5 ms·

Cabin Fever

76 points by enesunal 7y ago

dijit 7y ago
So, aside from irritability and perhaps paranoia, are there any more symptoms? It’s fun that you can’t be diagnosed with it as it’s not a defined medical definition but how can you know if you’re on the slope to experiencing something like this?
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  speaking only from my personal experience it can trigger depression, loss of motivation, and a feeling of an "empty head". e.g. place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know. Also increased anxiety when the quarantine is over.
  - new2628 7y ago
    You mention smoking weed in another comment. Do you think there may be a connection?
    - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      The times I had this experience with depression and feeling empty headed etc was when I was working off-shore. We were isolated at sea for 8-10 months per year and it was 2-3 months stretches in one go (with only 1-2 days in between). I wasn't able to smoke weed back then and there was no Internet out there. I didn't know about cabin fever back then but only learned later that this must have been what it was. But I strongly agree that smoking for many weeks/months every day could sure trigger a lot of side effects. Isolation/quarantine right now is very different (I got Internet, and the problem is there is actually too much choice of what I could read, watch or study). edit: N.N. Taleb talks about his concept of "balancing extremes", I'm very much a believer of this life style.
  - circlefavshape 7y ago
    > place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know Isn't that called meditation?
    - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
      hehe, it sure sounds like that. my explanation is that because it follows several hours of severe depression it is more of a state of exhaustion. a state in which I couldn't sleep but also not really alert. Literally empty, no day dreaming either but also no negative thoughts. Nothing.
    - nkohari 7y ago
      Meditation is an intentional pursuit; it's about focus rather than daydreaming.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
An awesome resource for long term effects of quarantine is this paper from The Lancet: The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... I personally try to set little goals every day. Routine is really important. Maybe study a new subject and/or work on a side-project. Also exercise (basic cardio) - some sunlight (open a window if nothing else is an option), and/or smoke weed to reduce anxiety. Smoking weed and drinking coffee is a combination that keeps me productive for tasks that require deep thinking. (weed alone just makes me complacent and lazy). If anyone needs help working on a fun foss project I have time to spare :) edit: also timebox both your work and your fun activities. (timeboxing one alone isn't enough IMO)
- dwiel 7y ago
  Are you not concerned about smoking making covid19 symptoms more extreme?
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    maybe I should be. but having stopped cigarettes 25 years ago, and my weed consumption not being regular (often have breaks of several months) I'm not too worried. Maybe baking cookies in these times would be better but it's not the same :-/
    - marsrover 7y ago
      I read something on Reddit that said marijuana is an ACE2-inhibitor, but I can't find any research on it or anything about it. No idea where the guy got his information but I keep looking around. Does anyone else know if this is just completely false information?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - 7y ago
tyingq 7y ago
I imagine under a tight lockdown, this is way more pronounced for apartment dwellers. Being able to just sit in your backyard seems like a big difference.
- phillc73 7y ago
  I absolutely agree. I have a 5 year old at home due to closed kindergarten. Both my wife and I are supposed to be working from home for the next few weeks and without our garden I think we'd be off the wall by now. Sending the lad outside to play in the sunny weather, while I can watch him from the window next to my workspace, is making a huge difference.
  - hamaluik 7y ago
    We were in the process of finding a house to rent before this all went down. Now we're stuck in an apartment with our stir-crazy toddler and are both supposed to be working full hours from home. It's.. difficult, to say the least.
- coldcode 7y ago
  I have a house and our neighborhood has nice walking areas including a pond. Going outside and looking at nature helps a lot.
- aniham 7y ago
  It’s been a great opportunity for me to finish several half completed gardening projects. Don’t know if any studies have been done on this, but for me personally, digging in dirt for an hour every day has the same mood improvement benefits as exercise.
- lol768 7y ago
  Yeah, it's not great. I've been stuck in my flat with some symptoms for the past ... week or so now? I've still been working from home, and video calls with co-workers + conversations with friends/family help; but it's not been the highlight of my year. No real idea when it will end, either. I managed to get out and try to go for a walk at what I thought was a reasonably unsociable time, but it was still busy enough and I was passing people enough that it seemed irresponsible to repeat.
posterboy 7y ago
Business as usual for shut-ins, hikikomori, cellar-dwellers, 24/7 gamers etc
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  some re-energize themselves by going out and sharing with others what their day was like, others need isolation in order to recover from a busy day. Most aren't on either extreme of that spectrum but somewhere in between. I think you don't need to be a shut-in or 24/7 gamer for this to not have much of an effect on you. I used to be on the far end of this spectrum of needing to share and have others around me in my first 30-40 years and as I got older I changed within a time-span of 5 years that I'd rather stay home. I can still wear my party-hat when I need to and do enjoy it but if given the choice now I rather spend time with my own thoughts.
- the8472 7y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2276/ https://xkcd.com/2276/
scotty79 7y ago
How does it differ from excruciating boredom?
awinter-py 7y ago
As always, the inuit word for this is best I would use a product called 'Piblokto' almost no matter what it did
jdxcode 7y ago
That article links to another called "Piblokto"—a cultural-specific hysterical reaction. I'm suspicious it's a real thing and the article mentions there is heavy skepticism around it, but it's a strange article to read nonetheless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto
chewz 7y ago
Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coronavirus-and-sitting-quietly-in-a-room-alone/ https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coro...
tombert 7y ago
