As a person with a history of depression and social anxiety I really do feel calmer since the crisis started, as if my state of mind was made for this kind of life.
Less people on the streets, it's quieter, no one breathing down my neck in the supermarket, home office, no expectations on how to pick my clothes, how to behave, no trying to hide the weird stuff I eat (carnivore, high meat, raw, cooked and aged whatever gets on the plate), no forced socializing.
I agree. It's not that my state of life is that great: in many ways it's a side-effect of a nasty upbringing that did me harm, and I'd be better off without it and am actively pursuing repair of some of these mental issues.
But given that I've spent my life with a set of challenges, this crisis has given me space to sort out what parts of it are ME and what parts are issues needing to be fixed. That's pretty valuable.
Even better, I don't think we'll ever go back to boisterous 'forced socializing or you are a bad person!' attitudes. There are now conditions attached, and that's reasonable (and opens the door to conditions like 'I don't have coronavirus, but when I socialize like you guys do I panic')
My hope for cultural change post pandemic is that the shift towards remote work will persist after it's over. I love being an engineer but I can't stand working in an open office or commuting 2 1/2 hours a day.
For a while I wondered if I'm the outlier since I feel substantially better now than I did before going into isolation. Then some of my close friends who were on anti-depression or anti-anxiety medication told me the same. They actually stopped taking the medication for months with no signs that the symptoms are coming back.
It's anecdotal and I have no idea how widespread this is or why it happens, at least to people for whom self-isolation didn't work in the past. I can only imagine that the isolation may relieve some of the social pressure without leaving you with the feeling that you have to go to extraordinary measures to achieve it, it doesn't feel so self inflicted like self-isolation does under regular conditions. Now it's an external cause and applies to everybody.
My worktime shifted more towards evening / night which is good for me because I’m a night owl and seemingly can only think very deeply at night. Having to work 9-5 with all its distractions can make me depressed as I start to make more mistakes or don’t really „get into“ things and produce shallow work. After being unsatisfied with my work for some time I tend to lose trust in my abilities. Did you observe something similar for you? Some colleagues also shifted towards evenings (many more evening chats right now).
I don't know how widely this applies, but sometimes undirected anxiety is harder to deal with than being worried about a specific thing. And if you're going to be anxious no matter what, then external circumstances might not affect the intensity of the anxiety as much as would seem logical. So it's possible that some people have benefited from having a very concrete threat to focus on, and relatively clear steps to minimise the risk.
(I'm not trying to push this too far: I assume it mostly applies to people who have enough control over their lives to take the necessary precautions, and who are fortunate enough that the threat to them and their loved ones remains a possibility rather than a tragic reality. And I know that the exact opposite can happen: sometimes external threats just multiply the pre-existing anxiety and make it even harder to cope.)
I think it’s even deeper than that. Human society has changed a lot really quickly, it would be unreasonable to expect a seamless transition. Similar to how wild animals in captivity suffer from tremendous stress due to their environment, the pressures from living in our society are massive.
Compared to say living in 1000 AD. Family units are smaller, life is more fast paced and it’s way more complicated with all the credit cards, the often difficult legal system, and ever present “connection” to one another through messaging and social media. During this pandemic I’ve deleted all my social media accounts and even though I’m less “connected” now, I feel much better than before and the world even feels more real to me.
Not a response to parent comment, but does anyone know of studies of people that describe their self-assessment? My impression is that most people think they're weirder than they are, i.e. most people fall within a band of what everyone would call normal, but they often self-assess as weird in one way or the other.
i.e. for parameter X which typically ranges between x and x' and for which people estimate themselves at x1, they typically severely underestimate the size of the range (x,x') and conclude that x1 is outside it, when it's really inside it.
It really depends! Some forms of mental illness come with an inability to understand the illness as one of the diagnostic criteria -- this is part of why so many people are internally resistant to diagnosis.
I was diagnosed as bipolar 2 a few years ago, and I just assumed the mood swings I dealt with were normal. Doesn't everyone occasionally get too enthusiastic during a meeting? Or call in sick because they can't get out of bed? Turns out no, everyone has mood swings from time to time but mine were more predictable and severe enough they were preventing me from doing the things I wanted to. Hence the diagnosis and medication.
This is why mental health professionals are important. It can go both ways -- sometimes folks are just neurotic and overanalyzing themselves, and sometimes they're oblivious to the mental illness they do have. Medication and life changes help, but the first step is to see a professional who can help you sort through whether your mood issues rise to the level of clinical or not.
I think it goes both ways though. We have no real frame of reference for “normal” — most of us only know maybe 20 people well enough to see the inner workings of their mind, and we’re probably related to at least half of them so anything congenital would feel “normal”. It seems pretty common that children of people with undiagnosed mental illness end up feeling weird or crazy until they break free and start to discover the world on their own (see also /r/raisedbynarcissists).
Trauma is a huge factor in mental illness as well, so much so that the definition of a “healthy individual” can only be really anchored to a specific point in time. Some things that rise to the level of clinical (anxiety, depression, BPD, PTSD, DPD) are largely seen as the result of trauma and/or some hereditary predisposition.
