My focus has been the main casualty of my stress. I'm a reader who can't read more than memes, a knowledge worker who's coasting, a thinker who gets sucked into Tik Tok so I don't have to really think about anything. It doesn't sound physical but it feels that way, like my brain just doesn't have the ability to fire all the right neurons at the right time. It feels like it's tired and heavy and could use a year on the beach.
I don’t know where to begin with this other than I feel very seen and very sad all at the same time. I’ve noticed I’ve had to go back to practices that helped me weather PTSD diagnoses and treatment and while I thought it was mostly postpartum anxiety again (although whew should we even start to talk about how exhausting being pregnant in this societal soup is), I think it’s also just all of this. Cracked teeth, yes. Insomnia, yes. Intrusive anxious thoughts and images before bed, yes. Bone tired fatigue, yes. It’s better than it was when I was pregnant but it’s there. Im struggling with it and I literally research how stress becomes biologically embedded. I am a cortisol scientist. And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures. Maybe it’s too pessimistic, but I’m focused on surviving on my individual level and trying to fix the societal structures for my kids because I don’t know that I’ve got the longevity to benefit from that change without also doing intense individual survival self care
I couldn't even read it. I had an undertreated autoimmune disease before COVID. Likely had COVID in Dec 2019 after my husband returned from a trip to Wuhan. Can't prove it, the tests didn't exist then and the antibody tests weren't invented for another 10 months. Likely had Long Covid, ineligible for the specialized treatment center due to lack of positive test. Had multiple doctors prove their humanness (i.e., massively drop the ball) during this. The docs directly affected by COVID - ENT and psych - were the only ones who were ON. Everybody else just kind of floundered around...just like the CDC. Now I function at 50% pre-COVID. Thanks for letting me overshare. Now I think I can read it.
I had undiagnosed Cushing's disease (rogue brain tumor that causes overproduction of cortisol with all the joy that high steroids cause) for nearly a decade when 2020 hit, and I guess for me the silver lining was that it intensified my symptoms so much I actually got sent to an endo who properly tested me so I finally got treated. It's famously rarely diagnosed (suspect I know why.) None of my doctors took me seriously when I said that something was wrong. I WAS dieting and exercising and kept getting fatter (hair falling out, BP going through the roof, insomnia, etc.) but when I said there was something wrong, they told me the problem was that I was...fat. Told me I was being unrealistic, not telling the truth, needed to get "serious" about the obesity, and then we could worry about my chronically elevated white blood cell counts and the weird hump on the back of my neck.
The lesson: high cortisol makes you fat, and doctors don't listen to fat people, regardless of what else might be going on. All the symptoms on this list are high-cortisol responses and I bet you dollars to doughnuts there's a secondary lack of treatment because doctors don't take fat people seriously.
Amen, Sister. Amen amen amen. We’re collectively traumatized but then treated as if our suffering is an individual problem to solve. This is why I feel our model of mental healthcare (I’m a therapist) will be insufficient to address the need and demands of this time - I’m not sure this model has ever been sufficient. So I’m trying to start community healing groups starting with groups for teachers. We need to relearn and reembody our innate capacity for compassion and learn to skillfully apply it to ourselves and everyone around us. Lighten the load by caring for the load together. Create decidedly depatriarchified spaces of healing. Because even the mental healthcare models are patriarchal and neoliberal. But, man. The road ahead is long and the challenges to community healing are great. We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We’re so socialized to hide suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences. We’ve dropped off a cliff in the ability to connect through compassion. My mom has never talked about her magical marriage, her beloved mother or us, her kids. She says these things are so precious that she needs to keep them close. I wonder at social media - are we exploiting that which we should hold preciously close? and in that conditioning ourselves to never share a burden? I hope people - helped greatly by essays such as yours, AHP - will start to see the need for healing and pursue a truly healing lifestyle.