I've been having to deal with this lately; I've never really been someone who likes working from home. Typically when I've told coworkers that I'm "working from home", I'm actually "working from McDonalds" or something, and I just don't feel like taking an hour-long subway ride for whatever reason. Now that everything in NYC is closed or on restricted hours or whatever, I have been getting a little stir-crazy, especially since my already-too-low amount of exercise that I got from my commute to work has now been reduced to "me walking downstairs to my basement", which has made it very difficult for me to sleep. To combat this, I ordered an exercise machine last night, to at least allow me to get an approximation of what I'd be doing at the gym, and hopefully ameliorate the sleep issues, but I have no idea how I'm going to deal with 3+ more weeks of this quarantine.
derefr 7y ago
I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life, and spent at least some time in seclusion in each one. And I have experienced the “cabin fever” feeling before... but not everywhere I’ve lived. In some environments, it happened easily and immediately; in others, it never did. I’ve tried to think about my environment at each juncture to figure out if the situations where I did experience “cabin fever” had anything in common. Every time I experienced the symptoms described in the article (restlessness, lightheadedness, insomnia, irritability, etc.) I was living in a modern, rather-well-sealed apartment building; or was on a long road-trip in a modern, rather-well-sealed car; or was on a long plane flight; or was staying in a modern hotel room in a high-rise; or I was camping in a tent or camper-trailer. Meanwhile, I’ve never experienced these symptoms while living in an old, drafty brick building (repurposed office building); or while living in a Victorian-era farmhouse; or while staying in a low-rent motel; or while camping under the stars. My conclusion is that “cabin fever” is a feeling you get when your living space is not well-ventilated. Specifically, when there’s no way to create a through-draft of air, so even opening windows won’t force out the air deeper in the home—leading to that air becoming stale, creating a built-up “cloud” of CO2, other gaseous bodily wastes, and exhaled aerosolized water droplets (you know, those things that viruses travel on.) It happens faster when more people are cooped up together in a small space, because this cloud of stale air gets denser, faster; and because there’s less time when everyone is gone at once, where the air can “recharge” by slow through-insulation-barrier gas exchange. If the problem is stale air, then just “going outside” is only a temporary fix, because the air will usually be just as stuffy when you return (unless you leave for hours and leave your windows open and fans on.) On the other hand, you can be fine while inside indefinitely, if you open a window and then sit right beside it, where the outside air can reach you. But this will only work if there’s enough wind to push the air into the house a small bit; and it seemingly has no effect—possibly for purely-psychological reasons?—if the air outside is humid, as it is in e.g. Hong Kong. (But going outside in humid places still works for temporary relief. Weird.) And that last realization leads me to the secondary conclusion that the (or my, at least) human physiology is responding mainly to aerosolized-moisture-content in the air (in some way that’s distinct from responding to the evaporated humidity) as a proxy metric for the other, harder-to-sense air-quality measures. So, in theory, you might be able to reduce the qualitative of “cabin fever” just by buying a dehumidifier. But really, I wouldn’t recommend it; there’s pretty good documentation about the subtler, less-self-apparent effects that a high CO2 concentration in a room can have on people, and on how much CO2 does tend to build up in closed or not-well-ventilated rooms—especially people’s bedrooms at night. Relevant links: - Tom Scott’s This is Your Brain on Stale Air — https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome (when this same thing happens in offices) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui (which, at its practical core, seems to be about arranging the contents of living spaces to avoid having objects act as baffles to the through-flow of air)
aphextron 7y ago
People talking about going "stir crazy" is just bewildering to me. Working from home has been a dream come true. I am happier, less stressed, and easily 2x more efficient and productive. The ability to sit quietly in my apartment alone for extended periods of time is literally the only thing in the world I have ever wanted.
- watwut 7y ago
  I am not alone. My ability to sit quietly and undisturbed went down.
- TylerE 7y ago
  This is true, but there is a huge difference psychologically between choosing not to go out and not being allowed to go out.
- eyelidlessness 7y ago
  I also prefer to work from home, I tend to be less stressed and more productive as well. However, I also tend to benefit from some time out of the house in the world. I typically take at least one meal break out. It's a social experience, and a break from my day that helps my brain reset after a long stretch of work. I'm currently self-quarantined so even trips out for essentials are not happening, and it is definitely starting to wear on me. Different people require different levels of social activity for their mental wellbeing. I think now is a good time for everyone to be aware of that. As a (mostly) introvert, we often feel overlooked in this regard. Now is a good time for us to show compassion for our extroverted friends and colleagues who are struggling with social isolation.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  The gap between the extremes of introversion and extraversion is wide. Most people, of course, sit somewhere in the middle. Though there seems to be another axis at play here—what if you were forced to stay at home but not alone? For many people the office is a more peaceful place to work than home. And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so on.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Yesterday evening I needed to get out of the house for a while. I've been a remote worker for two years so working from home is nothing new but most days I'd end up outside of the house for errands or just going down the street to say hi to neighbors. Instead I went out and drove around. Even twenty minutes of a change in scenery helped out quite a bit. Back when I lived in a midrise condo in the central business district of a large metro, it would have been much more difficult to achieve this small bit of scenery change without passing through spaces shared by a couple hundred neighbors. Cabin fever is going to be distributed unevenly throughout this event.
jeadfa 6y ago
Getting Your Travel Information , Travel Guides, Discover, Plan, Destination information if you Love Travel . Inspiration from TheTravelersTalk https://thetravelerstalk.com/ https://thetravelerstalk.com/

