Temporal Experience in Addiction and Recovery: A Scoping Review and Conceptual Synthesis of First-Person and Professional Accounts

Phenomenological psychopathology regards disturbed temporal experience as central to addiction, yet most research measures time perception and time perspective with behavioral or psychometric tools, leaving lived experience underexamined. Patients’ descriptions of time have not been systematically compared with those of researchers and clinicians. This scoping review mapped descriptions of temporal experience in addiction and recovery and compared first-person with professional accounts. Following JBI guidance and PRISMA-ScR, we searched PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar (November 2023–February 2024; no date limits) for English-language publications (and one Polish-language publication) of any design on temporal experience in substance or behavioral addiction. Of the 623 records, we included 59 publications (1969–2023). We inductively coded temporal terms by perspective (first-person/professional), dimension (past/present/future), and stage (addiction/recovery). No formal quality appraisal was performed. In active addiction, accounts described a narrowed, repetitive present organized around use, a fragmented past, and a foreshortened future. Recovery accounts described renewed access to the past, a more structured present and a wider, more concrete future, with first-person language increasingly resembling professional terms (e.g., “rebuilding”, “continuity”). Evidence came predominantly from substance use disorders. The literature suggests present-focused temporal constriction in addiction and temporal re-integration in recovery. The apparent convergence of patient and professional vocabularies is a hypothesis requiring longitudinal testing before clinical use as a marker of recovery.