More or less for my entire life I've had the idea that my social needs were not on par with the rest of the people, and this quarantine seems to have proven just that.
Bear in mind I do enjoy social life; when I was living in Spain in my 30s (and single) I had a very active social life, and had a moderate (~30) amount of friends split in 2 groups with which I continuously interacted.
When I left Spain for my place of origin I had only a handful of friends, and then I moved to where I live now and have only one friend, whom I see sporadically.
Nowadays I mostly interact with my partner and daughter, and the people I work with (I've been working remotely for 13 years) and to be honest, I have no cravings for social life (Except that I miss going for a stroll every once in a while at nights).
Can you really call living with your family isolation? There are people out there who live with no one, aren't near family, and can't see friends because of the lockdowns.
Yes, this has certainly solidified my understanding of myself as an introvert... I am stuck home with my wife and two young kids, and I mostly want more alone time... I don't miss seeing other people.
I've been almost completely alone for about 3 months now, at least physically. And honestly... I couldn't feel much happier in that regard. It's been great. Maybe I'm broken or something.
That explains fair amount of us, I think. I'm on the same camp. It makes it a bit challenging as my wife is extremely social, so finding balance is a bit tough for both of us :)
If you live with a partner and a daughter, you're not socially isolated.
I really get a strong feeling that a lot of people who do not live alone, have no idea what others who live alone actually went through (during lockdown / quarantine). It's hard to explain, it's like being lost at sea, maybe. My mind just started blanking all the time
I am an introvert. Many people (including many introverts) thinks this means you don't like people or social gatherings. That's not the case. Or at least it's not necessarily true.
Here's the best way I can describe it: being an introvert means that social interactions cost you energy. Being an extrovert (since I'm not one) seems to mean that social interactions gain you energy.
I see this in a relative of mine who is clearly an extrovert. Social interactions are her drug. She craves them and gets almost like a high from them and honestly gets really hyper as a result.
Compare this to me. At work I've had these extended work gatherings for several days where it's a lot of team-building, brainstorming and so on. By the end of the day I'm physically exhausted from all these interactions. Some people are not. Some will go to dinner in the evenings then out to a bar to drink and then back to someone's Airbnb for another gathering after that. That's all fine for them but it's just way too much for me.
So it's not like I don't like interacting with these people. It's merely a question of how much mental energy I'm capable of expending before I need to recharge.
So you see these differences really exposed by the forced isolation. I miss some of the interaction (and, to be fair, the food) of being in the office but otherwise I'm fine. You can clearly see that other people are not. While I have a natural excuse to avoid many draining activities, others are clearly being denied their recharging activities.
So yeah, I can totally buy neural cravings here. For some.
For me, part of the draining effect isn't just due to being an introvert... it's because I tend to engage far too willingly in what most would treat as shallow casual interactions.
I tend to treat even strangers with too much respect to give them less than my full attention and thoughtful responses. That makes it a draining chore.
We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there's a constant urge that is not being satisfied.
Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to 'check yourself' when you realise literally everything you'd normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way.
To me, lockdowns feel like some sort of irrational loss aversion strategy. If you gave me the option in, say, 2017, of halving my mortality rate for a year, but the cost was that I had to endure relatively strong anxiety for that year, there's no way I'd take that bet regardless of my age.
Mucking around with your mental health is not wise. Add on top of that all of the economic effects, the political effects of dividing populations, domestic abuse, "non-essential" healthcare like dentistry, and so on and so forth, and honestly I reckon it's been a net negative.
I've found this period has had an overall positive effect on my mental health. At first I was rather depressed, religiously following the news and subreddits about what was happening, but after a couple of weeks of that I realised I couldn't continue living like that forever. I started introspecting and tried to figure out what was causing the stress and low level anxiety I've been experiencing for a few years.
During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don't need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed.
Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me.
(And I've somehow lost 6kg - even though I've been cooking whatever tasty deserts I've found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)
Mortality isn't everything. You don't seem to be taking into account the suffering of people who survive -- but are often very sick for quite a long time, and may never fully recover -- and the extra anxiety caused by an unchecked deadly pandemic. (Or if you are, you don't seem to think it is very significant?) In this comment you also seem to ignore that the trade-off isn't just about increasing your risk, but everyone's, including the people you care about -- though I think you acknowledge it in another reply.
Even if I got lucky enough that nobody close to me died and I suffered no permanent damage myself, personally I would feel immense anxiety knowing that the virus was likely to affect many of the people I care about (and also that I had limited but non-zero control over this, so I could neither try to ignore it nor bring the odds down far enough to feel optimistic), watching some of them suffer and wondering whether they would make it, possibly suffering myself and wondering how bad it would get and how fully I would recover, and so on. That's aside from the effect of empathising with strangers suffering and dying at a much higher rate than usual, too.
