Why Does Everything Feel So Hard Right Now If I’m Fine?
By: Kella Hanna-Wayne
Tags: Covid 19, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Psychology, Self Improvement

A light-skinned woman sits in a half-full bathtub, her face and arms hunched over her knees in sadness. Photo courtesy of Tophee Marquez, Pexels.

There’s a very unique feeling that I’ve come to associate with our new normal now that we’re social distancing long-term and I don’t seem to be alone in this feeling.

It’s the feeling of continuously large, emotional reactions getting squished into a manageable package so that I can function in day to day life. It’s a sense that there is a constant threat surrounding me, followed by a layer of all-encompassing grief and compassion fatigue, all of which is smothered by a blanket of avoidance, dismissal, and critical judgment of myself for struggling when “there’s nothing wrong.” It’s saying, “I’m fine” and your voice is a little too squeaky or a little too loud and you kind of want to cry after you’ve said it.

In addition to the very normal sense of loss of our old world and concrete sources of stress like financial instability, the impossible delegation of labor in a home with children and working adults, or having a loved one hospitalized, there are a few other mental health-related reasons that everything is hard right now that may not be intuitive. Even if you’re technically “fine” right now you might not be feeling so fine and there’s probably a good reason for that.

We Have Lost Access to the State of Autopilot

First, a general overview of how brains work: Our brains, though amazingly complex, are also incredibly lazy. If there is a more resource-efficient way to do something, your brain will find it. Whenever you complete a task, you’re sending a signal down the corresponding neural pathway for that task. Just like how a physical path in a forest gets wider and smoother the more often it’s used, the more often you repeat an action, the stronger that neural pathway gets, which in turn makes it easier for the signal to pass through and the task to be done. The more you do something, the easier it is to do.

When you’ve done a task the same way enough times, the act of doing that task is actually processed differently by your brain: You go on autopilot. When you’re on autopilot, you don’t have to be consciously making all of the choices that the task is made up of. You can zone out and focus on other things while your brain enables you to finish the task unconsciously. This is why, on days you are feeling particularly distracted, you might find that you have driven home from work without much memory of getting yourself there. Your neural pathways related to the skill of driving and following your route home are well-worn enough that you could safely drive on autopilot.

The reason we have autopilot is that our brains only have a limited amount of conscious energy to devote to tasks that require active focus and decision making. Imagine if you had to focus intently on every aspect of tying your shoes and brushing your teeth and putting on your clothes all the time? That would be exhausting, right? The ability to defer certain tasks to autopilot saves your brain a HUGE amount of energy.

A plastic model of a human brain where the cross-section of the interior is shown. Photo courtesy of Robina Weermeijer, Unsplash.

The process of moving a task from conscious focus to autopilot is more casually known as habit building, which takes time and repetition. There’s varying research on how many correct repetitions of a task you need before it’s solid enough in your brain that you can let go (and this number also depends on variables like the complexity of the task etc) but building a new habit takes somewhere in the vicinity of a month of consistently and consciously doing the task correctly. Until the task is solidly in autopilot, you have to work a lot harder to make it happen.

Even more laborious is the process of replacing an old habit. For example, if you have a habit of leaving your dirty plates on the table for days at a time and you want to switch to collecting them and washing them immediately after eating, you not only have to do the conscious work of building the habit to wash the dishes after meals but you also have to override the autopilot that’s already in place from your previous habit. Your brain is REALLY REALLY going to want to default to that old habit of just leaving the dishes on the table because defaulting to autopilot is so much less work.

The large amount of effort required for habit-building and habit-replacing is why when people go on self-improvement kicks and declare they’re going to transform their lives by working out every day, keeping their house clean, eating healthy, learning a new language, all at once, they usually crash and burn. We just don’t have enough conscious energy to maintain the level of activity required to build 20–50 habits at the same time, for more than a few days.

How’s This Info Connected to COVID-19?

When businesses closed and social distancing began, just about every aspect of our lives changed, which also means, almost every routine needed to continue meeting our basic needs also changed. How we buy and cook food changed; how we do our jobs changed; how we socialize and entertain ourselves changed; how we run errands changed. Even the most basic task of walking around in public — continuously altering your path in order to stay 6 ft away from everyone at all times — changed.

A medium-skinned woman wearing a black coat and a medical mask walks through the city and looks thoughtfully as a light-skinned man wearing a mask, talks on a cell phone in soft focus nearby. Photo courtesy of Gustavo Fring, Pexels.

Every one of these changes required us to abandon dozens of solidly autopilot habits and learn equal amounts of brand new habits to adapt to the changes, in a very short amount of time. Unlike that fitness-kick we went through in January, the consequences for failing to adopt these new habits could be deadly, to you or someone you love. You’re not supposed to start twenty new habits at once but we didn’t have a choice.