76 points by enesunal 7y ago

So, aside from irritability and perhaps paranoia, are there any more symptoms? It’s fun that you can’t be diagnosed with it as it’s not a defined medical definition but how can you know if you’re on the slope to experiencing something like this?

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
speaking only from my personal experience it can trigger depression, loss of motivation, and a feeling of an "empty head". e.g. place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know. Also increased anxiety when the quarantine is over.
- new2628 7y ago
  You mention smoking weed in another comment. Do you think there may be a connection?
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    The times I had this experience with depression and feeling empty headed etc was when I was working off-shore. We were isolated at sea for 8-10 months per year and it was 2-3 months stretches in one go (with only 1-2 days in between). I wasn't able to smoke weed back then and there was no Internet out there. I didn't know about cabin fever back then but only learned later that this must have been what it was. But I strongly agree that smoking for many weeks/months every day could sure trigger a lot of side effects. Isolation/quarantine right now is very different (I got Internet, and the problem is there is actually too much choice of what I could read, watch or study). edit: N.N. Taleb talks about his concept of "balancing extremes", I'm very much a believer of this life style.
- circlefavshape 7y ago
  > place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know Isn't that called meditation?
  - DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
    hehe, it sure sounds like that. my explanation is that because it follows several hours of severe depression it is more of a state of exhaustion. a state in which I couldn't sleep but also not really alert. Literally empty, no day dreaming either but also no negative thoughts. Nothing.
  - nkohari 7y ago
    Meditation is an intentional pursuit; it's about focus rather than daydreaming.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

An awesome resource for long term effects of quarantine is this paper from The Lancet: The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... I personally try to set little goals every day. Routine is really important. Maybe study a new subject and/or work on a side-project. Also exercise (basic cardio) - some sunlight (open a window if nothing else is an option), and/or smoke weed to reduce anxiety. Smoking weed and drinking coffee is a combination that keeps me productive for tasks that require deep thinking. (weed alone just makes me complacent and lazy). If anyone needs help working on a fun foss project I have time to spare :) edit: also timebox both your work and your fun activities. (timeboxing one alone isn't enough IMO)

dwiel 7y ago
Are you not concerned about smoking making covid19 symptoms more extreme?
- DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
  maybe I should be. but having stopped cigarettes 25 years ago, and my weed consumption not being regular (often have breaks of several months) I'm not too worried. Maybe baking cookies in these times would be better but it's not the same :-/
  - marsrover 7y ago
    I read something on Reddit that said marijuana is an ACE2-inhibitor, but I can't find any research on it or anything about it. No idea where the guy got his information but I keep looking around. Does anyone else know if this is just completely false information?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago

