Emotional ups and downs are common and recurring during quarantine. Many people experience mood swings throughout the day, from motivation to discouragement, from calm to stomach-stirring anxiety and disruption of their thoughts.
We should not feed this in our minds, wondering if we are suffering from bipolar disorder, this psychological condition goes far beyond these emotional changes.
- What happens.
- In general terms.
- Is that we are exposed to an unknown situation.
- To an unforeseen scenario in which the brain.
- Body and emotions react.
- All within the normal range.
However, this context is not new to some people. Astronauts know what containment is and also prisoners who spend months and years in a prison.
In addition, there are children with immune diseases who have to spend a lot of time at home, and we cannot forget researchers who spend months in closed seasons in Antarctica.
Lawrence Palinkas of the University of Southern California is one of the experts studying this topic, his studies on psychosocial adaptation in extreme environments provide relevant data to understand what we are currently living.
Confinement has a high psychological impact, especially after 15 to 20 days. It is then that we suffer the most emotional ups and downs. We will see more about this below.
We can get up discouraged. As soon as we open our eyes to a new day, we experience a temporary disorientation, for a few seconds we do not know what day we are, but we quickly remember our reality: the pandemic, the confinement, the physical and social isolation and the uncertainty about the moment when our life returns to normal.
During breakfast we usually have the first exchange of messages with family and friends, we are thinking about what we are going to do today and that gives us a little energy and motivation.
Over time, and not knowing why, a mist appears that darkens and blurs everything, the mood fades and sadness distorts everything. We thought, “Why is this happening to me?
Let’s look at some aspects to understand the reason for these emotional ups and downs during quarantine.
It doesn’t matter if we have stimulating routines. Nor that we are optimistic people who always have words of encouragement for themselves and for others.
We will all experience moments of sadness in these circumstances, experiencing this feeling at some point in the day is also normal.
It is illusory to try to be well 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so while this may seem a little daunting, we will have to live for a while with our negative emotions, they will be like inconvenient colleagues who will visit us. us from time to time and whom we will have to accept and understand.
When we feel sad or frustrated, we should not avoid these feelings or obsess over the desire to push them back to try to be happy, the emotional world does not work that way, emotional ups and downs are also an outlet for the brain. This governing body needs the daily routine first.
When the perception of such radical change occurs, an alert system that results in stress and fear, emotions regulated by our cerebral amygdala, so when these moods occur it is impossible to replace them with others.
We have to accept them and, above all, make sense of them through thoughts such as: “Feeling it is normal, because I am living in a new and unexpected situation. All I have to do is keep this negative emotion from prevailing. Should I accept it, understand it and let it go?.
Everyone experiences emotional ups and downs during childbirth: children, adults and the elderly. However, there are profiles that are much more vulnerable to this.
Anyone who has suffered from depression or has some other type of psychological disorder or mental health problem will have more difficulty regulating these variations.
It is therefore important to have psychological, medical and social support, that there be a support network both close and far away to provide assistance to these people. The descents are quite normal and we can control them.
An ideal way involves
This is not the time to be productive, it is time to take care of ourselves in survival mode, to achieve this we need to understand a wide range of emotions that can visit us throughout the day, this will allow us to live this experience successfully.