I recently had a bad cold (possible bout of COVID but it didn’t feel the same) and all I wanted to do was slump in bed and feel crappy. No interest in doing anything. Is it something to do with endorphins? Or is this just a me-thing?
I believe your body needs rest to repair itself. Quite normal in my experience.
Your body should be enthusiastically trying to eliminate whatever is making you ill. Your body is already multi-tasking at full capacity with that additional effort and can’t take on new projects well, so that doesn’t leave you with the resources to be enthusiastic in other ways.
What is it you want to be doing enthusiastically? Vacuum, clean, laundry? It can wait. Go out running, playing sportsball? Why? Your body wants to rest and recover. Go shopping, to the theater? Stay home and avoid spreading your germs…
Signed - A Big Lump Staying In, Myself.
On the other hand, W H Auden once remarked that sometimes feeling mildly ill can occasionally stimulate creativity?
I think that was in ’ Letters from Iceland’ which he co-wrote with Louis McNeice.
But the key word there is probably mildly?
In grad school, I had a bug and since I couldn’t do any “creative” work I went thru a problem, trying out a bunch of variations that didn’t require any real brain work. Came up with a somewhat “ideal” solution. Led to my first published paper. (And a descendant of the result is my most famous result.)
So I’ve always treated “off” days as a good time to just do scut mental work. Slow but steady kind of things.
OTOH, heavy duty physical work is out of the question.
Preface:
Mental illness is a disease, and I am not trying to obscure or put aside that fact. In addition the brain is a physical organ and can be affected by physical states in the body. However, for this discussion I need to distinguish between depression—a mental illness—and other things which are not primarily a mental illness such as the flu or heart disease. So for purposes of this discussion, I’ll use “sick” and “sickness” to describe conditions that are not mental illness, but are still an illness.
It has long been observed that many aspects of depression resemble the the brain’s reaction to a sick body. For example lethargy, disrupted eating and sleeping, anhedonia, melancholy, and irritability can all be both symptoms of depression and reactions to a sickness such as influenza or covid.
This has inspired some study into the possibility that depression is related to the brain behaving as though the body is sick when it is not. It’s my understanding that though promising, this hasn’t produced too exciting of results. This stuff is incredibly complex, so studying it is extremely difficult.
It is easy to generate a hypothesis about why sickness could result in a depression like state. The body wants to reduce energy expended on things other than fighting off the illness. The body’s response to being sick is not always optimal, or might be good to start, and bad later. A low appetite may be good to save energy on digestion, avoid possible food poisoning, and heal the GI track, but if it goes on too long starvation can set in. Similar that a fever can decrease a pathogen’s ability to function, but kill you if it gets too high.
All of that is to just answer the OP with a tautology. Sometimes when you are sick, your brain creates a mental state that in other circumstances might be called depression. So, you feel bad because you feel bad.
Can I jump in with a related question ?
Why do I crave, really, really crave a hot shower when I’m sick ? Even when I’m not feeling particularly cold, I can stand in the shower doing nothing for 20 minutes, just letting the hot water flow all over me.
Why am I (mostly) perfectly healthy yet I have near zero enthusiasm for anything?
I can’t find what they are called, but I recall reading that when people are sick their body produces substances that produce the classic “I feel sick” sensation; so it’s an evolved response.
As for why; fighting off disease takes energy, often a lot of it (fever is energetically costly), so it making you feel like resting makes sense.
Thank you good people for your answers. They make a lot of sense.
First of all, immune response is hugely energetically costly:
Immune response is energetically a highly demanding process as activated immune/repair system required huge amounts of energy (25% - 30% of the basal metabolic rate). For example, as previously reported [46] [47] [48] [49] , the energy consumption in case of extensive burn wounds (up to 20,000 kJ/day or 4777 kcal/day) is approximately the same as during military jungle training (also 20,000 kJ/day) and more than during military arctic training (~18,000 kJ/day or 4302 Kcal/day).
Although burns represent an extreme case, it’s really no wonder that this will leave you drained. But there are also knock-on effects in that what’s doing its best to fight off a viral invader isn’t available to do it’s usual job elsewhere:
White blood cells are diverted from their usual job of keeping your muscle fibres and joints repaired and healthy, to fighting off the virus, meaning that you quickly lose strength in your muscles, leaving you less able to stand and move.
So your lack of enthusiasm is (to some extent, at least) just due to having a good portion of your resources bundled up. Although one should probably not underestimate psychological effects of just feeling crappy and perhaps a bit sorry for yourself.
We have a poster here named @Ann_Hedonia - you could ask her about anhedonia.
It is not uncommon in people suffering from major depression.