![]() Not just for your mental health, but also for your physical health," Wood said. "Chronic loneliness is on par with smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in terms of its health repercussions. And when you start getting exhausted, your world gets more chaotic, more obtrusive, and more miserable."įor some, the experience leads to nothing more than irritability, but for others who struggle with the effects of social isolation, it can trigger feelings of loneliness and depression, and that's when cabin fever can become something much more serious.Īdrienne Wood, an assistant professor of psychology at UVA who studies the impact of emotions on our behavior, said that social isolation, and in particular the experience of being lonely, is an extremely unhealthy state. When your bandwidth is cut, you start getting exhausted. When you're deprived of that person in the passenger seat, your bandwidth is cut. Because if I'm not looking for the address, I can devote all of my attention to driving. "When you have someone in the passenger seat," he said, "they can look for the address and navigate while you just operate the car. "And the nature of that 'crazy' is really that our bodies and our brains are so thoroughly designed to work with other people that they don't work very well on their own."Ĭoan likened it to driving around an unfamiliar city while looking for an address. Remove that access to others that we expect on a daily basis, and "we start to go crazy," Coan said. But the reason that we're so adaptable is that we've picked up our ecological niche, our habitat, and taken it with us. We can live anyplace, and we live on almost any kind of food. "We're designed as a species to be around other people," he said. But while the disease may not be real, the symptoms certainly are, and treating those symptoms early can make all the difference.Īccording to James Coan, an associate professor of clinical psychology and director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Virginia, our natural habitat is not a cabin, a living room or a home office it's other people. It's a folk term for that combination of anxiety and exhaustion you experience when you begin to feel trapped in your own home. Of course, cabin fever isn't a genuine psychological disorder. ![]()
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