I’ve been consumed this fall with a melancholy sadness. It’s different from the loneliness that I felt in the early stage of the pandemic, during the lockdown, when I took a picture of my shadow after a neighborhood walk failed to jumpstart exercise endorphins. Eleven months after COVID-19 spread globally, and during what would otherwise be a joyous Thanksgiving, my sorrow, and surely the emotion of many others, is more complicated. Studies by health-care professionals show that our emotional challenges, from anxiety and depression to anger and fear, have been deepened by the pandemic. In June, just three months into a historic health crisis, a survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that forty per cent of Americans were already struggling with at least one mental-health issue. Among young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, one in four had thought about committing suicide during the previous thirty days. By July, more than half of Americans over the age of eighteen said their mental health had been negatively affected by emotions evoked during the pandemic, the Kaiser Family Foundation found. In October, A.A.R.P. reported that two-thirds of Americans felt increased anxiety.
For Americans, the pandemic’s spring scourge intersected with appalling human tragedies and unprecedented political rancor over the summer: the racial tension and unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, in the Midwest; soaring unemployment, business shutdowns, and hunger nationwide; the raging wildfires in the West and record-setting tropical storms in the South; and a bizarre and bitter Presidential campaign. Each calamity intensified our emotional state. Now, our anxieties are further compounded by holidays without loved ones—at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah, then the New Year—and by the numbing rate of coronavirus infections and the darkening hours of winter. The accumulation makes it harder, even with a vaccine around the corner. So, over the past week, I’ve reached out to a neuroscientist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a suicide expert to understand our states of mind.
Cheer up. Just understanding the phenomenon—and the science of the brain that copes with crisis—helps a lot. In an excellent and timely new book, “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,” Nicholas Christakis writes that epidemics also produce fear and grief that “can themselves be contagious, forming a kind of parallel epidemic.” Christakis, a sociologist and physician who directs the Human Nature Lab, at Yale, described a phenomenon called “the cascades of grief.” He told me, “If the plague is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, then grief is its squire.” Christakis quoted the Greek general and historian Thucydides, who noted during a plague in the fifth century B.C. that “the most terrible feature in the malady” was public despair. During a pandemic in the second century, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, observed, “Corruption of the mind is a pest far worse than any such miasma and vitiation of the air which we breathe around us.”
This year’s simultaneous health, social, natural, and political crises have produced psychological phases, almost like seasons, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, told me. “Early on, I saw a lot of solidarity,” she said. It was visible when people took to their balconies or streets during the first phase of the pandemic to bang pots in support of medical workers and first responders. Earlier data shows that suicides decrease at the onset of a national crisis “as there’s a sense that we’re all in the same storm,” Jonathan Singer, the president of the American Association of Suicidology and a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, told me.
But over the summer, fatigue and denial set in. Holt-Lunstad explained, “Initially, we all hoped that the pandemic was a short-term pause in life, but it lasted much longer than many anticipated.” Social distancing and other restrictions exhausted patience and increased frustration; some got tired of complying, and others took them as an affront to personal freedoms. This fall, tension has emerged, even within families, over contact and precautions, causing divisions that have their own corrosive effect on the psyche, Holt-Lunstad told me. There’s biology behind human connections, whether among family, friends, neighbors, or colleagues. “For many, people they thought were part of their tribe may not have the neurological signature of trust and safety anymore,” she told me. The problem goes beyond the reduction in contact with others. “Now we’re at the point where it’s difficult to get the emotional support from others that meet our biological needs as social beings.”
The way our feelings bounce biologically off social networks is primitive and ancient, Christakis told me. “Our emotions have a collective existence. They depend not only on your own genes and experiences. They also depend on the biochemistry, genetics, physiology, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the people to whom we are directly—or even indirectly—connected.” Our emotional state depends on what’s happening around us. “It’s the same with the germ and the same with emotions,” he said. And it’s not limited to humans. Other species experience it as well. “If you map the social networks of elephants, you find that they are structurally the same as among humans—and our last common ancestor is from eighty-five million years ago,” he said.
The good news is that, physiologically, science now understands the origin of the sadness and anger fuelling our current mental-health challenges. Blame it on the prefrontal cortex, Jim Coan, a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and the director of the University of Virginia’s Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, told me. “The prefrontal cortex is capable of doing these incredible things that no other animal can do. It’s like the Ferrari car of our brain. It is our majestic human-evolution innovation. It helps us anticipate the future, make contingency plans, maintain vigilance for threats or opportunities, ruminate about past events in order to figure them out.” It basically carries out the executive functions of the brain.
The reason that many feel troubled now, Coan said, is because the flow of blood, which brings nutrients to the brain, is finite. The brain moves blood around in short-term loans to its various parts as situations demand. “But the blood supply is not enough to run every part of the brain at the same time,” he said. “When you’re running that prefrontal cortex at top speed, it’s sucking up a lot of blood from the brain. So that’s the reason we subjectively experience a cognitive exhaustion and fatigue.” The myriad crises each demand attention—one eye on the virus, a second on political turmoil, a third on career and income, a fourth on kids and their education, a fifth on civil unrest, a sixth on wildfires and other climate catastrophes, and so on. That’s six or seven eyes, and we only have two, Coan said.
Grief, anxiety, and trauma are pervasive today partly because the coronavirus surprised us. Throughout most of history, human societies expected pestilence, famines, and nature’s disasters to cyclically cause calamitous death or destruction. Epidemics fill the Old Testament and ancient Greek and Roman literature. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the Great Depression and the two World Wars, modern progress allowed increasingly large numbers of people freedom from worries about daily subsistence, disease, or inexplicable natural disasters. Science produced vaccines that warded off deadly diseases. As a child, I was part of the clinical trial for the Salk vaccine for polio. Modern economies were able to rebound after the great wars and repeated depressions. Progress duped us into thinking modern humans would always prevail. We’ve refused to be humble or honest about our vulnerability. “It’s an arrogance that we should be spared our time in the crucible,” Christakis said.
For me, the sadness is compounded by how many will die even as at least three new vaccines that could protect us are so close to being available. It reminds me of the wars I’ve covered when peace talks have begun but the killing continues as negotiators dither over political and territorial terms. Almost eleven thousand people died in the final six hours of the First World War, between the signing of the pre-dawn peace agreement, in a railway car north of Paris, and when the Armistice formally took effect, at eleven A.M. Henry Gunther was the last American to be killed—exactly a minute before the war formally ended. With sadness, I’ve thought of the American who might be last to die from COVID-19.
In the meantime, we need to pay attention to the signals from our brains. “Our brains have a way to “encourage us gently not to use the prefrontal cortex so much,” Coan told me. That part of the brain is there to help humans be the dominant species on Earth, “but it’s important for us to sparingly utilize the resource that is so magically powerful. It has other shit to do.” There are simple ways to relieve demands on the prefrontal cortex, such as getting enough sleep and basic exercise. “You brute-force a way to keep your prefrontal cortex from doing its work,” Coan said. Another is a vacation that reduces the demand for focus to an activity that requires only one eye.
And, perhaps, holiday lights. In the past week, I’ve been surprised by how many people in my neighborhood, in Washington, D.C., have put up twinkling lights and trees that usually go on display two or three weeks later in the year. I’m convinced it’s a reflection of our brains’ quest to alleviate sadness. Homebound Americans began adorning yards and homes with lights after Halloween this year for the first time, the Wall Street Journal reported. The connection is clear. The Washington Post quoted the manager of a local Christmas-decoration store who reported that her top-selling items are pandemic-themed ornaments—emblazoned with toilet paper, hand sanitizer, masks, and pictures of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
