Emotional pain feels permanent precisely because it distorts your sense of time

Haig argues that one of the cruelest features of severe depression or anxiety is how it warps a person's perception of time itself, making the current painful moment feel not just bad but endless, as though it has always been this way and always will be. He describes this from his own breakdown in his twenties, where the present suffering seemed to erase memory of feeling differently, and any prospect of feeling differently again.

His counter isn't a promise that pain will vanish quickly, but a reminder that this sense of permanence is itself a symptom, not an accurate forecast — moods that feel eternal in the moment have, in his own repeated experience, eventually shifted, even when nothing external changed to cause the shift.

He frames this less as toxic positivity and more as a fact worth holding onto precisely because the distorted brain, in crisis, resists believing it: the feeling of permanence is not reliable evidence of actual permanence.

Takeaway: when pain feels endless, remember that the feeling of endlessness is a symptom of the pain itself, not a fact about the future.