A quick glance at the news on a daily basis reveals things aren’t going so well. The climate is going to hell in a hand basket. There’s that global pandemic. Humanitarian disasters, like Afghans clinging to foreign military planes as they take off into the skies. Wildfires ripping through natural habitats and people’s lives. Unspeakable acts of daily violence levelled at women and children in their own homes. And yet, most people I know feel okay. In fact, they are pretty chipper. And I count myself in that category, which makes me wonder if we’ve all completely lost the plot. Honestly, how it is even possibly for us to get up in the morning?

According to a Australian psychologist Steven Taylor, who studies disaster psychology at the University of British Columbia and, prophetically, released his book The Psychology of Pandemics just two months before Covid-19 hit… all these simultaneous disasters might be messing with us. Research shows that intense sustained stress can desensitise the mind. Specifically, as we all live through the after-shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic, while still hearing about and even being touched by other disasters, we may be letting go of our ability to empathise… just to process what’s happening around us.

One thing that I often marvel at is people’s ability to adjust to a new kind of normal so quickly. The idea of being crammed into our small house, all the adults, children, pets and stuff, for months on end would have filled me with all sorts trepidation. And then we had to just buckle down, and at first it felt like the hardest thing. Near impossible. But then, for me at least, something locked into place. To survive the close-quarter living, and home-schooling, and unrelenting work pressures, I became attached to this new way of living. I began to wonder how I ever spent so much time roaming around in the world. And wearing structured clothes. 

I began to let go of my usual controls as we settled into a new rhythm. I no longer set an alarm - my commute is 10 steps away. I no longer crammed the fridge full of food on a Sunday… I can pop down to the supermarket an old time. I rarely wore anything that isn’t in the “comfy clothes” drawer. And I kept checking in, waiting for some sort of deep sadness or longing for my former life… but I felt fine.  

What I can’t quite believe is now the thing that fills me with dread now is the thought of going back to the way things were before. I don’t understand this, because my life is so much more challenging now. There are no boundaries. There is very little respect for my needs and wants, as I am constantly juggling everyone else’s needs and wants in the house. The domestic load is unbearable. And yet, I want to cling to the side of this raft as if my life depended on it. 

Science is on my side: according to several studies, chronic stress (which I’m assuming a pandemic results in) impairs our brain function in multiple ways. It can disrupt synapse regulation, resulting in the loss of sociability and the avoidance of interactions with others. Stress can even reduce the size of the brain.

Partly, there is also a desire to tune out the noise of the world and the unknown nature of when this will all end, according to psychologists who study the way disasters and prolonged stress impacts the brain. Our coping reserves become diminished, and rather than wait on the edge of our seats for a signal that it’s over, we just look at what is in front of us. Rather than let ourselves feel all the feelings about the planet and social injustice, in many ways, we have to let it wash over us. It’s one day. And then the next. 

My friend Michael, a film director, calls this “pigeon” mentality. When you can only look at what is right in front of you. I feel more like a pigeon than ever.

The only other time I have felt this way was after I had my first baby, almost 13 years ago. I remember checking emails when Ruby was a few days old, and I just couldn’t make sense of anything. I opened a work email, out of curiosity, and I just looked at the words. I couldn’t process them. I didn’t know what to say. And I remember observing this about myself quite calmly. I just knew that all I could do was the next immediate thing that Ruby needed… or that I needed… to exist. Thankfully, it passed. But I did hold onto some memory of the simplicity of this life, when only the most basic needs dominated my days. 

In the same way, psychologists say we won’t forget this last year. According to Kevin Larkin, professor of clinical psychology at West Virginia University, US, that’s because the human brain is an additive organ – we add things to it, but we don’t subtract. He says that while we’re not going to forget that experience we went through, we can still control our behaviours going forward.

Emerging is unclear, slow and confusing, which is another reason many of us (okay, me) would almost prefer things just stay as they are. Almost. Yes, lockdown or remote working is hard, but it’s a known quantity. Figuring out the new way forward is messy and even the most courageous might feel cautious. Reclaiming our lives might just be about putting one foot in front of the other. I might not have the bandwidth or even the desire to make ambitious plans or even think much further than tomorrow, but I know enough to realise that soon enough, I’ll be looking back on my happy little pressure-cooker life and wondering how I didn’t totally crack up.