I am very uncomfortable in stores or other enclosures with people. Perfectly fine at home or in empty buildings. I’m OK in a masked crowd of people walking around a botanical garden at our own pace, but totally not OK in an unmasked crowd of people walking around in an outdoor farmer’s market at the same meandering pace?
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who gets all twitchy and wants to hurry up and get out of COVID risky situations, but does it have a name?
Sounds like coronaphobia, which I did not make up.
I see that you didn’t make it up. So, considering this part “the factors identified are, an unforeseen reality, unending uncertainties, need of acquiring new practices and avoidance behavior, loss of faith in health infrastructure, contraction of COVID-19 by head of states, cautionary statements from international bodies, and infodemia.” I can’t see how anyone has avoided at least some small degree of coronaphobia.
Its sad that seeing someone with a portable hand washing station outside their front door made me jealous (yes, we have one too now). In the before times, I would have worried that they didn’t have running water inside due to plumbing issues.
I’m really not liking the changes in me very much.
To name it IMHO implies some kind of pathology. Why do that? To me this all sounds like being sensible. You should be uncomfortable in a crowd of unmasked people. If only more people would experience that discomfort! I mean, this thing is VERY contagious.
Reality has changed and you are making sensible, life-preserving changes in response to the new reality. People with phobias are reacting irrationally to things that are NOT in fact real dangers. You are being rational. It’s the reality that is totally messed up – and yeah, it’s creepy to see what it’s doing to us. I cringe when I see people casually hugging on TV. Don’t give yourself a hard time. Times are hard enough.
I’m looking at definitions of “phobia” and almost all of them include the specification that the fear is irrational. Since covid-19 is so infectious and is potentially deadly, and since it has killed so many people and continues to do so, I think a person’s fear of it would have to be pretty extreme to be irrational. Yeah, calling this a phobia is inappropriately pathologizing it. What would be irrational fear of covid-19? I dunno, maybe you’re reading a history book and start worrying that some figure you like is going to die of it in an upcoming chapter set 100 years ago? You’d have to do something bizarre like that to qualify, I think.
If there’s any pathology to be found here, it’s in people who think COVID is a hoax, who attend large indoor gatherings with no masks. For someone to react with caution to a dangerous reality (as you are doing) is a sign of mental health. To deny a dangerous reality because you’re tired of it, don’t like it, want it to go away, etc., and to buy into the CT that COVID is a lie and a hoax when it has KILLED a million people world wide and a quarter-million in the USA-- now that’s crazy.
I see @Napier’s point but I don’t think it has to go that far.
In general a mental health issue is one that harms the sufferer’s quality of life as they perceive it. And is unjustified by the facts commonly agreed to.
There is rational caution in the face of uncertainty and then there is irrational excessive caution. We all know of people that two years ago we called “germophobes” who would be obsessively washing hands and disinfecting while the rest of society was going along with pre-COVID normal. Those folks had a phobia.
The presence of COVID today does not alter the fact that there is some level of precaution that is disproportionate to the true threat and that is detrimental to the quality of life of the person taking those disproportionate precautions.
All the debate is about where the line is between proportionate and disproportionate precautions.
And, ref @ThelmaLou’s excellent point just above, with so many people throwing reasonable caution to the wind, the rest of us need to clamp down all the harder on our own precautions and hence our own lives to compensate. Which in turn mean your QOL is taking a bigger beating than it “should have to” if everybody else was playing it sensible.
IMHO, and worth every penny you paid for it, anyone quarantining or disinfecting their groceries or their mail is engaging in irrationally overcautious behavior. Someone who sets up a handwashing station outside their home is likewise irrationally overcautious. If that provides them psychological comfort, it’s harmless enough. But if that is fomenting psychological discomfort then we have to conclude they’re hurting themselves with their decisions. Decisions which are not based on a rational balancing of all their concerns.
I live in FL adjacent to the water. Alligators exist nearby. And eat pets regularly and very very occasionally children. The threat is 100% real. But I do not refuse to go outdoors unless equipped with a suit of gator-proof armor and a big gun. The balance of benefits and the actual level of risk is such that IMO that response would be overkill and harm my quality of life too much for the incremental safety gained. As long as I’m watching where I’m walking so I don’t surprise one, I’m OK with me being (very occasionally) around them and them being (very occasionally) around me.
COVID is extra scary because it’s invisible. But that does NOT mean that you must be totally isolated in your home with 100% delivery and wearing a space suit most of every day to be “safe”. There is no “safe” or “unsafe”. There is merely “more safe” and “less safe”. You want enough, but not too much.
If memory serves, in the early days of the pandemic, epidemiologists were concerned that surface contact could be a significant factor in spreading the coronavirus, and such precautions were, if not universally recommended, at least were classified as “not a bad idea.”
But, further research has told us that such transmission appears to be pretty rare, meaning that those sorts of precautions are likely unnecessary – but some people may not have gotten that message, or they don’t feel comfortable in stopping.
All true. In the early days delayed surface transmission was considered highly plausible. Now not so much.
The punch line is your “… , or they don’t feel comfortable in stopping.” If that comfort/discomfort leaves them in a happy place they don’t have a problem. But if it leaves them in an unhappy place maybe they do have a problem they should address.
Humans aren’t fully rational; we do a lot based on emotions. But there is a defective line of thinking that emotions are a) unexaminable, and b) unassailable. In other words, some folks believe “I feel whatever I feel and whatever that is, it’s totally genuine and must be accepted and obeyed exactly as is.” IMO that’s a faulty (or at least a very limited / limiting) understanding of human emotions and human cognition.
