Yeah, You Probably Have ‘Pandemic Brain’

If you feel like you’re losing your mind, you’re not weird. In fact, right now, you’re probably in the majority and you’re probably dealing with what people are calling “pandemic brain.”

There are many reasons why the late stage pandemic is messing with your brain. Your colleagues are showing up for Zoom meetings fresh-faced and smiling, moments after posting memes that say, “I am in hell.” Your social media feeds are dystopian—a picture of your high school classmate in a crowded club above a heartbreaking photo of your friend’s dad on a ventilator, above an ad for a multilevel marketing scheme clearly aimed at moms who have been pushed out of the workforce. Your job, if you’re lucky enough to have one, is encouraging you to “give yourself breaks!” and “Find time to relax!” while subtly suggesting that if you don’t work doubly hard, you won’t have a job to take breaks from. Everything you do is harder than it used to be.

“People feel like they’re not as sharp—there is a sense of being overwhelmed,” says Raquel Gur, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry, neurology and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Gur has been conducting an international study of personal resilience during the pandemic, and she’s heard countless people describe similar symptoms of “being flooded with emotion” and “being dysregulated.” 

It’s an experience people are calling “pandemic brain.”

Pandemic brain is not a disorder, and it hasn’t yet been studied, Dr. Gur says, but it’s certainly happening. “It’s more of a subjective report of what people describe as a fogging mind,” she explains. 

Neurobiologically, this makes sense. “When the temporal limbic regions of the brain are active from being overwhelmed with worries and uncertainty,” she says, it’s harder for the part of your brain that lets you complete tasks to function. “It’s like a fogginess or a low-level depression that comes with being isolated or off your regular routines,” says Deanna Crosby, a therapist who has been hearing reports of these symptoms from her clients, including people who felt healthy before the pandemic.

In other words, it turns out there are real consequences to trying to carry on at normal levels of productivity through a prolonged period of crisis. And even though your impulse might be to stop feeling sorry for yourself, or to get over it, or think about how others have it worse, scientists are telling us clearly that the mental effects of living through this past year are an extremely serious, widespread problem. Whatever you’re feeling, you’re not alone.

How bad are things, really?

“I’ve been doing this for about 21 years and I think this is the hardest I’ve ever seen people struggle with depression and anxiety and definitely substance use,” says Crosby. A screening of over 300,000 adults by the U.S. Census Bureau found that compared to 2019, American adults in the spring of 2020 were more than three times as likely to meet criteria for depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, or both. Depression symptoms are especially associated with having low savings and low income. 

Another survey of 70,000 people throughout the pandemic revealed, depressingly, what you might already have intuited: “Depression and anxiety are still highest in young adults, women, people with lower household income, people with a long-term physical health condition, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, and people living with children.”

Dr. Gur’s research has also found that women have higher levels of COVID worry than men, and that Black women, consistently, shoulder the greatest burden of worry around jobs and health.

What many people need is so much more than we can do for ourselves—direct government intervention for food security, rent breaks, medical care, and unemployment pay. But there are ways to feel less dread, less confusion, and less pandemic brain fogginess now.

What can I do to feel better?

“The best thing that I have found that naturally increases serotonin and dopamine is exercising,” says Crosby. I know, I know! We should be sitting less and exercising more, we get it! But it’s not about burning calories, and it doesn’t matter what form it takes for you, or how short it is—any kind of movement can help clear your head.