Your point about telling yourself “I have it so much better than most” really resonated. I have three kids under 9 who were home from March 2020 through January 2022 all while my husband and I worked full time from home. BUT! They did online school beautifully! My mom, a retired elementary teacher, came and helped tutor them! We didn’t have to leave our bubble! We even moved to Florida one winter! No one got sick! We didn’t have any high risk conditions! Our income actually increased! How could I possibly be stressed or complain? And yet, heartburn, palpitations, tingling in my extremities, acne, headaches. The list goes on. I was extremely stressed for all of it and I think I only started to realize it when the kids when back to in person school in January.
.
Someone once told me that there is a theory that the generation who raised the Greatest Generation (think King George VI) died in their 50s and 60s because they lived through WWI, a pandemic, the depression and WWII and the stress of those things compounded to actual poor physical health, and if you look at the generations before and after, those people mostly lived until their 80s or longer. I think about that a lot these days.
I have been a voracious reader of literary fiction and nonfiction since I was a preteen. Then the pandemic — my husband has an organ transplant so the risk for him just keeps increasing as our society takes fewer precautions. We live in a very red place. And I can’t read this way anymore. I listen to romances when I exercise (thank you CS Discord for all the recs). I read a couple of newsletters, try to manage 1 piece in each New Yorker which I promptly forget. I miss my books so much but I just can’t focus.
I really appreciated this piece for its acknowledgment that the pandemic -- with all of its stressors -- is not really over. I am so tired of folks suggesting that it is, that we can just go back to normal, as though there is still a "normal" somewhere out there, as though our lives -- and our bodies, really, the world -- have not fundamentally changed.
Thank you for writing this. I'm exceptionally lucky in the grand scheme of things, but between the pandemic and being a biracial Black person in Minneapolis, I was carrying a lot of stress. I felt like my body was in revolt. I started snoring, had more frequent migraines, developed a noticeable amount of grey hair (I'm in my late 20s), and gained a significant amount of weight (which isn't bad, just not something I'd experienced before). I felt fairly certain stress was the culprit early on, but I had just started living with a pretty terrible (now-ex) boyfriend. He told me I was lazy and stupid for gaining weight, often saying, "It's just calories in, calories out. It's not hard." (I wish Maintenance Phase's latest podcast existed at the time.) I started believing my boyfriend. I hated my body and tried to punish it into compliance. Instead of turning to my favorite low-stress and stress-relieving workouts (yoga, walking outside, paddleboarding) I did a lot of intense cardio and ate like a bird. This seemed to stress my body more, but my boyfriend said I simply wasn't working out or dieting hard enough. When I talked to folks and mentioned that I think stress might be behind the changes in my body, I was told it was more likely the cheese I ate or that I didn't do crossfit.
I'm not all the way symptom-free now (*looks at world chaos*) but since I broke up with my boyfriend in November and moved out, I haven't had a migraine and it seems like I've stopped snoring. And not that weight is an indication of health, but I'm back at my pre-pandemic size. Looking back, I really regret how much time I spent hating and punishing myself for a normal reaction to stress in a very stressful time. I regret ignoring my own first instinct about the root of my symptoms and instead let other people's fat-phobia and body shame take over. I hope that through this collective experience, we can change how stress is recognized and treated.
This piece and your question on Instagram gave me the idea, if not the permission, to actually stop and notice what was going on in my body. I cannot believe how many things have changed in 2 years, and it’s saddened me to identify with so many symptoms from your list; small shifts that I hadn’t even taken the time to acknowledge. Thanks all for sharing them
I attributed my own hairfall to a delayed reaction to four surgeries in 2018-19 & the anesthesia required for those, plus an 11 day stay in ICU.
Looking back, it was most likely due to the stress of isolation. My husband retired in 2019 & then all of our travel/fun-life plans evaporated in 2020. We were stuck at home together. My favorite person became my co-prisoner.
We learned to give each other space. He’s a news junkie & I had to go lock myself behind a closed door to avoid the barrage of information about trump & the pandemic. (At least he watched MSNBC & PBS & not Fox!)
We saw no one-adult kids stayed away to keep us safe, (they worked with the public), our groceries were curbside pickup. I talked to friends on the phone occasionally, but we all felt the same way. The fabric of our daily lives was ripped-with no one to see, safely.
Pre-vaccine was unbearably lonely. I read a lot, rediscovered sewing & quilting to pass the time. I bought a used electronic keyboard & practiced sight reading sheet music for hours. We both gardened, played with our cats. I paint & have dozens of unframed canvasses stacked in my art studio. I have started taking long drives alone just to get out of the house. I gained 35 pounds.
It’s hard to be 66 & lonely. I am double vaxxed & double boosted, but with sub-variants on the rise, I do not go anywhere without a mask, which gets me dirty looks in our town. I do not want to risk long-Covid, my autoimmune conditions are bad enough already. After the school shootings last week, I despair that things will ever get better in our nation. It is all so damn depressing.
I am looking for a therapist, but no one has openings for new patients. I made an appointment for mid-September. I will persist at surviving. But just barely.
I have been to numerous doctors over the past few months trying to figure out why I just felt WRONG and BAD all the time seemingly out of nowhere. They couldn't find anything physically wrong with me and just shrugged. Today's piece was like, OH NOW I GET IT. It's sort of a relief to know it's probably not some mysterious undiagnosed illness...but in other ways it's even more terrifying because what do I actually DO about it?
It’s been covered before but: so many people go to the doctor and they say “You need to take time off work and rest” - but it’s simply not an option. I’m not talking about reluctance to take PTO, I’m talking about the *inability* to take PTO. When “taking time off” means losing your job, income, and health insurance…you simply can’t. And it’s fucked!
My focus has been the main casualty of my stress. I'm a reader who can't read more than memes, a knowledge worker who's coasting, a thinker who gets sucked into Tik Tok so I don't have to really think about anything. It doesn't sound physical but it feels that way, like my brain just doesn't have the ability to fire all the right neurons at the right time. It feels like it's tired and heavy and could use a year on the beach.
I don’t know where to begin with this other than I feel very seen and very sad all at the same time. I’ve noticed I’ve had to go back to practices that helped me weather PTSD diagnoses and treatment and while I thought it was mostly postpartum anxiety again (although whew should we even start to talk about how exhausting being pregnant in this societal soup is), I think it’s also just all of this. Cracked teeth, yes. Insomnia, yes. Intrusive anxious thoughts and images before bed, yes. Bone tired fatigue, yes. It’s better than it was when I was pregnant but it’s there. Im struggling with it and I literally research how stress becomes biologically embedded. I am a cortisol scientist. And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures. Maybe it’s too pessimistic, but I’m focused on surviving on my individual level and trying to fix the societal structures for my kids because I don’t know that I’ve got the longevity to benefit from that change without also doing intense individual survival self care
I couldn't even read it. I had an undertreated autoimmune disease before COVID. Likely had COVID in Dec 2019 after my husband returned from a trip to Wuhan. Can't prove it, the tests didn't exist then and the antibody tests weren't invented for another 10 months. Likely had Long Covid, ineligible for the specialized treatment center due to lack of positive test. Had multiple doctors prove their humanness (i.e., massively drop the ball) during this. The docs directly affected by COVID - ENT and psych - were the only ones who were ON. Everybody else just kind of floundered around...just like the CDC. Now I function at 50% pre-COVID. Thanks for letting me overshare. Now I think I can read it.
I had undiagnosed Cushing's disease (rogue brain tumor that causes overproduction of cortisol with all the joy that high steroids cause) for nearly a decade when 2020 hit, and I guess for me the silver lining was that it intensified my symptoms so much I actually got sent to an endo who properly tested me so I finally got treated. It's famously rarely diagnosed (suspect I know why.) None of my doctors took me seriously when I said that something was wrong. I WAS dieting and exercising and kept getting fatter (hair falling out, BP going through the roof, insomnia, etc.) but when I said there was something wrong, they told me the problem was that I was...fat. Told me I was being unrealistic, not telling the truth, needed to get "serious" about the obesity, and then we could worry about my chronically elevated white blood cell counts and the weird hump on the back of my neck.
The lesson: high cortisol makes you fat, and doctors don't listen to fat people, regardless of what else might be going on. All the symptoms on this list are high-cortisol responses and I bet you dollars to doughnuts there's a secondary lack of treatment because doctors don't take fat people seriously.
Amen, Sister. Amen amen amen. We’re collectively traumatized but then treated as if our suffering is an individual problem to solve. This is why I feel our model of mental healthcare (I’m a therapist) will be insufficient to address the need and demands of this time - I’m not sure this model has ever been sufficient. So I’m trying to start community healing groups starting with groups for teachers. We need to relearn and reembody our innate capacity for compassion and learn to skillfully apply it to ourselves and everyone around us. Lighten the load by caring for the load together. Create decidedly depatriarchified spaces of healing. Because even the mental healthcare models are patriarchal and neoliberal. But, man. The road ahead is long and the challenges to community healing are great. We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We’re so socialized to hide suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences. We’ve dropped off a cliff in the ability to connect through compassion. My mom has never talked about her magical marriage, her beloved mother or us, her kids. She says these things are so precious that she needs to keep them close. I wonder at social media - are we exploiting that which we should hold preciously close? and in that conditioning ourselves to never share a burden? I hope people - helped greatly by essays such as yours, AHP - will start to see the need for healing and pursue a truly healing lifestyle.
I felt this entire piece in my bones. Thank you for writing it.
I'm 53. Menopause arrived a few months into the pandemic. It's been... a ride.
Your point about telling yourself “I have it so much better than most” really resonated. I have three kids under 9 who were home from March 2020 through January 2022 all while my husband and I worked full time from home. BUT! They did online school beautifully! My mom, a retired elementary teacher, came and helped tutor them! We didn’t have to leave our bubble! We even moved to Florida one winter! No one got sick! We didn’t have any high risk conditions! Our income actually increased! How could I possibly be stressed or complain? And yet, heartburn, palpitations, tingling in my extremities, acne, headaches. The list goes on. I was extremely stressed for all of it and I think I only started to realize it when the kids when back to in person school in January.
.
Someone once told me that there is a theory that the generation who raised the Greatest Generation (think King George VI) died in their 50s and 60s because they lived through WWI, a pandemic, the depression and WWII and the stress of those things compounded to actual poor physical health, and if you look at the generations before and after, those people mostly lived until their 80s or longer. I think about that a lot these days.
I have been a voracious reader of literary fiction and nonfiction since I was a preteen. Then the pandemic — my husband has an organ transplant so the risk for him just keeps increasing as our society takes fewer precautions. We live in a very red place. And I can’t read this way anymore. I listen to romances when I exercise (thank you CS Discord for all the recs). I read a couple of newsletters, try to manage 1 piece in each New Yorker which I promptly forget. I miss my books so much but I just can’t focus.
I really appreciated this piece for its acknowledgment that the pandemic -- with all of its stressors -- is not really over. I am so tired of folks suggesting that it is, that we can just go back to normal, as though there is still a "normal" somewhere out there, as though our lives -- and our bodies, really, the world -- have not fundamentally changed.
CW: weight, diet, and emotional abuse
Thank you for writing this. I'm exceptionally lucky in the grand scheme of things, but between the pandemic and being a biracial Black person in Minneapolis, I was carrying a lot of stress. I felt like my body was in revolt. I started snoring, had more frequent migraines, developed a noticeable amount of grey hair (I'm in my late 20s), and gained a significant amount of weight (which isn't bad, just not something I'd experienced before). I felt fairly certain stress was the culprit early on, but I had just started living with a pretty terrible (now-ex) boyfriend. He told me I was lazy and stupid for gaining weight, often saying, "It's just calories in, calories out. It's not hard." (I wish Maintenance Phase's latest podcast existed at the time.) I started believing my boyfriend. I hated my body and tried to punish it into compliance. Instead of turning to my favorite low-stress and stress-relieving workouts (yoga, walking outside, paddleboarding) I did a lot of intense cardio and ate like a bird. This seemed to stress my body more, but my boyfriend said I simply wasn't working out or dieting hard enough. When I talked to folks and mentioned that I think stress might be behind the changes in my body, I was told it was more likely the cheese I ate or that I didn't do crossfit.
I'm not all the way symptom-free now (*looks at world chaos*) but since I broke up with my boyfriend in November and moved out, I haven't had a migraine and it seems like I've stopped snoring. And not that weight is an indication of health, but I'm back at my pre-pandemic size. Looking back, I really regret how much time I spent hating and punishing myself for a normal reaction to stress in a very stressful time. I regret ignoring my own first instinct about the root of my symptoms and instead let other people's fat-phobia and body shame take over. I hope that through this collective experience, we can change how stress is recognized and treated.
This piece and your question on Instagram gave me the idea, if not the permission, to actually stop and notice what was going on in my body. I cannot believe how many things have changed in 2 years, and it’s saddened me to identify with so many symptoms from your list; small shifts that I hadn’t even taken the time to acknowledge. Thanks all for sharing them
Yes. I don’t have the energy to write a detailed response, but yes. Thank you.
This is all hitting too close to home.
I attributed my own hairfall to a delayed reaction to four surgeries in 2018-19 & the anesthesia required for those, plus an 11 day stay in ICU.
Looking back, it was most likely due to the stress of isolation. My husband retired in 2019 & then all of our travel/fun-life plans evaporated in 2020. We were stuck at home together. My favorite person became my co-prisoner.
We learned to give each other space. He’s a news junkie & I had to go lock myself behind a closed door to avoid the barrage of information about trump & the pandemic. (At least he watched MSNBC & PBS & not Fox!)
We saw no one-adult kids stayed away to keep us safe, (they worked with the public), our groceries were curbside pickup. I talked to friends on the phone occasionally, but we all felt the same way. The fabric of our daily lives was ripped-with no one to see, safely.
Pre-vaccine was unbearably lonely. I read a lot, rediscovered sewing & quilting to pass the time. I bought a used electronic keyboard & practiced sight reading sheet music for hours. We both gardened, played with our cats. I paint & have dozens of unframed canvasses stacked in my art studio. I have started taking long drives alone just to get out of the house. I gained 35 pounds.
It’s hard to be 66 & lonely. I am double vaxxed & double boosted, but with sub-variants on the rise, I do not go anywhere without a mask, which gets me dirty looks in our town. I do not want to risk long-Covid, my autoimmune conditions are bad enough already. After the school shootings last week, I despair that things will ever get better in our nation. It is all so damn depressing.
I am looking for a therapist, but no one has openings for new patients. I made an appointment for mid-September. I will persist at surviving. But just barely.
I have been to numerous doctors over the past few months trying to figure out why I just felt WRONG and BAD all the time seemingly out of nowhere. They couldn't find anything physically wrong with me and just shrugged. Today's piece was like, OH NOW I GET IT. It's sort of a relief to know it's probably not some mysterious undiagnosed illness...but in other ways it's even more terrifying because what do I actually DO about it?
It’s been covered before but: so many people go to the doctor and they say “You need to take time off work and rest” - but it’s simply not an option. I’m not talking about reluctance to take PTO, I’m talking about the *inability* to take PTO. When “taking time off” means losing your job, income, and health insurance…you simply can’t. And it’s fucked!