11/29/2023 0 Comments Covid brain fog depression![]() Many also reported symptoms of depression. Across groups, people reported difficulty with concentration and memory. Sahakian has examined categories of people ranging from medical workers to those who never had Covid but were in lockdown. Yet there may be commonalities among these experiences. We must have resembled kidnap survivors released from subterranean bunkers, relearning how to navigate the outside world As a healthy, childless thirtysomething who was able to continue my job from the safety of home, my road to cognitive recovery may be smoother than for a frontline medical worker with post-traumatic stress symptoms, or a single parent of young children. It’s worth remembering that different people have had vastly different pandemic experiences. We must have resembled kidnap survivors newly released from subterranean bunkers, relearning the basics of navigating the outside world. It took us an hour, and a few fraught exchanges, to figure out which plants we wanted and what we would need to buy in order to hang them. I think of a tragicomic episode from my own life, sometime this past winter, when I met up with a friend at a nearby hardware store to shop for houseplants. Volume loss in any or all of these areas could be seriously detrimental to the processes we rely on to engage with others and the world around us. “We’ve seen changes in volume in the brain’s temporal, frontal, occipital and subcortical regions, the amygdala, and the hippocampus in people who are socially isolated,” says Sahakian. She says that the impacts, across multiple regions of the brain, are “profound”. Researchers have begun to get a sense of the ways our brains have been altered by 18 months of social distancing and uncertainty (literally, physically in the case of some people who received treatment for serious Covid infections and showed reduced gray matter volume).īarbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, has been working in partnership with Fudan University researchers to assess the effects of social isolation and loneliness on people’s brains during the pandemic. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he reminds me: “We didn’t get here overnight.” Yassa thinks we’re finally “on the trajectory to recovery”, though it won’t happen instantaneously. It’s been a collection of many simultaneous stressors, some of them life-threatening, that have been compounded by disruptions in our physical activity, daily rhythms, and routines, and stretched out over many months. More recently, a high-profile article in the Atlantic investigated the late-pandemic “fog of forgetting” and suggested that our circumstantial memory holes were an adaptive response to the endless unknown.Īs Yassa tells me, the pandemic hasn’t merely been a stressful event. “It’s not just you,” headlines reassured us, as “smooth brain” memes swept the internet. In the weeks and months after initial lockdown, people began to notice a sudden inability to focus, remember things and follow through on tasks. Chronic stress has been found to kill brain cells and even shrink the size of your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for memory, focus and learning. Prolonged exposure to cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, increases the risk of heart disease, sleep disruptions and even mood disorders like anxiety and depression. It is now common knowledge that stress can be hazardous to our physical health, especially when experienced over a protracted period of time. Or, as the phenomenon has come to be known: pandemic brain. “It” being the subtle, but frustrating, mental deterioration many of us have incurred over the course of the pandemic. “It’s going to take us some time to recover from it,” says Mike Yassa, the director of the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and the UCI Brain Initiative. ![]() For others, like me, it also means reckoning with the lingering sluggishness of pandemic cognition.The good news is that our brains are extremely plastic, and therefore capable of repair. ![]() For some people, that may mean diving headfirst into the bacchanalia of a hot vax summer. Vaccination rates in the US, UK and beyond are on the rise, inviting more and more of us to shed our cocoons and engage more fully with the outside world than we have in over a year. Why had my brain missed the memo – and could I get my trusty pre-pandemic brain back? Life was starting to appear almost, well, normal. (The simple act of folding laundry became a slapstick-worthy fiasco.) But now I was fully vaccinated, making plans, and even socializing indoors again. Beginning in the spring of last year, with the first lockdown, I’d often get distracted and overwhelmed, then lose the plot of my task – a common Covid-era affliction.
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