So you manage to get a full eight hours of sleep, but for some reason, in-between zoom meetings and food deliveries, you want nothing more than to crawl back under the covers and sleep some more. Or maybe you have an assignment or a work task to do that’ll really only take an hour of solid work, max. But instead, you’re laying in bed scrolling through your social media feeds and not getting anything productive done.
Chances are, you’re not the only one. Repeated lockdowns have many of us constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking for energy to get through the day. But why are we all so tired and unmotivated? And even now, when people are out and about again, why is the fatigue sticking around?
Pandemic Fatigue. Is it real?
Some signs that you might be suffering under pandemic fatigue are:
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Emotional exhaustion
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Increased anxiety and depression
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Feeling hopeless
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Feeling trapped and powerless
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Increased irritability
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Lack of motivation
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Tearfulness
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Physical Exhaustion
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Fatigue
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Headaches and migraines
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Lack of appetite
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Sore muscles or muscle tension
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Pandemic fatigue is real, and chances are it’s affecting every level of your day-to-day life.
Is that why I can’t seem to focus on coursework and assignments?
Absolutely.
Learning involves physical and physiological changes to the brain. When we learn new information, the brain has to encode, store, and retrieve that information by creating neurons and neural pathways. But when the brain is under stress, that process of neural growth and formation is affected. We can’t do it as quickly or as effectively.
That’s why something that usually takes you one readthrough to understand might now take a couple, or maybe even four passes. Sometimes, no matter how much you try, nothing seems to be sinking in at all.
And there is so much information to process! The news, new guidelines, new work challenges. And underneath all of that, we have our conflicting emotions; grief battling with humour, apathy, anger, etc. Our resilience to all of those things is constantly being tested. And while in some areas we can manage fine, with a constant barrage of things to deal with, naturally some will still slip through the cracks and chip away at our defences.
Since March 2020, we have been living under constant and unrelenting stress. Some of us hit that first lockdown strong, taking up new hobbies, baking unprecedented amounts of bread. But then came the second lockdown. Then the third, and the fourth. Even those who made it through the first few are running into a wall.
This is because this level of prolonged fear and anxiety is not normal. Our brains have been subjected to so much stress over the last couple of years, constantly under a barrage of conflicting information and emotions that we’re all still struggling to process. Simply put, our brains are exhausted.