Robin Wright: Our Brains Explain the Season's Sadness

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Our Columnists
Our Brains Explain the Season’s Sadness
By Robin Wright
November 26, 2020


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.

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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.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/our-brains-explain-the-seasons-sadness

[Mike 03]

1. That third paragraph is absolutely fascinating.

Thanks for posting this.

*Bookmarked*