TLDR: Why do I feel better after Covid than before, and is this common?
After being careful, masking, vaxxing, etc, for almost 3 years, I finally let my guard down a little and almost immediately got Covid. That was about 5 weeks ago. I was given Paxlovid, which worked well, although I had a minor rebound about a week in. I was feeling mostly but not entirely better for maybe 3 weeks. But for the last 10 days or so I have been feeling great, significantly more energetic and peppy than I did before I had Covid. I thought this was odd. I spoke to a friend who had Covid earlier in the pandemic. He is fit, healthy, and under 50, and it nearly killed him, he was in the hospital for weeks. I told him how I was feeling great, and he said he had the same experience. He’s a professional musician, and he said his lung capacity was increased and fans said they could tell a difference in his singing.
While I’m sure many would attribute the improvement to either having the opportunity to rest during recovery, or just a psychological effect, it doesn’t feel that way to me. I did take it somewhat easier during recovery, but to be honest I was living a pretty non-strenuous life beforehand, and an outside observer probably wouldn’t have seen a lot of difference.
I wasn’t given steroids, only an Albuterol inhaler which I used sparingly, and I took a few doses of OTC decongestants, which I have also used in the past and am familiar with.
I Googled “feel better after covid…” and “…than before” was a top autocomplete, so others are apparently also interested in the topic. Unfortunately, none of the results were relevant. So what gives? Anybody else experiencing this? Any theories?
I think you may have used the wrong search term. I used “post-Covid” and “euphoria,” and found some valuable sites. We often think of “euphoria” as being blissed-out and extremely happy, but it also applies to feelings of intense well-being. Why would Covid cause such a powerful sense of well-being? In a word: inflammation.
Once immune cells or cytokines have entered into the central nervous system, they basically cause inflammation. And, inflammation in any part of the brain that can lead to different symptoms depending on the part of the brain that’s affected.
So patients who have acute inflammation … they present a lot of highly, highly variable presentations. So you can see changes in sleep, changes in alertness, changes in mood. Some people might have depressed mood. Some people might have euphoric mood.
Thank you. It makes sense to me that depression would be more prevalent. What would you say accounts for the euphoria noted in the article I read? Maybe it’s actually psychological, as in “It feels so good when the misery stops”?
I thought about that, or that I felt better from resting as I recovered, but it really feels deeper than that. I was not a happy camper throughout the pandemic, and I admit that it’s almost a weird relief to have finally caught it, so maybe there is something to your theory.