<story><title>Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/forced-social-isolation-causes-neural-craving-similar-to-hunger/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esotericn</author><text>Er, yeah, I&amp;#x27;ve been saying this for months.&lt;p&gt;We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there&amp;#x27;s a constant urge that is not being satisfied.&lt;p&gt;Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to &amp;#x27;check yourself&amp;#x27; when you realise literally everything you&amp;#x27;d normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way.&lt;p&gt;To me, lockdowns feel like some sort of irrational loss aversion strategy. If you gave me the option in, say, 2017, of halving my mortality rate for a year, but the cost was that I had to endure relatively strong anxiety for that year, there&amp;#x27;s no way I&amp;#x27;d take that bet regardless of my age.&lt;p&gt;Mucking around with your mental health is not wise. Add on top of that all of the economic effects, the political effects of dividing populations, domestic abuse, &amp;quot;non-essential&amp;quot; healthcare like dentistry, and so on and so forth, and honestly I reckon it&amp;#x27;s been a net negative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fyfy18</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve found this period has had an overall positive effect on my mental health. At first I was rather depressed, religiously following the news and subreddits about what was happening, but after a couple of weeks of that I realised I couldn&amp;#x27;t continue living like that forever. I started introspecting and tried to figure out what was causing the stress and low level anxiety I&amp;#x27;ve been experiencing for a few years.&lt;p&gt;During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don&amp;#x27;t need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed.&lt;p&gt;Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me.&lt;p&gt;(And I&amp;#x27;ve somehow lost 6kg - even though I&amp;#x27;ve been cooking whatever tasty deserts I&amp;#x27;ve found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)</text></comment>
<story><title>Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/forced-social-isolation-causes-neural-craving-similar-to-hunger/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>esotericn</author><text>Er, yeah, I&amp;#x27;ve been saying this for months.&lt;p&gt;We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there&amp;#x27;s a constant urge that is not being satisfied.&lt;p&gt;Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to &amp;#x27;check yourself&amp;#x27; when you realise literally everything you&amp;#x27;d normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way.&lt;p&gt;To me, lockdowns feel like some sort of irrational loss aversion strategy. If you gave me the option in, say, 2017, of halving my mortality rate for a year, but the cost was that I had to endure relatively strong anxiety for that year, there&amp;#x27;s no way I&amp;#x27;d take that bet regardless of my age.&lt;p&gt;Mucking around with your mental health is not wise. Add on top of that all of the economic effects, the political effects of dividing populations, domestic abuse, &amp;quot;non-essential&amp;quot; healthcare like dentistry, and so on and so forth, and honestly I reckon it&amp;#x27;s been a net negative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WhompingWindows</author><text>The problem with your analysis is that you&amp;#x27;re not considering just how much &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot; we were averting via lockdowns. Do you think those negative effects of our partial lockdowns outweigh 5X more COVID casualties, including many from preventable deaths that have nothing to do with COVID? We need a functional healthcare system, we could not allow it to become overwhelmed and collapse. There&amp;#x27;s also the ethical issue of allowing a disease to run rampant and ravage our elderly population - could we recover morally and ethically if we allowed 100&amp;#x27;s of thousands of older folks to die long, painful deaths so our economy was a tad stronger?</text></comment>