Post by londonpostie on Oct 22, 2021 10:37:57 GMT
This arrived in my inbox this morning. Seems an interesting contribution to the discussion about where we might be atm. I think we probably have an idea of this, it was just interesting to hear it put in clinical terms. Some quotes >>
In 2018, a group of psychologists in the Antarctic published a report that may help us understand our current collective exhaustion. The researchers found that the emotional capacity of people who had relocated to the end of the world had been significantly reduced in the time they had been there; participants living in the Antarctic reported feeling duller than usual and less lively. They called this condition “psychological hibernation”. And it’s something many of us will be able to relate to now.
“One of the things that we noticed throughout the pandemic is that people started to enter this phase of psychological hibernation,” said Emma Kavanagh, a psychologist specialising in how people deal with the aftermath of disasters. “Where there’s not many sounds or people or different experiences, it doesn’t require the brain to work at quite the same level. So what you find is that people felt emotionally like everything had just been dialled back. It looks a lot like burnout, symptom wise.” Kavanagh continued: “I think that happened to us all in lockdown, and we are now struggling to adapt to higher levels of stimulus.”
It may take a few more months until our energy for socialising returns, but rest assured, it will. “One thing we know is that when you remove people from an isolated environment, their brain function does return to normal. It takes time, it’s hard to say how long,” Kavanagh said.
Finally, even as our social schedules kick into gear, it would be wrong to assume everything really is back to normal. “I think the other issue that we are contending with is [how] we are still in an ongoing threat situation, people still feel like they are in a dangerous situation, which is reducing our brain’s ability to adapt to our new
Finally, even as our social schedules kick into gear, it would be wrong to assume everything really is back to normal. “I think the other issue that we are contending with is [how] we are still in an ongoing threat situation, people still feel like they are in a dangerous situation, which is reducing our brain’s ability to adapt to our new