A shared universe › Blog › Why waiting feels so long · Español
The clock in the waiting room says twenty minutes, but to you it has felt like a whole morning. Yet an afternoon with friends slips away in a sigh. The time the clock measures and the time the mind lives don’t always match, and when we are waiting for something, the difference is very noticeable.
Psychologists who study how we perceive time have seen that the duration we feel depends largely on where our attention is. In a review of twenty experiments published in 1997, Richard Block and Dan Zakay, the latter of Tel Aviv University, found that when a person is paying attention to time, because they know they will later have to estimate how long something lasted, they judge it to be longer than when they are not.
In a wait, exactly that happens: there is little to do but look at the clock and think about how long it is taking. Zakay has also explained that boredom makes time seem to pass more slowly, like a warning that the mind lacks something to occupy it.
In 1985, David Maister, who was then teaching at Harvard Business School, wrote an essay on the psychology of queues that is still cited today. His starting point was simple: whether we end up satisfied or annoyed after waiting depends not so much on how long the wait is as on how we experience it, compared with what we had imagined.
From there he gathered a series of observations about what makes a wait feel longer:
He also observed that the more what we are waiting for is worth, the more willing we are to wait. Maister was talking about queues in banks, restaurants or theme parks, and his ideas were observations from someone who knew those services well, not experiments. Several of them have been confirmed since.
In 1996, the researchers Michael Hui and David Tse ran an experiment on what it is best to tell someone who is waiting. Giving information about how much longer it would be made a long wait more acceptable and less unpleasant. In short waits, on the other hand, that information made hardly any difference.
In 2019, a team at the University Hospitals of Geneva asked 509 patients who had waited in the emergency department what influenced how they had experienced the wait. Four things stood out: feeling forgotten, not knowing exactly how much longer it would be, their privacy not being respected and having the impression that the urgency of their case had not been properly assessed.
And the researcher Richard Larson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stressed in 1987 something almost all of us have felt at some point: that someone jumping the order of arrival completely changes how a queue is experienced.
Maister was talking about queues, but what he described can also be recognised in far more serious waits: a waiting list for an operation, a place that doesn’t come through, papers that don’t arrive, the call from someone who said they would ring.
In many of them, several of the things that stretch time come together: you don’t know how much longer, nobody explains why it is taking so long, the worry is great and often you carry it with nobody beside you. So it isn’t unusual for a few weeks of waiting to feel like months, and finding it hard says nothing bad about you.
If it is especially hard for you, there are ways of training your patience and of living better with not knowing what is going to happen.
All this works the other way round too. Someone may be waiting for you: a child hoping for your call, a friend waiting for an answer, an older person counting the days until your visit. Saying when you will arrive, explaining a delay and giving signs of life takes a good part of the weight off their wait.
One of the things that weighed most on the patients in Geneva was feeling forgotten. Outside the hospital, that feeling can often be avoided with a short message.
Maister observed that a shared wait feels shorter. Say what you are waiting for on a star with “What I hope for”: for seven days, other people will wait with you.