Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain
Notes and highlights from Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic.
Nobody has been able to avoid the “microdoses of unpredictable stress” over the past year. This article made me feel less crazy in the feelings that I — and maybe you, too — have been feeling.
“As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.”
“Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful, Franklin said. Our brains hate it.”
“‘What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,’ the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new thing…”
“The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December 2020…”