(I'm in Australia, where so far our measures have kept the infection rate very low. Maybe you feel like you've experienced something closer to the worst of both worlds?)
The problem with your analysis is that you're not considering just how much "loss" we were averting via lockdowns. Do you think those negative effects of our partial lockdowns outweigh 5X more COVID casualties, including many from preventable deaths that have nothing to do with COVID? We need a functional healthcare system, we could not allow it to become overwhelmed and collapse. There's also the ethical issue of allowing a disease to run rampant and ravage our elderly population - could we recover morally and ethically if we allowed 100's of thousands of older folks to die long, painful deaths so our economy was a tad stronger?
There are also mental health consequences to large-scale death and hospitals being over capacity. Would you choose a year of watching your friends and family randomly die over a year of staying home most of the time?
We should definitely be beginning to examine the mental health toll the lockdowns are having on people. Changing our behaviour for the sole purpose of extending our life expectancies as long as possible is not living at all.
"We are social animals."
Are we though? We're not like a flock of fish, herd of sheep, pack of wolves not even like apes. Or when was the last time you met a silverback human?
If we keep indoctrinate that, we may miss the real solutions.
This was Maslow's point from back in the 40s, that there's no real distinction between physiological and social hunger, besides the fact of an importance hierarchy (one needs to be decently fed in order to start caring a lot about sociality, although even a person in starvation may care somewhat).
Glad to see it's being neurologically researched as well.
Honestly its scary the talk of another year like this. I have a family and even with them around living all day in my apt is starting to drive me crazy. I'd hate to be living by myself. Its a lot like solitary confinement.
My Brother had the bug, had a mild cough for a few days and lost his taste. I'm very jealous.
It's funny because I am having the opposite issue... stuck at home with my wife and two young kids, and what I want is MORE alone time. I need daycare!
Try spending 2+ months in an 18m² apartment alone AND under the obligation of following courses and studying for exams. Being a college student in a French elite school sucks.
> Honestly its scary the talk of another year like this.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting you will not be able to leave your house for another year. I think everywhere has concrete plans to re-open everything short of mass gatherings pretty soon. That's the cautious countries and the less cautious countries alike.
One of the things that scares me a lot about covid is the risk of losing my sense of smell and/or taste.
So I'm not sure if I would be jealous of your brother.
I mean, sure, I'm also tired of this, but just thinking that I could potentially never smell coffee again, or taste avocado or not being able to notice the scent of my partner, or lot of other things... it's terryfing.
I've spent the majority of my life in social isolation, mainly because I keep forgetting to maintain relationships. I'd drop off the radar for months on end, until a concerned friend or family member would manage to get in contact with me (I don't use social media because it's too much bother to maintain). In 2001, after the dotcom crash, I took a yearlong sabbatical where I saw no one, spoke to no one, and by the time I was pulled into the open again it hurt to speak.
TBH until I met my wife, I never thought it possible to be comfortable living with someone.
I know I'm an extreme exception, but I'm one of those people who don't feel a craving for human contact.
That's not forced; that's your choice. I'm someone who also naturally ends up being alone, however, being forced to be alone is a completely different situation. The power of choice is everything and it seems essential to this study.
Would explain why I'm eating a bowl of cereal at 9PM nowadays...
I would encourage people to see friends at a distance whenever possible. We must remember to balance our mental health (greatly affected by seeing others) with our physical health.
I just haven't been able to read books when I've been isolated a lot. It's just like my mind can't focus, it's so anxious and doesn't considering the reading to be important. My theory is it's similar to waking up in the middle of the night when lonely. The mind is searching for dangers from being isolated and alone.
I also notice my urge to buy stuff goes up when I am lonely. Another salve for the pain.
I call bullshit. I stopped reading at the setup: "the researchers had 40 socially-connected healthy human adults spend 10 hours (9am to 7pm) alone, with no social interaction and no other social stimulation (e.g., twitter, email, reading fiction)."
All they did was deprive them of social media. I think it's well known by now that this is a source of dopamin.
Additionally, they also forced them to get up in the early morning on the social isolation day, locked them in an unfamiliar room, and gave them close to nothing to do:
On the day of the isolation session, participants arrived at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT building 46, at 8.15am...Subsequently, participants gave their phones and laptops to the experimenter and were guided to a room containing an armchair, a desk and office chair, and a fridge with a selection of food, snacks and beverages. Participants remained in that room from 9am until 7pm.
