Are you experiencing a case of pandemic brain?

If you feel like you aren’t quite yourself, your thoughts are a bit foggy, your emotions fluctuate, or maybe you can’t access their full spectrum - you might be.

I certainly noticed this in myself, my clients and their partners. Not surprisingly, many relationships experienced strain for this reason. You may be wondering why someone coped better or just different than you these last few months, why some relationships thrived when others crumbled, why we have such varied capabilities and capacities for the same challenges. The answer may lie in our brains and their unique wiring.

As a species, we were not designed for optimal function in these circumstances, short term, immediate stress yes, but not long term consistent levels of it. In response to stress, most of our brain resources and its cognitive functions and attention are deployed to look for and prevent threats. Anything of less importance than that gets paused for the indefinite time-being. Forward and complex thinking, decision making, planning and many emotions disappear from awareness while we deal with danger.

This stress response has been very effective in ensuring the survival of generations, but it becomes problematic when it’s engaged as a slow pressure cooker for a long time. We might not be noticing all the physical responses of our bodies, or be consciously aware of worries and fears, tight muscles, disturbed sleep or the loss of focus. We don’t even notice the errors in judgement or little mistakes as we continuously subconsciously scan the world for threats. As we get lost manoeuvring through the fog in our minds, we may resolve to old thoughts and patterns. Even if they’re not good for us, they’re familiar, so we perceive them as safe.

The individual differences in our responses and capacities lie in a small part of our brain - the amygdala. Its functions are related to fear and reward processing, learning, and crucially the fight, flight or freeze response. It’s also where all the memories which resulted in negative emotions are stored, which is why childhood memories are so impactful even when not consciously remembered. When faced with a perceived danger, the amygdala sends stress hormones to shut down the higher functions of the prefrontal lobes and diverts all resources to the more primal parts of the brain to tackle the emergency. With the brain functions unnecessary to fight or flight closed down and less energy available for intellectual processing, we tend to revert to more linear thinking and old patterns. It’s the tiny amygdala that’s responsible for our inability to think clearly or rationally under stress.

Our subjective responses to the danger we perceive in the pandemic or any other long term stress may be largely determined by the type of negative memories stored in our amygdalas. As a result, the effects on the frontal parts of our brain responsible for processing and emotions will also vary from person to person.

Despite having the same parts of the brain, our experiences and levels of awareness differ, so we must hold space for one another and allow for processing of whatever response we are having. This is particularly important in relationships, as many have experienced struggles and miscommunication resulting from differences in brain wiring. Handling these times may not be easy, but we can prevent many future problems and even breakups with compassion and understanding.