Time blindness: is being late a disorder?

It can feel rude when a friend always turns up late to meet you but are they actually being rude or do they have a disorder?

“Being late is one of the quickest ways to strain relationships,” said Indian Express. But “time blindness”, or the inability to determine how long a task will take, or conceptualise how much time has passed, is becoming an increasingly understood condition.

‘Built-in excuse’

The trend was first recognised in the 1990s, when Russell Barkley, a retired clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Massachusetts, linked time impairment with people with ADHD or autism, calling it “temporal myopia.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“What’s new is how broadly the label now gets applied,” said Vice. A “well-documented characteristic” of many people with ADHD, this inability relates to executive function that occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain, Stephanie Sarkis, a psychotherapist in Florida, told the Associated Press.

Although “anyone can have issues with running late”, but with ADHD there’s “functional impairment”, she said, and this “impacts family life and social life” as well as work and “money management”.

But not everyone who is “chronically late” has ADHD or a “built-in excuse”, said the outlet. Jeffrey Meltzer, a therapist in Florida who works with people who never turn up on time, said some people who hate small talk fear arriving early, and others who feel they don’t have much control over their lives may try to reclaim a few minutes from responsibilities.

‘Practical solutions’

If a person’s chronic tardiness is “one star in the constellation of symptoms,” said Sarkis, then it could be a treatable disorder, because studies suggest that stimulant medication prescribed for other ADHD is also effective at treating time blindness.

Actually, the “solutions tend to be practical rather than philosophical”, said Vice, and these can include “external timers”, “checklists” and “overestimating how long things take”.

But the “uncomfortable truth” is that even if lateness comes from “different places”, it can “feel the same on the receiving end”, so “understanding the cause can build empathy”.