Plus people tend to be drawn to like-minded people. I know that personally the people that I am closest with are those who I've bonded with over dealing with similar types of anxiety and/or depression. It's just... harder to connect that way with a dissimilar mind.
Haha, but is it the case that maybe those people (or perhaps even everyone) tell everyone else at some point that they're weird? i.e. one problem with this is that if someone calls lots of people weird, their calling you weird isn't significant. And I'm certain everyone has been called 'weird' at some point in their lives, so merely having been called weird is insufficient to actually be weird.
There's a bias induced by how people act in public. You don't normally see people's quirks, you only see the most normal side of their behaviour. It doesn't occur to you that they also have weird ticks - possibly weirder than yours.
Do you live in a city? It sounds like you might enjoy living in a small town much more. Many small towns are very similar to what you just described all the time.
As a self-proclaimed weirdo and staunch individualist, small towns can be very difficult to just mind your own business in. Literally everything you do or don’t do tends to get noticed and talked about amongst the residents.
There’s something to be said for the anonymity of large urban center.
Absolutely. I grew up in a tiny town, and loved the ability to get way out in the middle of nowhere with no humans around. And hated practically everything else about it.
Small towns make your business everyone's. There's a desperation for gossip that's just gross to me, and worse, if you don't play along, you're an outcast. Which worked fine for me, except it makes you a target for local shitheads.
I get why others might like it if they're social extroverts who fit whatever local majority-normal is, if not, a city is a far better place to live.
Another data point. If you have difficulty with people talking about you, definitely don't move to a small town in a foreign country where you are a visible minority. I've yet to experience real negative discrimination amongst my neighbours, but boy are they interested in me! I'm kind of strange in that I like being the center of attention, but don't like spending energy to achieve that position, so it's kind of ideal for me. However, I've know people for whom it is haunting (Yes, they really do notice everything you do). If you need to buy things that are... um... delicate... best to go to another town -- and even then you aren't always safe ;-) When I first moved here, I was one of 2 visible minorities and I also taught at the high school, so everybody knew who I was. It's like being a celebrity without the money.
I agree with this. I have though about it extensively, as an introvert who hates large cities, and I think (at least for me) a city between 500k and 1 million inhabitants spread out over a sizeable area is ideal. It has some of the benefits of a large city and some of the benefits of a small town, and I think it strikes a good balance between being anonymous in a crowd while having enough space for myself to live comfortably. Such a city would also have the population to find enough people with similar interests/hobbies to have clubs and meetups.
Have to choose the town wisely... in extremely small towns you might find people go out of their way to interact with you more and are generally more interested in your private business. Part of my family lives in small towns and I think they have less privacy than I do.
Sadly, I experienced the opposite. I also have a history of depression and panic disorders (not social, however), and I was getting better before the quarantine. When the quarantine struck about a week after I started feeling hopelessness as if I have no control in life anymore. Like things, bad things will happen to me, and I will not be able to cope with it.
Then memories over past mistakes took over, and I started obsessing on every little bad thing I've ever done. As time went by these thoughts filled my head for the most of the day, and because of quarantine restrictions, I wasn't able to do much to shake them off. Anybody else experienced something similar?
I found I just break down without human contact. Thoughts. No thoughts. Staring, not moving. It's not good. I'm thankful that the lockdown restrictions are easing up a bit where I live and I can meet with friends again. Otherwise I'd have been arguing to take it slower with opening up, if it wasn't taking such a toll on me.
My therapist told me that a lot of her anxious clients are actually doing really well with all this, because now everybody is anxious and it feels less alienating.
Same for me. I was already out of work and could barely eat at restaurants due to a few years of emerging health problems, so the idea that we're supposed to stick around the house and get groceries delivered was easy to accept. It actually felt like a nice change from my habits. I like some of the political changes it is catalyzing, such as how some people are gaining a better understanding of why the government should provide a functional social safety net, and mandate things like paid sick leave.
However, it's been hard to witness and deal with the effects I've seen on other people. My roommate has been extremely stressed out. It makes me feel sad to see all the restaurants and bars that are closed down, and normally busy districts deserted at 6:00 on a Friday. I feel bad for people who have no choice but to continue working in high-risk jobs, and those whose businesses will be interrupted for quite some time, such as concert organizers. And, of course, for the hundreds of thousands of people who have died and their families.
Did you seek out carnivore/animal-centric nutrition in response to gut issues, mental health or something else?
I keep stumbling upon anecdotes of significantly improved states of mind since going keto/carnivore. Have you found any discussions putting forward a proposed mechanism behind these reportings?
The point of the article is that we have five appetites, not one: protein, carbs, fats, sodium and calcium.
Then:
"The thing about ultra-processed foods is that they tend to be low in protein – which is expensive – and high in cheap carbs and fats. It is these foods that have largely been responsible for the dilution of protein in Western diets since the 1960s. And the more ultra-processed foods people eat, the more calories they need to consume to get the target intake of protein, with disastrous consequences."
