April 27, 2020 - Exhaustion in the Time of Coronavirus - Dipataches from SIP

I'm so pooped - and yet I'm doing pretty close to zilch all day long. Not teaching, barely writing, sometimes knitting. Can't focus on reading. My brain seems beat up. Walking, at times, is about the only thing I'm capable of.

It doesn't seem right, though, this tiredness, given the lack of activity or duties.  I mean, all I'm required to do is Stay Home. And yet most everyone I talk to reports this same sense of exhaustion. Sure, everything takes longer  - washing hands, standing in lines to get into stores, sense of rushing through any kind of shopping in order to minimize contacts, unpacking and wiping off groceries and delivered items.  All the washing and wiping of door handles and counters and light switches. The anxiety itself wears on us, too, I think, burning up mental energy.

But Kella Hanna-Wayne thinks it's even more subtle than that. In her article Why Does Everything Feel So Hard Right Now? she writes that being unable to reliably predict the future adds its own burden to our brain and psyche, draining our energy. Even more importantly, all our automatic-pilot sort of routines are gone, the things we did without thinking too much, our habits that allowed us to save mental energy for other tasks.  Routine things like going to the store are no longer simple. Our mornings are no longer dictated by the same automatic pattern of rise, shower, eat, commute to work. We aren't getting the kids ready for daycare - even if we are WFH, it hardly matters what we wear, when we get up, if the kids ever get out of their jammies. We have to think about everything again  - when to get up, how to procure supplies, where we can actually walk. We have to come up with new patterns and routines, almost daily, as the restrictions and requirements shift quickly.

 No doubt by the time this is over, the new behaviors will be routine and we'll have to re-learn new patterns.  I'm tired just thinking about it.




https://medium.com/invisible-illness/why-does-everything-feel-so-hard-right-now-if-nothing-is-wrong-e16230a99a80