During the winter.” The most recognized origin of the term is from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. What you’re experiencing is an age-old phenomenon known as cabin fever.Īccording to the Oxford Dictionary, the definition of cabin fever Is “lassitude, irritability, etc., resulting from long confinement or isolation in one’s home, etc. What you might not realize is that these feelings have a name. Then it becomes really hard to fix the problem.As millions of Americans stay at home because of the Covid-19 pandemic, you might have noticed that you’ve developed feelings of isolation, whether the longing for interaction, feeling bored or unmotivated, or even feeling yourself losing touch with reality. "Once things get bad," she said, "it's going to become harder for you to reach out to others. Positive emotions and, in particular, humor are ways of rebuilding the resources we have available to us."īut, Wood cautioned, if you're starting to feel anything akin to depression, don't wait to take steps to connect with friends, family and colleagues and laugh a little. It's very emotionally draining it's physically draining and it's cognitively draining. "This is a very draining time that we're all experiencing. Laughter increases your pain threshold, but it also helps build resiliency. "Laughter is associated with positive emotions," Wood said, "but it also has therapeutic effects on the body and is linked to the release of endorphins, which you get after exercise. Phone calls, videoconferencing, playing online games and actively building your network through social media are all good ideas, and Wood added that laughter remains one of the best things you can share with the people in your life. The most important thing you can do is to find ways to minimize your feeling of isolation. Wood suggested that if you're beginning to feel the effects of exhaustion or depression, there are things you can do, like spending time in the sunlight every day, finding creative activities that keep you from becoming bored and establishing a routine that can bring some predictability to your day. Your body will physically be treating itself as if it were sick, which, in the long term, is bad for it." "Just the subjective feeling of being lonely increases inflammation in the body, which is the body's sickness state. Not just for your mental health, but also for your physical health," Wood said. "Chronic loneliness is on par with smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of its health repercussions. And when you start getting exhausted, your world gets more chaotic, more obtrusive, and more miserable."įor some, the experience leads to nothing more than irritability, but for others who struggle with the effects of social isolation, it can trigger feelings of loneliness and depression, and that's when cabin fever can become something much more serious.Īdrienne Wood, an assistant professor of psychology at UVA who studies the impact of emotions on our behavior, said that social isolation, and in particular the experience of being lonely, is an extremely unhealthy state. When your bandwidth is cut, you start getting exhausted. When you're deprived of that person in the passenger seat, your bandwidth is cut. Because if I'm not looking for the address, I can devote all of my attention to driving. "When you have someone in the passenger seat," he said, "they can look for the address and navigate while you just operate the car. "And the nature of that 'crazy' is really that our bodies and our brains are so thoroughly designed to work with other people that they don't work very well on their own."Ĭoan likened it to driving around an unfamiliar city while looking for an address. Remove that access to others that we expect on a daily basis, and "we start to go crazy," Coan said. But the reason that we're so adaptable is that we've picked up our ecological niche, our habitat, and taken it with us. We can live anyplace, and we live on almost any kind of food. "We're designed as a species to be around other people," he said. But while the disease may not be real, the symptoms certainly are, and treating those symptoms early can make all the difference.Īccording to James Coan, an associate professor of clinical psychology and director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Virginia, our natural habitat is not a cabin, a living room or a home office it's other people. It's a folk term for that combination of anxiety and exhaustion you experience when you begin to feel trapped in your own home. Of course, cabin fever isn't a genuine psychological disorder.
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