I imagine under a tight lockdown, this is way more pronounced for apartment dwellers. Being able to just sit in your backyard seems like a big difference.

phillc73 7y ago
I absolutely agree. I have a 5 year old at home due to closed kindergarten. Both my wife and I are supposed to be working from home for the next few weeks and without our garden I think we'd be off the wall by now. Sending the lad outside to play in the sunny weather, while I can watch him from the window next to my workspace, is making a huge difference.
- hamaluik 7y ago
  We were in the process of finding a house to rent before this all went down. Now we're stuck in an apartment with our stir-crazy toddler and are both supposed to be working full hours from home. It's.. difficult, to say the least.
coldcode 7y ago
I have a house and our neighborhood has nice walking areas including a pond. Going outside and looking at nature helps a lot.
aniham 7y ago
It’s been a great opportunity for me to finish several half completed gardening projects. Don’t know if any studies have been done on this, but for me personally, digging in dirt for an hour every day has the same mood improvement benefits as exercise.
lol768 7y ago
Yeah, it's not great. I've been stuck in my flat with some symptoms for the past ... week or so now? I've still been working from home, and video calls with co-workers + conversations with friends/family help; but it's not been the highlight of my year. No real idea when it will end, either. I managed to get out and try to go for a walk at what I thought was a reasonably unsociable time, but it was still busy enough and I was passing people enough that it seemed irresponsible to repeat.

posterboy 7y ago

Business as usual for shut-ins, hikikomori, cellar-dwellers, 24/7 gamers etc

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
some re-energize themselves by going out and sharing with others what their day was like, others need isolation in order to recover from a busy day. Most aren't on either extreme of that spectrum but somewhere in between. I think you don't need to be a shut-in or 24/7 gamer for this to not have much of an effect on you. I used to be on the far end of this spectrum of needing to share and have others around me in my first 30-40 years and as I got older I changed within a time-span of 5 years that I'd rather stay home. I can still wear my party-hat when I need to and do enjoy it but if given the choice now I rather spend time with my own thoughts.
the8472 7y ago
https://xkcd.com/2276/ https://xkcd.com/2276/

scotty79 7y ago

How does it differ from excruciating boredom?

awinter-py 7y ago

As always, the inuit word for this is best I would use a product called 'Piblokto' almost no matter what it did

jdxcode 7y ago

That article links to another called "Piblokto"—a cultural-specific hysterical reaction. I'm suspicious it's a real thing and the article mentions there is heavy skepticism around it, but it's a strange article to read nonetheless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto

chewz 7y ago

Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coronavirus-and-sitting-quietly-in-a-room-alone/ https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coro...

tombert 7y ago

I've been having to deal with this lately; I've never really been someone who likes working from home. Typically when I've told coworkers that I'm "working from home", I'm actually "working from McDonalds" or something, and I just don't feel like taking an hour-long subway ride for whatever reason. Now that everything in NYC is closed or on restricted hours or whatever, I have been getting a little stir-crazy, especially since my already-too-low amount of exercise that I got from my commute to work has now been reduced to "me walking downstairs to my basement", which has made it very difficult for me to sleep. To combat this, I ordered an exercise machine last night, to at least allow me to get an approximation of what I'd be doing at the gym, and hopefully ameliorate the sleep issues, but I have no idea how I'm going to deal with 3+ more weeks of this quarantine.

