We thought, however, that we would be entitled to a little respite after two years of often painful pandemic. But no, Vladimir Putin had other ideas.
Posted at 8:23 a.m.
Barely emerged – we believe, we hope – from the pandemic, now Russia invades Ukraine. And as if that weren’t enough, Mr. Putin makes it clear that he has one finger firmly pressed on the nuclear button.
And as if that weren’t (still) enough, the latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned on Monday that the climate will deteriorate in 127 ways in the years to come. , some of which will be “potentially irreversible”, if human-induced global warming is not limited to a few additional tenths of a degree.
This accumulation of drops that give the impression that everything is going wrong at the same time could end up breaking the camel’s back for some.
“The stress system is made to be activated in an acute and punctual way in the face of very specific situations,” said Professor Marie-France Marin, from the psychology department of the University of Quebec in Montreal. It is not made to maintain a frantic pace for months or even years.
And since the start of the pandemic two years ago, the stress system has been called upon more often than not.
Remote work, school at home, confinement, curfew, masks, vaccine passports, deconfinement, partial reopening, return to class, reconfinement, return home, reclosure… The well-known cycle of sanitary measures which we had sometimes the feeling that they changed every week, and all the unpredictability and uncertainty they generated, undermined the sanity of millions of people, on one level or another.
So it is with greatly weakened psychological defenses that some now hear that the worst war since World War II is raging in Europe; that the master of the Kremlin threatens to send us back to the Stone Age; and that the Earth is in very, very bad health anyway.
“There are some who come out a little bit more messed up than others (from the pandemic), so there are some who are more fragile in terms of mental health, said Ms. Marin. Some already have two strikes against them, if you will.
The stress hormones circulating in the body tint our perception of the world and the events around us, “so we have our glasses a bit where we don’t see life in pink,” she adds. Even a relatively neutral situation can be perceived in a fairly negative way under the effect of these hormones.
A kind of vicious circle then sets in: the higher the stress, the more the environment seems stressful and threatening to us, and the more the stress climbs.
A war is obviously stressful in itself, but at least, as long as it is a conventional war, we can believe that it does not really threaten our lives, especially if it takes place far from home. — but only if it is a conventional war.
“With nuclear weapons and everything, there’s a lot of unpredictability there,” Marin said. The novelty is that they will threaten us, we who are far away. And then basically, the pandemic, all it does is that it comes to make us more fragile.
Unpredictability and lack of control are very important stressors; after having received triple doses of it during the pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine is adding to it.
“Some people have been under great stress for two years, continued Ms. Marin. So clearly there are beginning to be effects that are felt, then these effects can manifest themselves, for example, in more depressive symptoms, more anxiety. It does not mean that you are suffering from depression or an anxiety disorder, it can only be an exacerbation, certain manifestations linked to anxiety disorders or linked to depressive disorders for example.
It is also chronic stress, much more than occasional stress, which is associated with multiple health problems, she recalls. If the brain is able to get used to the majority of stressful elements (think, for example, of the stress of a first day at work which ends up fading), it will never get used to others, like the bullying experienced by young people.
Studies also show that people are very poor judges of the stress they feel, possibly because the image associated with stress is that of the depressed, downcast, incapacitated individual who has “hit a wall”, whereas the reality is quite different.
“You say to yourself, ‘As long as I don’t look like this, I’m not stressed,'” Ms. Marin said. But before hitting the wall, there are many signs that are there, and if we don’t listen to them, we’re going straight into the wall, so it’s important to be on the lookout for the signs who are there before being in total exhaustion.
Stress draws on the body’s energy reserves, but these reserves “are not a bottomless pit”, she added, and “it is clear that at some point, we will miss, so it’s important to listen to the signs, both physical and psychological”.
“We start to be more irritable, we start to forget little things, we have spontaneous anger, things like that, she said. These are psychological signs (…) which speak to us and then clearly tell us that the stress is acting, then that we should take action before escalating to chronic stress.