The OP is wondering if her evolving attitudes are harming her mental well-being. I’d respond that
Here’s some interesting food for thoughtful risk assessment.
I work for a big airline. We have multiple tens of thousands of pilots and flight attendants. It’s a LOT of people. They travel in public every day all over the US and a bunch outside the US. When on-duty everybody, but especially FAs, are stuck in close proximity to crowds of other humans indoors in airports and on airplanes. When off-duty on the road they’re eating in restaurants and staying in hotel rooms that somebody else slept in last night. Of necessity they touch vast amounts of public and shared stuff from doorknobs to flush handles to keyboards to … And they’re exposed to a never-ending randomly selected cross-section of (mostly US-based) humanity. Actually they’re not exposed to a random selection of humanity. The passengers flying are heavily selected from the less sequestered more risk tolerant part of the populace.
And of course they also have whatever exposures they do in their daily home lives, going shopping, dealing with kids in school, and everything else that the rest of America deals with.
With all that incremental scary exposure above and beyond that of e.g. the OP, how much more disease are we suffering versus the country as a whole? We’re suffering less.
Our weekly statistics show that we, the crew force, have (a little) less COVID than the US at large. This has been true every week since the beginning. Our numbers ebb and flow about in sync with the US totals, but always lower. Despite much more aggressive monitoring and testing than is the US average.
Why are our numbers better? IMO it’s simple: we all wear masks seriously and we wash hands regularly, at least while on the road. And many, but by no means all of the flying public does the same at least while they’re flying, if not the moment they get outside the airport. We certainly have our share of anti-maskers while off duty.
If 10s of thousands of people can spend about 2 weeks of every month hanging out on airplanes and in hotels and restaurants and still not get sick, maybe hiding indoors 30 days a month is an excessive precaution and the folks doing that are not being psychologically healthy to themselves.
As to me personally: I never liked loud crowds. I aggressively avoid them now. I eat only in half-empty restaurants, preferably at an outdoor table. But I’ll take empty indoors over crowded outdoors. I wear my N95 mask tightly so my glasses don’t fog. I keep my distance from random people. I wash my hands when I get home and at any store, etc., that has a restroom. Otherwise I live my life pre-COVID normal.
That’s what the data is telling me to do. So I conform my emotions to the data.
That was not what I did in April when the situation was less well understood. I took far more precautions. But as the true shape of the reality has emerged from the murk of uncertainty I have altered my behavior to maximize my perception of the risk / reward.
I’m not “over this”. I fully expect I’ll be wearing a mask in public for the rest of my life, all 30+ years of it. COVID is not going away. The risk that excessive caution poses to my / your / our mental health is not going away. Just as the physical risk of excessive incaution to my / your / our physical health is not going away.
What should you (any you) do? Follow my 4 numbered points above as you evaluate them. There is a balance to be struck for each of us.
In an opinion piece in today’s Washington Post, Michele L. Norris terms it “covertigo.”
There is some very good information here, and its good to know that I’m not alone.
Thank you LSLGuy for the perspective from your side.
The portable hand washing station was acquired back in May and I probably wouldn’t do it now for COVID.
We don’t have a hose bib in the front yard, so when I get muddy hands while playing in the garden I either have to walk around to the back yard or walk through the house with grubby hands. If/when the plastic breaks from the sun and heat, I will be replacing it because I found how much I liked being able to rinse the dirt off right away.
Small silver lining in a BIG gray cloud.
Good luck whatever you decide. COVID’s risks are not all physical.
Somewhat related, some people with OCD have gotten worse symptoms. Others feel better because they feel that now other people are feeling what they’ve been feeling all along, and now they’re better equipped to deal with it.
Pandemic Raises Special Concerns For Those With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
As to the OP, I’m not a big fan of labels because I think it just allows more judgment, so I think people should do whatever works for them. Labeling is optional.
Also of note, some essential retail workers have a higher rate of anxiety and/or depression if they are not allowed the social distancing they felt comfortable with.
While there may be mental health risks associated with taking too many precautions (debatable), there are also mental health risks for people who are taking too many perceived risks.
Excellent point. I suspect a lot more working-age folks are being forced by their life circumstances to take uncomfortable risks than are overreacting by taking nil risk.
In either case it’s about the feeling of being out of control or trapped by circumstances. That’s one of the most corrosive stressors on humans.
My overall point was not to sound glib about the risks, nor to suggest that anybody, much less everybody, should act fully masklessly crowdedly pre-COVID: that’s a recipe for a US death toll in the millions.
We do have some folks here that seem to say that there’s no such thing as excessive precautions while complaining at the same time about the psychological toll their attitude is taking on them. I hoped to point out the gap in their thinking.
Just want to possibly clarify something The term phobia doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing you fear is irrational. For instance, a fear of heights is rational. It becomes a phobia when the fear is excessive and causes harm to one’s ability to cope or function. It’s fear that is out of proportion to the threat.
Oh, and having actual need to wash hands so often is annoying to me as someone with OCD, but it was worse when I had to do it to avoid gluten contamination.
And, yes, you do need to wash your hands, avoid touching your face (unless your hands are clean), and maintain social distancing, along with mask wearing. When they talk about surface contamination risk, they are taking for granted that the other aspects are still being practiced. It’s not that you can’t get it from a surface that was recently contaminated by droplets, it’s that, if you wash your hands before touching your face, it’s unlikely to be a problem. Also, mail is generally safe due to exposure to the outside environment.