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Coronavirus Disease 2019
"Pandemic Brain" is Real
Why we need compassion during COVID-19.
Posted December 29, 2020 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
It can be helpful to understand how brains react to stress. Our paleomammalian/ midbrain (or as we like to call it our “caveman brain” or “survival brain”) is in charge of several important aspects including emotional reactions, automatic thoughts, memory, learning, and appetite regulation (Tirch et al., 2014). The system is built for survival and gives excellent advice if you were a caveman person whose life expectancy was 30 years. It also functions automatically and unconsciously. There is no way to turn this part of your brain on or off.
During COVID-19 our caveman brains are on fire. The ongoing threat from the virus continues to activate our survival brain in unconscious and automatic ways. This is a well-designed system for acute threats such as a bear attack. Unfortunately, it is not well designed for chronic threats like a pandemic.
Another relevant part of our brain is our prefrontal cortex. This part of our brain regulates executive functioning (Kesner & Churchwell, 2011; Porcelli & Delgado, 2009). This includes initiating behavior, inhibiting behavior planning, delaying gratification and planning. It primarily controls behavior not emotional reactions. And unlike the survival brain which functions continuously, our prefrontal cortex is more like a battery (Lowe et al., 2019; McGonigal, 2015). We will use the charge in the battery as we control our behavior throughout the day. This is why binge eating is more likely to happen in the evenings compared to the morning because our frontal lobe battery has been spent but our survival brain is ready to offer us a way to feel better at least in the short term by means of highly palatable food readily available in our environment.
During COVID-19 our frontal lobe batteries are incredibly spent. There are an enormous number of new behaviors required for us to exist a pandemic. All of these require our frontal lobe battery. A simple example is going to the grocery store. We now often have to wear a mask, follow the arrows in the store, continuously monitor how close we are to other people and not touching our faces. This uses up our frontal lobe battery significantly. Therefore there is not much left to control any other kind of behavior.
Research shows that stress impairs concentration, memory, attention, problem solving, and decision-making (Sandi, 2013). In other words, our brains are simply not working the way they normally do or in other words, "pandemic brain" is a real thing. Psychologically, living in a pandemic is like living in an active war zone. If we were in an active war zone we would understand that people may not be able to do all the things they used to. However, our current desire to pretend like everything is normal is making us all crazy. We should also recognize that during a pandemic our expectations need to be better matched with what individuals are capable of. Unfortunately many of us are attributing these problems to something being “wrong” with us (e.g., “what’s the matter with me?”) rather than attributing these issues to the pandemic (e.g., “oh this is just pandemic brain”).
Although it seems abnormal to us to live through such hardship, it is noteworthy that in modern history, the baby boomer generation was the only generation that didn’t have to live through a pandemic or a major world war. Every other generation in history has had to contend with a global struggle. But we need to adjust our expectations when so much of our effort has to go to managing the pandemic we do not have as much frontal low battery to engage in work or to be productive. Historically during such a time of crisis everyone’s efforts would be dedicated to “the war effort” and many normal things would be put aside or abandoned if they were contributing to the war effort. This would help to manage the overall stress level because numerous expectations would be eliminated. However, in the current situation, we haven’t adjusted workloads or expectations appropriately. We have simply added on a pandemic onto regular life. Many people were just getting by even before a pandemic. It is no wonder that the stress levels have increased exponentially.
We simply do not have enough frontal lobe battery to continue with regular expectations. So much of our battery has to be dedicated to pandemic behaviors. As a result, no one is can it be at their best or their most productive or their healthiest. Compassion is the act of recognizing pain or suffering in ourselves or others and a desire to eliminate the suffering (Gilbert, 2014). It involves kindness, common humanity (recognizing everyone makes mistakes, has setbacks, has flaws) and mindfulness (being present moment focused in a nonjudgmental way; Neff, 2003). Research shows the benefits of compassion both in term of physical and mental health but also in persisting in difficult tasks (Neff et al, 2005; Hope et al., 2014; Neely et al., 2009).
We all need to extend some acts of compassion or kindness to ourselves and to others. It is psychologically important to “blame the pandemic” rather than ourselves or others. This isn’t giving a pass to ourselves or other people, it is an act of compassion. It is about recognizing the context in which we find ourselves which none of us chose and it’s not our fault. We often use the saying “I’m sorry but my frontal lobe is spent” or “sorry, pandemic brain”. And this is just a way to cue each other to let us know that were feeling worn out and we likely don’t have much ability to control our behaviour. It is simply a cue to encourage us to be kind to each other.
Acts of compassion allow us to free up some frontal lobe to make better choices. When we fuel the self-criticism, it activates our caveman brain and then part of our frontal lobe battery has to be dedicated toward managing the activated caveman brain. Consequently, there is even less frontal lobe available to make good choices. Living in a pandemic is incredibly hard. We need to be kind to ourselves and others to make it through.