[1]
It's not clear to me why reading material was withheld. It seems to make it harder to draw conclusions regarding the social isolation aspect.
For the fasting session, they only had to report for the 7pm fMRI session. It strikes me that the type of people with time to participate in an experiment like this likely correlates with people that get up later than 6-7am each morning (as would have been required for the isolation session), but it seems there wasn't any accounting for possible sleep deprivation effects.
People whose chosen occupations require a lot of time away from people they know well -- authors, artists, explorers, prospectors and geologists, traveling musicians and salespersons, fur trappers, truckers for example -- probably cope better with social distancing.
Being isolated for long periods can lead us to difficulty articulating our thoughts well. The 'gears get rusty'. Not so much for authors I'd guess ... but a fading ability to connect no doubt leaves many increasingly frustrated and feeling even more isolated. I'd guess that, for desert travelers, the word 'oasis' meant a lot more than just water.
I wonder what people will think of criminal and justice systems after this (probably nothing). We send people to prisons all the time for extended period without outside contact in an abusive environment between the real nasty criminals and authorities.
Is it really a good idea to send someone to prison for months for a small mistake that many might end up making and getting caught?
Is overusing imprisonment for different types of crimes okay?
A murderer will be fine in a prison since they are harmful for the society but someone stealing food because they couldn't afford any doesn't seem as harmful that they need being locked up.
> when I have those 70+ (rare) or even 55+ (more often) hour weeks
This is likely a different phenomena. You're burning more fuel by working longer. Especially if it comes with less sleep as well.
The brain is quite a fuel-hungry organ and will crave sugars and carbs when stressed. If you're also sleeping less, you're burning more physical energy as well simply by being active longer.
I regularly lose weight during hard weeks unless I compensate by eating more.
This makes sense to me because I dont think the feeling we call hunger is actually our bodies call to eat. I think from an evolutionary origin it is supposed to be a call to action. If that is so, then social isolation could trigger the same feeling.
Like for many people here, my need for socialization seems to be vastly inferior to the average. However, after years of living very isolated, I can strongly relate to the craving as it's described in this article.
[+] [-] ericol|5 years ago|reply
Bear in mind I do enjoy social life; when I was living in Spain in my 30s (and single) I had a very active social life, and had a moderate (~30) amount of friends split in 2 groups with which I continuously interacted.
When I left Spain for my place of origin I had only a handful of friends, and then I moved to where I live now and have only one friend, whom I see sporadically.
Nowadays I mostly interact with my partner and daughter, and the people I work with (I've been working remotely for 13 years) and to be honest, I have no cravings for social life (Except that I miss going for a stroll every once in a while at nights).
[+] [-] briefcomment|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pingyong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehlike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tripzilch|5 years ago|reply
I really get a strong feeling that a lot of people who do not live alone, have no idea what others who live alone actually went through (during lockdown / quarantine). It's hard to explain, it's like being lost at sea, maybe. My mind just started blanking all the time
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
extroverts get recharged by being with more people.
introverts get recharged by being with fewer people.
[+] [-] totetsu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
Here's the best way I can describe it: being an introvert means that social interactions cost you energy. Being an extrovert (since I'm not one) seems to mean that social interactions gain you energy.
I see this in a relative of mine who is clearly an extrovert. Social interactions are her drug. She craves them and gets almost like a high from them and honestly gets really hyper as a result.
Compare this to me. At work I've had these extended work gatherings for several days where it's a lot of team-building, brainstorming and so on. By the end of the day I'm physically exhausted from all these interactions. Some people are not. Some will go to dinner in the evenings then out to a bar to drink and then back to someone's Airbnb for another gathering after that. That's all fine for them but it's just way too much for me.
So it's not like I don't like interacting with these people. It's merely a question of how much mental energy I'm capable of expending before I need to recharge.
So you see these differences really exposed by the forced isolation. I miss some of the interaction (and, to be fair, the food) of being in the office but otherwise I'm fine. You can clearly see that other people are not. While I have a natural excuse to avoid many draining activities, others are clearly being denied their recharging activities.
So yeah, I can totally buy neural cravings here. For some.
[+] [-] pengaru|5 years ago|reply
I tend to treat even strangers with too much respect to give them less than my full attention and thoughtful responses. That makes it a draining chore.
[+] [-] esotericn|5 years ago|reply
We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there's a constant urge that is not being satisfied.
Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to 'check yourself' when you realise literally everything you'd normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way.
