Cabin Fever: Dealing with the Side-Effects of Quarantine
by Dr. Sam Alibrando and Gina Stepp, MA
Are the natives are getting restless?
One of the common symptoms of the COVID-19 virus is some degree of fever. By strange coincidence, the best way to safeguard you and your loved ones against contracting COVID-19 involves a situation that can also lead to varying degrees of fever—“cabin fever.” Merriam-Webster defines cabin fever as “extreme irritability and restlessness from living in isolation or a confined indoor area for a prolonged time.”
Across the planet people are self-isolating, either alone or with family members, partners or roommates. Many articles have been written on cabin fever and the coronavirus. We write yet another one, from a psychological point of view. This first article will deal with the psychological aspects of cabin fever. In a follow-up article we’ll cover the relational aspects of cabin fever.
The mind is like a computer (or is a computer like the mind?) A computer works best with a lot of RAM. RAM is an acronym for “random access memory.” It is the memory in the computer that can readily be accessed to run all the programs—seen and unseen. So, the more RAM, the more programs can be run efficiently. Those of you who are old enough might remember how little RAM there was in the first personal computers. So much so, you could only run two or three programs at a time without the computer slowing down, having problematic glitches or even outright crashes. Computers today have a great deal more RAM. Even as I write this, I have eight programs running in the background without a glitch. But if I start to try to run too many programs for a prolonged time, even my sleek, modern computer will slow down, get “irritable and restless” and might even freeze up.
So, what does this have to do with cabin fever? Being in isolation and confined spaces for a prolong time will whittle away at our mental/emotional RAM making us irritable, restless and reactive. If we are Red-reactors (see my article explaining the basic ways we emotionally react), we’re likely to become impatient, short-tempered and even angry. If we are Blue-reactors, we could easily become depressed, despondent and immobilized. And if we are Yellow-reactors we will “check-out and shut down” becoming even more isolated and emotionally detached. None of these ways of psychologically reacting to exhausted RAM are good for anyone. People will resort to all types of unhealthy coping mechanisms to offset these reactions: acting out in anger, drinking too much alcohol, neglecting healthy self-care or withdrawing from loved ones—to mention just a few.
What’s a person to do when their RAM is depleted during this prolonged isolation and one’s cabin fever reaches 100, 102 or even 104 degrees? Continuing the computer analogy, the answer is—reboot the mind. You already know how to reboot your computer and reset your mobile phone, but do you know how to reset the mind?
Here are few practices that will help reboot your brain–and give you a little more mind-RAM to help you during these stressful times:
Get enough sleep. Sleep is key to rebooting the mind. We’ve all had the experience of “sleeping on” an elusive problem to find the solution waiting for us when we wake. Sleep is a time of restoration to both the body and the mind. And what if cabin fever is keeping us tossing and turning for hours during the night? Then we should make it a priority to either seek medical help or research natural remedies to get us over the hump. Sleep is that important. And don’t neglect the other practices on this list: they can each have the side-effect of helping you sleep better too.
Move your body. “But my gym is closed, and no one will play golf with me.” Yes, many of the platforms that we’ve used to exercise are currently closed. Find other ways to move. It does not have to be strenuous. Every day I go out for a walk in my neighborhood. I’ve never seen so many (masked?) people (and their dogs) in the streets. If you do prefer a more demanding routine, there are a variety of other at-home options available. Many gyms, trainers and yoga instructors are now joining the ranks of other long-standing channels offering online workouts, complete with modifications that don’t require extra equipment or weights.
Eat well. Good nutrition is a key to having a healthy mind. Eating well during this crisis is a challenge—not just because we have to work harder to get good food into the house but because we are more inclined to increase our “emotional eating” at this time. We go for the chips and ice cream instead of the celery and apples. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve gained a few pounds over the past several weeks.) Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you can while cutting back on the carbs, fats and meat.
Socially connect. I personally don’t like the term “social isolation,” I much prefer to think of it as “physical isolation.” We may stay away from each other physically, but more than ever we need to stay connected to each other socially—and now more than ever before we have the technology to do that—through phone calls, video chats and even online games. I participate in at least three or four virtual “happy hours” a week to stay in touch with loved ones to see how they are doing, share knowledge about health practices, complain about our leaders, and find out what others are binge-watching on TV.
Give, be generous, help others in any way that you can. You will feel better about it. Find a way to give back, take care of, and be responsible to someone you love, an elderly person on your street, or the community at large. Taking our mind off ourselves and keeping it on others is another way to reboot. Writing this article—which I hope will be helpful in some small way—is one of my attempts to give back.
Keep your sense of humor. Find ways to laugh. Sigmund Freud identified humor as one of the healthier forms of “psychological defenses.”
There are no surprises in this list, are there? You already know these things are good to do, don’t you? So, either these things have been practiced and you are the better for it, you’ve attempted all of these reboots but they just don’t work for you, or you may be caught up in a destructive cycle in which you feel cabin fever prevents you from doing the very things that would reduce cabin fever. We call this “resistance” in the field of psychology. It’s natural to resist what’s good for us. What’s the answer to this human tendency to resist? This is where we call upon a well-known athletic footwear company’s slogan: “Just do it” anyway until you start to reap the benefits.
Of course, sometimes we just need an extra helping of supportive evidence to push us in the right direction, much the way a starting block can help a runner push off. To this end, in the next article we’re going to take a closer look at some of the research supporting the value of these re-boot practices—particularly those having to do with the importance of maintaining social connections.
In the meantime, let us know in the comments below how you and your family work at staying healthy and connected while “sheltering at home.”
