Eventually our muscles and our body say, 'No, I'm tired.' " Not a year, and not a year where they keep moving the finish line," says Gold. But "you can only run a 100-yard dash for a short amount of time. When we're anxious, our hearts race and our muscles tense up as we prepare to fight a predator or run from it. "We evolved as creatures, people that run from predators in the animal kingdom, right? To have anxiety as a way to predict and run from threat," she says. Long-term anxiety can also exhaust the body, says Gold. "After this long, most people have had some degree of anxiety, depression, trauma, something," she says.Īs studies have shown, rates of anxiety and depression in the population have gone up during the course of the pandemic. Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. The fatigue and fog so many are feeling now also could be symptoms of other mental health issues that flared over the last year, says Dr. It's subtle, it's low grade and it can absolutely cause fatigue and a worse mood." "We have this inflammatory response when we're feeling severe states of stress that can last. It doesn't have the same restorative ability, because we're getting less deep sleep, and we think that is tied to this chronic, subtle uncertainty, stress."Ĭhronic stress also triggers low-grade inflammation, she adds. "And so for many of us, even though we might think we're sleeping the same number of hours, it's not the same quality. "We really rely on sleep to recover each day," explains Epel. "When we're feeling stressed, our sleep can get disrupted, which naturally leads to feelings of tiredness and exhaustion," she says. That's one reason that prolonged stress can leave us feeling drained.Īnother way that chronic stress makes us feel exhausted is by interfering with sleep, says Bufka. Stress "keeps our mind vigilant and our nervous system vigilant, and that uses more energy," says Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. The threat of COVID-19 alone has been stressful for most people, as has all of the upheaval that the pandemic has brought, says Bufka. Millions of people have lost loved ones, have become ill themselves and/or have lost income as a result of the pandemic. "We know from other research that people will talk about fatigue as something that they experience when they're feeling overstressed," says Bufka.Ī recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 3 in 4 Americans said that the pandemic is a significant source of stress. "Exhaustion can be a symptom of many things," says Cyrus. In the meantime, Bufka and other experts say that there are things we can do now to fight the mental fog and exhaustion. "They may have struggled during the time of the challenges but generally come out OK on the other end." "We know that the majority of people tend to be resilient," says Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. It's a normal reaction to a very abnormal year.Īnd while many people will likely continue to struggle with mental health symptoms in the long run, research on past mass traumas suggests that most people will recover once the coronavirus pandemic ends. But at the root of it are the stress and trauma of the past year, say Cyrus and other mental health experts. This kind of mental fog is real and can have a few different causes.
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