do things at the last minute and it will never change, I tell them that makes total sense. But then we sit down and break everything down. We assign each task a time—usually using AI to help us—and then have a look at it. Usually, at that point, people realize the project will take way longer than half a day. They then feel motivated to start earlier. We rely on that dopamine rush of the last minute because we aren't estimating the actual time required.
William Curb: And sometimes we’re so bad at that estimation that we realize, "Whoops, I gave myself two hours to write a five-hour paper," and then we can't do it at all.
Skye Waterson: I’ve worked with a lot of professors who do this. I think it’s so common in academia that it's become part of the system. Deadlines in creative fields like writing or music are often "fuzzy."
William Curb: Flexible deadlines are great unless you’re trained on a non-flexible model, in which case they become a detriment.
Skye Waterson: Yes! Flexible deadlines are their own problem. People think, "It’s due Monday, but that really means Wednesday, so I’ll start Tuesday." Now they’re doing complicated math for a fuzzy system. If it were just due on Monday, we could work backwards.
William Curb: There’s a clock in my living room that’s five minutes fast. Now, when I look at it, I don't see the time; I see a math problem. I have to think, "Okay, what is that time minus five minutes?" That extra step doesn't help me be early; it just makes it harder to figure out the time.
Skye Waterson: You're just doing extra math! I used to work with students who got extra time on assignments as a support for ADHD, but it didn't help because of this exact problem.
William Curb: More time doesn't always equal better results. It’s that time estimation piece that is our Achilles' heel. We’re bad at figuring out how long something takes, so we rely on the deadline to provide the dopamine to finish.
Skye Waterson: Exactly. If you feel unmotivated, the answer isn't necessarily "more time." The answer is to sit down, get the dopamine you need—go to a coffee shop, have a treat—and break the task down. Once you see the actual steps and the time assigned to them, you're in a realistic estimation mode.
William Curb: And perhaps set an artificial deadline where you meet with someone to go over your progress before it’s due. If your estimation is off, you’ve built in a buffer.
Skye Waterson: Sub-deadlines are better than fake deadlines. If you just tell yourself "I want to get it done by this time," it's too easy to push. It usually needs to be a meeting with another person to review the work. You won't do it unless there is something external involved.