Chronophobia
fear of being trapped in a future of boredom
Chronophobia, also known as prison neurosis, is considered an anxiety disorder describing the fear of time and time moving forward, which is commonly seen in prison inmates. Next to prison inmates, chronophobia was also identified in individuals who experienced quarantine due to COVID-19. As time is understood as a specific concept, chronophobia is categorized as a specific phobia.
The term chronophobia comes from the Greek "chronos", meaning time, and "phobo", meaning fear.
Symptoms
Chronophobia manifests in different ways, since every person that experiences this disorder suffers from different symptoms. Inmates experience a constant psychological discomfort that is characterized through anxiety, panic, and claustrophobia by the duration and immensity of time. The main symptom of chronophobia is a sense of impending danger of loss and the accompanying desire to keep the memory of what happened. The most common signs include procrastination, poor planning of the working day, the inability to refuse, distraction and trying to do too much at one time. People also report feeling a general lack of time, often associated with fear and difficulty in completing tasks when scheduled or due.
Reasons
Risk factors and causes
Some people are more likely to have chronophobia.
“Chronophobia” enters the record as fear of being trapped in a future of boredom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chronophobia, fear and being can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5114244. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chronophobia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.