To make matters worse, we are still actively researching and learning about COVID-19, and each time new information comes out, there are additional changes required of us. After a week of working hard on our new habits, we learn we needed to change these habits or add even more, which repeats again the following week. Any semblance of a routine we build up is immediately disrupted again, giving us no time to relax into any kind of predictability.

Our brains are having to make active, conscious decisions, around the clock, just to handle basic functions.

It. Is. Exhausting.

Habits are Harder for Neurodiverse Brains to Develop

In addition to this baseline exhaustion, if you’re neurodivergent in some way, such as having ADHD, major depression, or if you struggle at all with executive function (the mechanism in your brain that translates the idea that you should do something into the action of doing it) you get an added level of difficulty in developing new habits.

We know dopamine as the “happiness chemical” but it also helps you feel accomplished when you’ve completed a task. In a neurotypical brain, going through a strictly practical and unexciting routine isn’t so bad because you are getting little zaps of dopamine for each task you complete. It’s not fun but you do feel a sense of satisfaction in completing it. In addition, a neurotypical brain releases dopamine in anticipation of completing a task, so you get a hit of dopamine at the start of a task to motivate you to do it and then another hit when you finish it.

But the structure of neurodivergent brains is such that transmitting dopamine is physically more difficult for your brain to do, meaning the threshold to receiving that little boost of motivation is higher. You could go through the same boring routine and get NO dopamine as a reward for completing the same tasks, and instead of getting a sense of accomplished satisfaction, it just feels like a pointless slog. It is way harder to motivate yourself to do a task when you never feel that inner sense of accomplishment, so given the choice, you’re much more likely to opt out of the task if you can.

A dozen large white mugs dirty from coffee, stacked in a disorganized way across a wooden table. Photo courtesy of Izzie R, Unsplash.

This process is also a mechanism that neurotypical folks are totally unaware of in themselves and they simply don’t know what it would be like to complete a task and receive zero dopamine in response. Looking at them breeze through work that you have to fight through, it’s very easy to beat yourself up and assume that the difference between you and a neurotypical person is just self-control. But you cannot simply will dopamine into existence. There are treatments and tools that can help with executive dysfunction but it’s exceedingly rare that “Just push harder” is the tool that works.

Given this added difficulty in making a conscious choice to do an unrewarding action, when you could so easily avoid it and save the mental energy, handling our current barrage of new habits is even more challenging.

Quarantine Can Bear Resemblance to Traumatic Environments

I want to start this section by acknowledging that some people are living in unsafe or abusive situations made worse by the requirement to stay home and that the sheer stress of the practical realities of losing your income, little to no access to child care, and avoiding a potentially deadly threat can be traumatic in and of itself. The following observations are not meant to underestimate the severity of those circumstances and the potential for real trauma in our current reality.

And yet many trauma-survivors who are technically safe are still finding that the current circumstances are triggering memories of their past traumas, even if their finances or access to food and shelter aren’t actually at risk.

Unfortunately, many of the necessary practices during a pandemic mirror the coping mechanisms/circumstances related to trauma and abuse: Extreme isolation, the constant practice of self-denial, the acceptance of your needs going unmet long term, a sense of powerlessness about your external environment, thinking of yourself or your body as a danger you must protect other people from, and having to develop a tolerance to the constant low-level threat to your physical safety, are all common themes in traumatic or abusive experiences.

If your past traumas are getting triggered, it’s likely that your nervous system is in an overactive state which can result in: difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, nightmares, irritation, anger, anxiety, a feeling of being “stuck” or frozen, further isolating yourself from social contact, and aversion toward tasks or activities that just feel like “too much”.

A light-skinned woman sits on a couch dressed in a cozy sweater, shorts, and socks, holding a book in her lap and a cup of coffee in her hand. Photo courtesy of Anthony Tran, Unsplash.

Mental health is a complicated subject in the best of times and during our current crisis, it’s even harder to receive or implement treatment while still maintaining basic life necessities.

I don’t have simple solutions to offer you for these heightened challenges but I do want you to take this information and use it to offer yourself compassion if/when you’re struggling. Our knowledge of how to function in society has not equipped us to handle a pandemic and it’s a little bit like we’re having to start over our lives as adults and start learning how to do everything again from scratch.

So, I encourage you to consciously alter your expectations of yourself to something that reflects our new reality, don’t be afraid to use external tools or ask for help even if you haven’t needed them in the past, and forgive yourself when you aren’t able to meet the same standards that pre-virus you could meet.