So, get your protein (nuts,meat, fish, dairy, etc, etc) in and the rest should follow naturally. Once you fix up your protein intake, you may find that you fix other diet related snags as well. This is another telling quote:
"Intriguingly, in our experiments with people, we found that most of the extra calories eaten by those on a low-protein diet came from savoury snacks, especially those that tasted of umami, the signature flavour of protein. Protein-deprived subjects were craving things that tasted like protein, even though they were made of carbs. Our food environment is awash with such umami-flavoured carbs and fats, which we call “protein decoys”: crisps, instant noodles, crackers and so on."
I don't think I have overdone it on the quotes but the message is quite clear. You may need this to join the dots:
"Ultra-processed foods make us fat, but not because we have strong appetites for the fats and carbs they contain, as is often thought to be the case. Rather, it is because our appetite for protein is stronger than our ability to limit fat and carb intake."
Not OP but I'm consuming a mostly carnivore diet, I struggled with gout for years and since I went keto and then pretty much carnivore I haven't had a flare up. I eat meat, fish, eggs, cheese and cauliflower (my stool seem fine with or without fiber but a little bit makes me feel more "flushed out", lol).
The biggest culprit for gout is definitely carbs (sugar) and dehydration in my opinion and the carnivore diet and/or keto pretty much takes care of that, it eliminates the carbs and meat in my experience makes you drink a lot of water.
It is also a lot easier to maintain your weight (also very important in the gout equation) on carnivore, I find it really hard to over eat, you hit satiety fast and I find that there is a lot less noise in the hunger signals. My stomach now days only makes itself reminded when I truly need energy, no "fake" cravings.
My mental state also seem clearer, I find fat to be a smoother source of energy then carbs. Fat is a slow stable burn while carbs is a violent explosive burn, which is cool every now and then but you pay a price for it.
I've come to believe that the confounding factors in whether dietary ideas "work" are micronutrients and the gut biome, and these are still really unexplored areas of medicine.
If you have a deficiency of, say, magnesium - that won't be fixed by eating more meat or less sugar, but it might give you strange cravings or bad moods. And if you have a gut that is working inefficiently, it might not adapt well to a high fat diet. And this translates into "bad and good diets", because eating differently reduces the symptoms.
But if your body is generally taking in things efficiently, its macronutrient requirements are going to be mostly proportional to your energy use, and then you can have relatively more protein or relatively more carbs without many ill effects.
So IMHO a decent starting place for dietary change is not really diet itself, but to take a multivitamin, start intermittent fasting, and to get some daily light, full-body exercise. These things start up the flywheel of reducing ongoing deficiencies and increasing selective pressure on the gut.
No I have no citation for this, you are right, generally that is what you read, and I went down that route as well for several years but the gout just go worse and worse. Switching to high fat, high protein but pretty much zero carbs seems to be the best for me. I believe, again my own conclusion, that it is a insulin issue, I nuked my insulin system for years with carbs (sugar).
I'm not a medical person, I got my first gout attack around 24 (33 now) and since then I had at least one major flare up (lasting weeks) every year + a few minor once per year. 2018 I had the mother of all flare ups in my knee, I thought I had experience pain but oh my lord that was pain on a whole nother level. That made me take extreme measures dietary wise and I've been gout free since (knock on wood).
The carnivore diet stuff is just straight up garbage fad dieting except it sounds cool or whatever so it appeals to insecure dudes. No real substance to it, and everyone I’ve ever seen promote just spits out the same bullshit claims as every other fad diet testimonial (“no more brain fog”)
Unless you’ve been instructed to by an actual doctor, switching to a meme internet diet promoted by morons like Jordan Peterson is probably not a great idea.
> Prospective data suggest that consumption of sugar sweetened soft drinks and fructose is strongly associated with an increased risk of gout in men. Furthermore, fructose rich fruits and fruit juices may also increase the risk
I never understood why people get so worked up about what others eat. Like how does this affect you in any way?
If it works for people so what? Personally, I would never go that far but it seems like most people aren't getting enough protein and could use a bump.
I wonder if the people who had those "no more brain fog" had an underlying condition in the first place, like vitamin/mineral deficiency, anemia, etc. These problems are rarely checked in the first place.
Most stories I hear about people that try carnivore doesn't do it to get on the next hip thing, these are people that suffered from something for years and out of sheer desperation tried something "wild" and it worked FOR THEM.
I don't understand how it is a garbage diet either? You get all the nutrients you need while eliminating pretty much everything else. That to me sounds like an excellent starting ground to then build upon and figure out what YOUR gut is cool with.
So much of American how society functions is going to be rethought after this - telework, hygiene, respect for healthcare and "essential" workers - but somehow, I don't think "the dignity and health of shy or introverted people" is going to be part of that. Extroverts are finally seeing what the other side looks and feels like, but rather than reconsider how their privilege might come at the expense of our health and happiness, they're clawing at their cages like rabid beasts to get out and "get back to normal."
And if you have to live with one, you know that the first few weeks were bliss, until they started getting antsy and began offloading their nervous energy on you. Can't win.
I am the opposite. My depression and anxiety has gotten worse since I have been stuck working from home. The social interaction I got at work has been significantly reduced.
I also have a history of depression, 20+ years on an antidepressant manages it very well, but I'm an extrovert, so this has me climbing the walls. It's been difficult to deal with for me.
