Struggling to concentrate, focus, pay attention, read, remember? Why has lockdown caused such brain fog for so many of us? We evolved to survive threat, which requires that we pay attention to our surroundings. This is the most primal function of our brain’s attention system: to direct our senses towards changes in our environment that might signal threat. Did the leaves just rustle? Was that the crunch of a twig? Can I hear paw-steps or footsteps, or is that the near-silent slither of a snake?
But our attention wavers. We’re rewarded by our brains for paying attention to new things: we get a little dopamine hit whenever we notice novelty, but over time our brain gets used to things that aren’t threatening, and they become unworthy of attention, no longer worth noticing.
So, our brains are geared towards novelty and filter out the familiar. And after the initial upheaval of expected near-apocalypse, the last year has become an exercise in familiarity. Of every day being the same. Of every part of everyday being the same. Not going out, not going to work, not going home, just the same old, same old – which to our threat-based attention circuits means ‘sleep mode’.
Our brains also wake up to people, and that’s not been happening much either. There is nothing more stimulating to a human being than another human being. We are wired for relationship. We come alive in the presence of others – especially when, for double effect, their presence is novel: absence makes the heart grow fonder but new presence makes the brain focus longer. Our brains activate at the sight and sound, the touch and feel, the smell and sensation, of other people. And that has happened relatively rarely over the last year. Our brains have stayed in relational ‘sleep mode’.
Our brains have dialled down in response to this relational vacuum. We are whirring more slowly, and it will take a little while to dial back up again. This is what so many people are talking about – a reticence, an anxiety, almost a loss of confidence about going ‘back to normal’ and the busy, hyper-engaged life that most of us used to live. Our relational brains will need a little while to warm up out of hibernation first, and then it will feel as familiar as it once did.
Another reason for lockdown lethargy is the stress and trauma we’ve all been experiencing during this time of collective trauma. We’ve been shrouded by a constant, insidious life-threat: the virus itself, plus its secondary impacts – financial insecurity, loss of liberty, reduced access to healthcare, loneliness, and savage uncertainty.
We may be angry at these losses, we may have been stoic in the face of them, we may have disregarded them, but all of us have been affected by them. Our brains, collectively, have clocked the shift in wind direction, the scent on the air, the rustle in the leaves. We have all been put on survival-alert. Our physiological threat response has provoked the sympathetic nervous system response of fight-or-flight (if we’re lucky) or the worn-out, resigned, defeated response of freeze (often when we have a trauma history). Both have resulted in a surge of stress hormones, and a dearth or rest-and-digest hormones (our happy chemicals). Trauma is tiring. Constantly readying ourselves to respond to threat is exhausting. Lockdown lethargy is a very normal response when the threat is chronic, as it has been ….… and still is.
There are very real reasons, based in our neurobiology, our evolution, in the way we are wired from the womb, to explain why so many of us have felt lumpy, dull, fuggy, and drained. Let’s not blame ourselves (so easy to do). Let’s be kind to ourselves and allow the time and space we all need (and deserve) to recover.