derefr 7y ago

I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life, and spent at least some time in seclusion in each one. And I have experienced the “cabin fever” feeling before... but not everywhere I’ve lived. In some environments, it happened easily and immediately; in others, it never did. I’ve tried to think about my environment at each juncture to figure out if the situations where I did experience “cabin fever” had anything in common. Every time I experienced the symptoms described in the article (restlessness, lightheadedness, insomnia, irritability, etc.) I was living in a modern, rather-well-sealed apartment building; or was on a long road-trip in a modern, rather-well-sealed car; or was on a long plane flight; or was staying in a modern hotel room in a high-rise; or I was camping in a tent or camper-trailer. Meanwhile, I’ve never experienced these symptoms while living in an old, drafty brick building (repurposed office building); or while living in a Victorian-era farmhouse; or while staying in a low-rent motel; or while camping under the stars. My conclusion is that “cabin fever” is a feeling you get when your living space is not well-ventilated. Specifically, when there’s no way to create a through-draft of air, so even opening windows won’t force out the air deeper in the home—leading to that air becoming stale, creating a built-up “cloud” of CO2, other gaseous bodily wastes, and exhaled aerosolized water droplets (you know, those things that viruses travel on.) It happens faster when more people are cooped up together in a small space, because this cloud of stale air gets denser, faster; and because there’s less time when everyone is gone at once, where the air can “recharge” by slow through-insulation-barrier gas exchange. If the problem is stale air, then just “going outside” is only a temporary fix, because the air will usually be just as stuffy when you return (unless you leave for hours and leave your windows open and fans on.) On the other hand, you can be fine while inside indefinitely, if you open a window and then sit right beside it, where the outside air can reach you. But this will only work if there’s enough wind to push the air into the house a small bit; and it seemingly has no effect—possibly for purely-psychological reasons?—if the air outside is humid, as it is in e.g. Hong Kong. (But going outside in humid places still works for temporary relief. Weird.) And that last realization leads me to the secondary conclusion that the (or my, at least) human physiology is responding mainly to aerosolized-moisture-content in the air (in some way that’s distinct from responding to the evaporated humidity) as a proxy metric for the other, harder-to-sense air-quality measures. So, in theory, you might be able to reduce the qualitative of “cabin fever” just by buying a dehumidifier. But really, I wouldn’t recommend it; there’s pretty good documentation about the subtler, less-self-apparent effects that a high CO2 concentration in a room can have on people, and on how much CO2 does tend to build up in closed or not-well-ventilated rooms—especially people’s bedrooms at night. Relevant links: - Tom Scott’s This is Your Brain on Stale Air — https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome (when this same thing happens in offices) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui (which, at its practical core, seems to be about arranging the contents of living spaces to avoid having objects act as baffles to the through-flow of air)

aphextron 7y ago

People talking about going "stir crazy" is just bewildering to me. Working from home has been a dream come true. I am happier, less stressed, and easily 2x more efficient and productive. The ability to sit quietly in my apartment alone for extended periods of time is literally the only thing in the world I have ever wanted.

watwut 7y ago
I am not alone. My ability to sit quietly and undisturbed went down.
TylerE 7y ago
This is true, but there is a huge difference psychologically between choosing not to go out and not being allowed to go out.
eyelidlessness 7y ago
I also prefer to work from home, I tend to be less stressed and more productive as well. However, I also tend to benefit from some time out of the house in the world. I typically take at least one meal break out. It's a social experience, and a break from my day that helps my brain reset after a long stretch of work. I'm currently self-quarantined so even trips out for essentials are not happening, and it is definitely starting to wear on me. Different people require different levels of social activity for their mental wellbeing. I think now is a good time for everyone to be aware of that. As a (mostly) introvert, we often feel overlooked in this regard. Now is a good time for us to show compassion for our extroverted friends and colleagues who are struggling with social isolation.
Sharlin 7y ago
The gap between the extremes of introversion and extraversion is wide. Most people, of course, sit somewhere in the middle. Though there seems to be another axis at play here—what if you were forced to stay at home but not alone? For many people the office is a more peaceful place to work than home. And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so on.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

Yesterday evening I needed to get out of the house for a while. I've been a remote worker for two years so working from home is nothing new but most days I'd end up outside of the house for errands or just going down the street to say hi to neighbors. Instead I went out and drove around. Even twenty minutes of a change in scenery helped out quite a bit. Back when I lived in a midrise condo in the central business district of a large metro, it would have been much more difficult to achieve this small bit of scenery change without passing through spaces shared by a couple hundred neighbors. Cabin fever is going to be distributed unevenly throughout this event.

jeadfa 6y ago

Getting Your Travel Information , Travel Guides, Discover, Plan, Destination information if you Love Travel . Inspiration from TheTravelersTalk https://thetravelerstalk.com/ https://thetravelerstalk.com/