The Perception of Time Influences Healing Independent of Actual Time

Insights and excerpts from the article Our Perception of Time Changes How We Heal will be shared over a series of SOW postings.

Typically, when considering healing time, we think about the depth of the cut, the severity of the wound, or which organs were affected. However, a study published in December 2023 found another significant factor that seems to influence healing speed–the perception of time passed.

“We saw that the healing rate of the wound depended on the duration of time as perceived by the participant. Our results contribute to a growing body of evidence suggesting that abstract psychological precepts, such as those that guide how we perceive the passage of time, can significantly impact physical health outcomes.”

This article points out additional insights in the mind/body concept and we will address those concepts in future excerpts. For now, here are the rough details of how they conducted this experiment.

The researcher and her colleagues used cupping therapy, a technique using glass cups that has been used for thousands of years in China and ancient Egypt for treating diseases, pain, and more. When the rim of the cup is applied to the human body, the vacuum “sucks” the skin into the cup, breaking the capillaries in the area and causing a blood blister that sometimes lasts for several hours, manifesting as a red mark on the skin. The researchers aimed to examine how quickly participants would recover from this controlled “injury” after 28 minutes.  

Each of the 33 participants underwent the process three times on different days. Each time, a researcher placed a cupping glass with a diameter of about 1 1/2 inches on the participant’s arm for about half a minute. The researcher then photographed the red mark immediately after removing the cup and again 28 minutes later. During the 28 minutes of each phase of the experiment, participants played Tetris on a computer with a small clock next to it. 

The researchers did not inform the participants that they were manipulating their sense of time. In one instance, the clock next to the computer moved at twice the normal speed, making the participant believe 56 minutes had passed. In another, the clock moved at half the normal speed, so the participant thought only 14 minutes had passed. In a third instance, the clock was not manipulated, and the participant knew that 28 minutes had indeed passed at normal speed.

When 25 judges, unaware of the experiment’s conditions, compared the pictures of the wound’s state immediately after removing the cupping glass, they were asked to rate the healing on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being “completely healed.”

In the slow-time pairs, where the participant thought only 14 minutes had passed, only five participants showed almost complete healing, and the average healing rate was 6.17. 

Of the participants who accurately believed 28 minutes had passed, eight reached almost complete healing, with an average healing rate of 6.43.

Among the participants who believed 56 minutes had passed, 11 of them achieved near-complete healing—the red mark almost completely disappeared—resulting in an average rating of 7.3.

Your perception of time passage has a significant effect upon your health.