Feeling exhausted after you hang out with friends you love?
Feeling fatigued on the days you have to be in the office?
Having reticence or anxiety about social events?
It’s not just you—the pandemic has changed our brain psychology.” Eleanor Peake wrote an article for Newstatesman.com about this phenomenon.
In 2018, a group of psychologists in the Antarctic published a report that may help us understand our current collective exhaustion. The researchers found that the emotional capacity of people who had relocated to the end of the world had been significantly reduced in the time they had been there; participants living in the Antarctic reported feeling duller than usual and less lively. They called this condition “psychological hibernation”. And it’s something many of us will be able to relate to now.
One of the things that we noticed throughout the pandemic is that people started to enter this phase of psychological hibernation,” said Emma Kavanagh, a psychologist specialising in how people deal with the aftermath of disasters. “Where there’s not many sounds or people or different experiences, it doesn’t require the brain to work at quite the same level. So what you find is that people felt emotionally like everything had just been dialled back. It looks a lot like burnout, symptom wise.” Kavanagh continued: “I think that happened to us all in lockdown, and we are now struggling to adapt to higher levels of stimulus.
One of the things energy work can affect is your body’s ability to adapt to and overcome environmental stressors.
Doing these exercises can help you more quickly adapt to your louder than usual, more active than usual and more emotionally engaged life.
Try it and see how you feel.
And please share this with anyone who is struggling: https://bit.ly/socialburnout-LR
Much love,
