In the first months of the pandemic, many people suddenly had trouble focusing on work, finishing books, and staying awake during meetings. Others reported instances in which they forgot their own phone numbers, put the clean laundry in the washer, and got into the shower with their glasses on. Ceiling-staring and aimless scrolling reached an all-time high.
It happened to me too – a sort of “mind fog” that made it more difficult to do almost everything. I became slower, drowsier, less motivated, and less focused. (And I wasn’t very focused to begin with.)
Experts in newspaper columns gave us a quick explanation: anxiety. Stress and anxiety can cause this sort of mental haze, and they’re a normal response to such an abnormal situation.
I always found this answer suspicious. It seemed too simple, and it was usually expressed without doubt, despite the “unprecedented” nature of the situation. It particularly made no sense in my case, because by spring 2020 I was experiencing far less anxiety than I had for the previous eighteen months. At that time I had just emerged from dark period of my own, and by April my anxiety had dropped to almost nothing compared to its peak. But the mind fog was new, and it was unmistakable.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I think radical self-acceptance and radical self-sacrifice are two poles we should play around between. But just like Earth's poles we probabaly don't want to live at either :)