To me, lockdowns feel like some sort of irrational loss aversion strategy. If you gave me the option in, say, 2017, of halving my mortality rate for a year, but the cost was that I had to endure relatively strong anxiety for that year, there's no way I'd take that bet regardless of my age.
Mucking around with your mental health is not wise. Add on top of that all of the economic effects, the political effects of dividing populations, domestic abuse, "non-essential" healthcare like dentistry, and so on and so forth, and honestly I reckon it's been a net negative.
[+] [-] fyfy18|5 years ago|reply
During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don't need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed.
Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me.
(And I've somehow lost 6kg - even though I've been cooking whatever tasty deserts I've found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)
[+] [-] retsibsi|5 years ago|reply
Even if I got lucky enough that nobody close to me died and I suffered no permanent damage myself, personally I would feel immense anxiety knowing that the virus was likely to affect many of the people I care about (and also that I had limited but non-zero control over this, so I could neither try to ignore it nor bring the odds down far enough to feel optimistic), watching some of them suffer and wondering whether they would make it, possibly suffering myself and wondering how bad it would get and how fully I would recover, and so on. That's aside from the effect of empathising with strangers suffering and dying at a much higher rate than usual, too.
(I'm in Australia, where so far our measures have kept the infection rate very low. Maybe you feel like you've experienced something closer to the worst of both worlds?)
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveFNbuck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] null0pointer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danybittel|5 years ago|reply
If we keep indoctrinate that, we may miss the real solutions.
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|5 years ago|reply
Glad to see it's being neurologically researched as well.
[+] [-] richardbrevig|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|5 years ago|reply
My Brother had the bug, had a mild cough for a few days and lost his taste. I'm very jealous.
[+] [-] cortesoft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousgal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting you will not be able to leave your house for another year. I think everywhere has concrete plans to re-open everything short of mass gatherings pretty soon. That's the cautious countries and the less cautious countries alike.
[+] [-] saganus|5 years ago|reply
So I'm not sure if I would be jealous of your brother.
I mean, sure, I'm also tired of this, but just thinking that I could potentially never smell coffee again, or taste avocado or not being able to notice the scent of my partner, or lot of other things... it's terryfing.
[+] [-] selimthegrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstenerud|5 years ago|reply
TBH until I met my wife, I never thought it possible to be comfortable living with someone.
I know I'm an extreme exception, but I'm one of those people who don't feel a craving for human contact.
[+] [-] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronbrown|5 years ago|reply
I would encourage people to see friends at a distance whenever possible. We must remember to balance our mental health (greatly affected by seeing others) with our physical health.
[+] [-] starpilot|5 years ago|reply
I also notice my urge to buy stuff goes up when I am lonely. Another salve for the pain.
[+] [-] danybittel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddeck|5 years ago|reply
On the day of the isolation session, participants arrived at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT building 46, at 8.15am...Subsequently, participants gave their phones and laptops to the experimenter and were guided to a room containing an armchair, a desk and office chair, and a fridge with a selection of food, snacks and beverages. Participants remained in that room from 9am until 7pm. [1]
It's not clear to me why reading material was withheld. It seems to make it harder to draw conclusions regarding the social isolation aspect.
For the fasting session, they only had to report for the 7pm fMRI session. It strikes me that the type of people with time to participate in an experiment like this likely correlates with people that get up later than 6-7am each morning (as would have been required for the isolation session), but it seems there wasn't any accounting for possible sleep deprivation effects.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.006643v2....
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
https://globalnews.ca/news/6929793/coronavirus-disability-to...
[+] [-] smcameron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|5 years ago|reply
Being isolated for long periods can lead us to difficulty articulating our thoughts well. The 'gears get rusty'. Not so much for authors I'd guess ... but a fading ability to connect no doubt leaves many increasingly frustrated and feeling even more isolated. I'd guess that, for desert travelers, the word 'oasis' meant a lot more than just water.
[+] [-] searchableguy|5 years ago|reply
Is it really a good idea to send someone to prison for months for a small mistake that many might end up making and getting caught?
Is overusing imprisonment for different types of crimes okay?
A murderer will be fine in a prison since they are harmful for the society but someone stealing food because they couldn't afford any doesn't seem as harmful that they need being locked up.
[+] [-] tomrod|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|5 years ago|reply
This is likely a different phenomena. You're burning more fuel by working longer. Especially if it comes with less sleep as well.
The brain is quite a fuel-hungry organ and will crave sugars and carbs when stressed. If you're also sleeping less, you're burning more physical energy as well simply by being active longer.
I regularly lose weight during hard weeks unless I compensate by eating more.
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajeevtfi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nav_Panel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pteraspidomorph|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply