Breaking. Routine.

     It started with a short piece in the New York Times that asked if your dreams have seemed a bit stranger these past few months.  If so, you're not alone, said National Geographic: The neurobiological signals and reactions that produce dreams are similar to those triggered by psychedelic drugs, according to McNamara (Patrick McNamara, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine).  Psychedelics activate nerve receptors called serotonin 5-HT2A, which then turn off a part of the brain called the dorsal prefrontal cortex.  The result is known as “emotional disinhibition,” a state in which emotions flood the consciousness, especially during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, when we typically dream.  Though these processes happen nightly, most people don’t typically remember their dreams.  Living through the coronavirus pandemic might be changing that due to heightened isolation and stress, influencing the content of dreams and allowing some dreamers to remember more of them.  For one, anxiety and lack of activity decrease sleep quality.  Frequent awakenings, also called parasomnias, are associated with increased dream recall.  Latent emotions and memories from the previous day can also influence the content of dreams and one’s emotional response within the dream itself.  Added Psychology Today: What are the obvious offenders?  Social isolation, massive upheaval to daily routines, fears about health and finances, and deep uncertainty about what lies ahead, as well as a shifting combination of boredom, overwork, stress, and anxiety.

     In a somewhat odd twist, author Helen Jukes* wrote this reflection in Book Page: What do we mean by “home”?  It’s not a question one usually asks when feeling at home.  It comes instead out of a sense of dislocation: when the home is present but lacking in some way; there but not there; visible but, for some reason, amiss.  To ask the question is to state a nagging suspicion that the word has become dislodged, detached, decoupled from its meaning.  The person asking is not necessarily homeless, but neither do they feel totally secure.  They might say, as they leave the office, that they’re going home, but the associations they have with that word, their expectations about it—comfort, shelter, recuperation, rest—sit oddly with the house that they’re headed for.  As most of us have already discovered, our routines are being shattered: kids going or not going to schools; parties/concerts/weddings/funerals;  trying to catch a semblance of a smile underneath a mask; giving or receiving a hug; going to work (if there is work); getting on a plane; planning a vacation; going out for a run; our diets.  In a rare dual issue that National Geographic titled: How We Lost the Planet/How We Saved the Planet, they wrote a piece about mining in Australia and a miner named Glenn Albrecht: As the mines spread, Albrecht began to notice a common theme in the emotional responses of some valley inhabitants.  They knew the mines were the source of their distress, but they had a difficult time finding the precise words to express their feelings.  "It was as though they were experiencing something akin to homesickness," he says, "but none of them had left home." ...Albrecht named the feeling the residents were describing "solastalgia," which he defined as the pain of losing the solace of home..."Why don't we have a single word," he asked, "that corresponds to a human feeling?"  Especially a feeling "that is profound, obvious, felt worldwide in various contexts, and has likely been felt for thousands of years in similar circumstances."  It seemed like a valid question.  Throughout history, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and volcanoes --as well as expanding civilizations and conquering armies-- have permanently altered treasured landscapes and disrupted societies...In the biggest empirical study to date, a team led by researchers from MIT and Harvard looked at the effects of changes in the climate on the mental health of nearly two million randomly selected U.S. residents from 2002 to 2012.  Among other things, they found that exposure to heat and drought magnified the risk of suicide and raised the number of psychiatric hospital visits.  In addition, victims of hurricanes and floods were more likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder amd depression.

   Perhaps it didn't help that I was (for some unknown reason) becoming engrossed in a book by award-wiining reporter, Anna Mehler Paperny; her introduction to her book about depression began this way: No one wants this crap illness that masquerades as personal failing.  I had no desire to plumb its depths.  The struggle to function leaves me little capacity to do so...The depth of depression's debilitation and our reprehensible failure to address it consume me because I'm there, spending days paralyzed and nights wracked because my meds aren't good enough.  But this isn't some quixotic personal project that pertains to me and no one else.  Depression affects everyone on the planet, directly or indirectly, in every possible sphere...I don't want to be the person writing this book.  Don't want to be chewed up by despair so unremitting the only conceivable response is to write it.  But I am.  I write this because I need both life vest and anchor, because I need both to scream and to arm myself in the dark.  Maybe you need to scream, to arm yourself, too.  I was fascinated by this unseen invader of our feelings and emotions, this mood altering "something" that could creep into people's lives and alter or damage or destroy them as surely and as certainly as any viral pathogen.  Indeed on a personal level, the world around me seemed to be functioning but something was amiss.  Author Paul Greenberg wrote that nearly one-eighth of all the fish caught each year gets processed not into meat or animal feed, but into fish oil/omega-3 supplements.  National Geographic wrote that mink farms** in the U.S. may have passed the coronavirus to humans.  And Michael Pollan wrote a piece in The New York Review that worked to condense a number of articles explaining why our industrial food system was so broken: Once pigs reach slaughter weight, there's not much else you can do with them.  You can't afford to keep feeding them; even if you could, the production lines are designed to accommodate pigs up to a certain size and weight, and no larger.  Meanwhile, you've got baby pigs entering the process, steadily getting fatter.  Much the same is true for the hybrid industrial chickens, which, if allowed to live beyond their allotted six or seven weeks, are susceptible to broken bones and heart problems and quickly become too large to hang on the disassembly line.  This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand....Four companies now process more than 80 percent of beef cattle in America; another four companies process 57 percent of the hogs.  A single Smithfield processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, processes 5 percent of the pork Americans eat.  Sigh...something was a kilter, or was it just me?

    In the U.S., the national rate of anxiety tripled in the second quarter compared to the same period in 2019 (from 8.1% to 25.5%), and depression almost quadrupled (from 6.5% to 24.3%), said a piece in Bloomberg.  In Britain, which has also had a severe outbreak and a long lockdown, depression has roughly doubled, from 9.7% of adults before the pandemic to 19.2% in June...Perhaps more pertinently, older adults had already built their lives before the pandemic -- with routines, structures, careers and relationships to fall back on.  The young had not, and were just embarking on that adventure when Covid-19 struck.  Added the piece: ...not all people, even among the young, are at risk, because everyone is psychologically unique -- introverts may even thrive in this time of social distancing.  Matthew Lieberman, a founder of the field of social cognitive neuroscience and author of the book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect told Rolling Stone: “Introverts and extroverts both have similar, total social needs, but they manifest and are satisfied in very different ways.”  In extroverts, the dopamine reward network --which is triggered by external stimuli and sensory input-- is more active.  Introverts get a bigger hit from the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which warms up when we turn inward.  This explains the fact that, while isolation can be measured objectively, loneliness is highly subjective, a function of whether or not one’s social expectations are being met.  Louise Hawkley (senior research scientist at the University of Chicago) told AARP that loneliness: "...is a universal human experience, and being the social animals that we are, there must be implications when those social connections are not satisfied.”  There is a human need to be embedded, connected, integrated in a social network, she notes.  When that social network is missing, “the consequences are very real in terms of mental and physical health."

    Nearly 40% of Americans "reported that their mental health has been negatively affected by the pandemic," said TIME, adding this: Another sobering report indicated that beyond the 100,000 people who have already died from COVID-19 in the U.S., as many as 75,000 more could die what’s termed “deaths of despair”–from substance abuse or suicide–as a result of the consequences of the pandemic, both social and economic.  Those numbers are unthinkable.  Not so surprising to Steve Cole (director of the UCLA Social Genomics Core Laboratory) and social neuroscientist, John Cacioppo.  In studies of white blood cells from "very lonely men and women," they found that the cells were "in a state of high alert."  Continued the piece from Rolling Stone (see above): The years they spent trying to figure that out amounted to the first study ever to use the whole human genome to look at a social epidemiological risk factor in humans, and what it determined was that loneliness is a perfect way to make the body feel threatened, to tell it that no one is around to pass on a virus but also that no one is around to help fight off a predator, to tend a wound, to share resources.  Loneliness, which has since been found to be a medical risk factor on par with smoking and obesity, may not feel like an active threat to us emotionally, Cole says, “but biologically, man, the memo is making its way down into our nervous system and our tissue and fertilizing chronic disease and undermining our antiviral defense.  And at this particular time, neither of those seem like great results.”  What this means is that those of us experiencing the loneliness of social isolation may actually be less equipped to fight off the coronavirus.

    Isolation isn't the same as loneliness, although they're closely related, said an ad for the AARP Foundation.  Loneliness is subjective -- the feeling of being alone, of not having the companionship or sense of belonging we want or need.  It's something that can't be quantified by data or metrics.  Isolation, on the other hand, is objective and measurable -- the reality of being separated from others, not by choice but by circumstance.  You can have a small network of a few close friends and not feel lonely.  Conversely, you can have a large network...but if you don't feel understood or valued in that group --or if you're unable to interact with them regularly-- then isolation can creep in.  What about Zoom meetings and other social media, you ask?  Said the piece in Rolling Stone: A 2018 study of 18- to 30-year-olds found that the odds of depression were significantly lowered by face-to-face emotional support, but significantly heightened by reliance on social media.  Another study found that decreasing time on social media reduced feelings of loneliness in 18- to 22-year-olds.  Yet when technology use (including email, Skype, and Facebook) was studied in older adults, it was linked to lower rates of loneliness and better psychological outcomes.  The key, according to Primack, (public-health expert Brian Primack) may be how we’re using these tools, whether they’re simply a way of projecting a version of ourselves out into the ether or whether they’re fostering real social connections we otherwise wouldn’t be able to have.

    Hmm, so what to make of all of this?  My mind drifts to a rebuttal letter in the London Review of Books which added to a piece that said "...the point of good typesetting is to be invisible..."  The letter writer discussed his company's use of optical kerning, "which analyzes the shape of a character and adjusts the space after it to produce a better 'fit' with the characters that follow it.  This is important because although well-produced fonts include built-in kerning pairs for many character combinations, very few cover all possible adjacent characters."  During this time of social isolation and possible loneliness, perhaps we should try to remind ourselves that we don't have to "fit" into everyone's world or everyone's image of us...only our own.  How IS our life going?  Are we bitter or worried, happy or undecided?  Are we content or unfulfilled, creative or in a funk?  Are we ready to get out or ready to go back on the couch?  We are different, each of us, but the studies above have shown that having a purpose, a passion, an interest in others, can actually change our cells' outlook.  When we change ourselves inside, we change ourselves outside.  Depending on your outlook, it may sound easier said than done.   So I leave you with this, a treat from Seabourn cruise lines showing you that sometimes we may need just a bit of distraction, a bit of fun even if we are stuck inside...something, as the magician Mark Haslam shows, is a clear as day and night.

    

*Jukes was writing about her exploration into the world of honeybees in her new book, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings.  An excerpt: Honeybees in real life are not like the ones in books.  They’re brittle and trembling, and when I lifted the lid of the hive, they didn’t buzz, they hummed—like a machine but more unstable, more liable to volatility.  Once a week I made a full hive inspection, prizing the combs apart one by one as the bees rose up in a cloud around me—light, sharp and impossible to predict.  The task was more involved than I’d anticipated, and I was going to become more involved, more unsettled, than I’d thought.

**Yes, we still have mink farms in the U.S., actually 275 mink farms at last count, each raising and killing about 100,000 minks each (what??).  And here I thought that wearing a fur coat was a dying industry...said the article: On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced two mink farms in Utah reported “deaths in numbers they’d never seen before,” a USDA spokesperson told Science, in addition to several staff coming down with COVID-19.  Nat Geo’s Dina Fine Maron tells me there’s no information yet on whether the virus spread from mink to humans or vice versa (that’ll require genetic testing, which is currently underway), and the USDA hasn’t shared whether it’s testing for the virus at any of the nation’s other 275 mink farms.  (U.S. mink farms produce about three million mink pelts a year.)