Losing your mind….or suffering from Pandemic Brain?

Well, here’s some news.

I think its good news because it gives some structure and background to a lot of what we’re all going through right now, the lethargy, the depression, the anxiety…all of it.

The Pandemic is changing our brains!

And scientists have been researching this and studies show it to actually be true.

There are many people getting diagnosed with ADHD right now, self diagnosed for some, sure, but I would say that’s because they finally have the time and opportunity to actually sit with themselves and see how they interact with the world differs from the way we are told we should.

That old ‘normal’ sense of how we should be is feeling pretty silly these days isn’t it?

There is no normal, there never was. And now, to let us know we are even further from that ‘normal’ than we could have thought,  researchers at Harvard Medical School are working on something they’re calling Pandemic Brain.

And this is affecting people who never even had Covid 19, its affecting many, many of us.

Here’s what the researchers have discovered: people are experiencing neuroinflammation which is causing brain fog, fatigue and depression.

If you’re struggling to focus, struggling to get things done in the way you used to do before Jan 2020 and the lid came off this thing, if you are finding yourself struggling with depression, anxiety, brain fog and fatigue; the pandemic is probably a large part of why we’re all feeling this way.

Living through such a scary, life altering, unseen for generations event like a global pandemic is changing our brains.

I would say we probably all knew this, felt it in ourselves, recognised it in others, but isn’t it nice to have science tell us we’re right?

We are not alone in this, although yes, some people seem to think the rules don’t apply to them, even after having the bloody disease (I’m referring of course to the idiot PM of the UK).

We are dealing with an unimagined event that just seems to keep on going with no end in sight, we are also dealing with degrees of selfishness, greed and corruption in politics and society that haven’t been seen in generations.

When you are telling yourself to get on with it, pull your socks up and worse, saying it to anybody else, just be quiet for a minute and think about how much everyone is dealing with right now.

And we’ve all been dealing with this for almost two years and there’s no end in sight and we are tired, weary and scared. People are struggling with survival, with financial worry, fear about ill and elderly relatives. We are all living on our second to last nerve.

Give yourself a break. Take a time out. Go to the woods and sit. Go to the beach and sit. Go to the mountains and sit.

Sit. Be still.

Do this every day for 10-15 minutes.

The only way to reduce inflammation is to take the heat out of the situation, out of the body, out of the mind. Since we can’t do that on a global scale, we must do it on an individual one.

Reconnect with your heart and soul. Be at peace. Breathe.

And maybe if enough of us do this, we can turn this pandemic related mental and emotional health crisis around.

Love,

Cynthia xx