
Cabin Fever - enesunal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_fever
======
chewz
Blaise Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to
sit quietly in a room alone.”

[https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-
coro...](https://thecatholicspirit.com/commentary/wordonfire/the-coronavirus-
and-sitting-quietly-in-a-room-alone/)

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DyslexicAtheist
An awesome resource for long term effects of quarantine is this paper from The
Lancet: _The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid
review of the evidence_
[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30460-8/fulltext)

I personally try to set little goals every day. Routine is really important.
Maybe study a new subject and/or work on a side-project. Also exercise (basic
cardio) - some sunlight (open a window if nothing else is an option), and/or
smoke weed to reduce anxiety. Smoking weed and drinking coffee is a
combination that keeps me productive for tasks that require deep thinking.
(weed alone just makes me complacent and lazy).

If anyone needs help working on a fun foss project I have time to spare :)

edit: also timebox both your work and your fun activities. (timeboxing one
alone isn't enough IMO)

~~~
dwiel
Are you not concerned about smoking making covid19 symptoms more extreme?

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DyslexicAtheist
maybe I should be. but having stopped cigarettes 25 years ago, and my weed
consumption not being regular (often have breaks of several months) I'm not
too worried. Maybe baking cookies in these times would be better but it's not
the same :-/

~~~
marsrover
I read something on Reddit that said marijuana is an ACE2-inhibitor, but I
can't find any research on it or anything about it. No idea where the guy got
his information but I keep looking around. Does anyone else know if this is
just completely false information?

~~~
RoosterJ
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487561/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487561/)

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aphextron
People talking about going "stir crazy" is just bewildering to me. Working
from home has been a dream come true. I am happier, less stressed, and easily
2x more efficient and productive. The ability to sit quietly in my apartment
alone for extended periods of time is literally the only thing in the world I
have ever wanted.

~~~
Sharlin
The gap between the extremes of introversion and extraversion is wide. Most
people, of course, sit somewhere in the middle. Though there seems to be
another axis at play here—what if you were forced to stay at home but not
alone? For many people the office is a more peaceful place to work than home.
And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay
inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so
on.

~~~
0xffff2
>And even people who like solitude do not often like being forced to stay
inside, without being able to go for a walk, without access to nature and so
on.

Is that actually happening anywhere outside of China?

~~~
Sharlin
Well, it is for those who are ill and/or quarantined. Or disabled, or
incarcerated… I was not only referring to this current situation. Plus the
curfews in place in France and Italy are very close to being total lockdowns.

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tyingq
I imagine under a tight lockdown, this is way more pronounced for apartment
dwellers. Being able to just sit in your backyard seems like a big difference.

~~~
phillc73
I absolutely agree. I have a 5 year old at home due to closed kindergarten.
Both my wife and I are supposed to be working from home for the next few weeks
and without our garden I think we'd be off the wall by now.

Sending the lad outside to play in the sunny weather, while I can watch him
from the window next to my workspace, is making a huge difference.

~~~
hamaluik
We were in the process of finding a house to rent before this all went down.
Now we're stuck in an apartment with our stir-crazy toddler and are both
supposed to be working full hours from home. It's.. difficult, to say the
least.

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posterboy
Business as usual for shut-ins, hikikomori, cellar-dwellers, 24/7 gamers etc

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
some re-energize themselves by going out and sharing with others what their
day was like, others need isolation in order to recover from a busy day. Most
aren't on either extreme of that spectrum but somewhere in between.

I think you don't need to be a shut-in or 24/7 gamer for this to not have much
of an effect on you. I used to be on the far end of this spectrum of needing
to share and have others around me in my first 30-40 years and as I got older
I changed within a time-span of 5 years that I'd rather stay home. I can still
wear my party-hat when I need to and do enjoy it but if given the choice now I
rather spend time with my own thoughts.

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tombert
I've been having to deal with this lately; I've never really been someone who
likes working from home. Typically when I've told coworkers that I'm "working
from home", I'm actually "working from McDonalds" or something, and I just
don't feel like taking an hour-long subway ride for whatever reason.

Now that everything in NYC is closed or on restricted hours or whatever, I
have been getting a little stir-crazy, especially since my already-too-low
amount of exercise that I got from my commute to work has now been reduced to
"me walking downstairs to my basement", which has made it very difficult for
me to sleep.

To combat this, I ordered an exercise machine last night, to at least allow me
to get an approximation of what I'd be doing at the gym, and hopefully
ameliorate the sleep issues, but I have no idea how I'm going to deal with 3+
more weeks of this quarantine.

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jdxcode
That article links to another called "Piblokto"—a cultural-specific hysterical
reaction.

I'm suspicious it's a real thing and the article mentions there is heavy
skepticism around it, but it's a strange article to read nonetheless.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piblokto)

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Mountain_Skies
Yesterday evening I needed to get out of the house for a while. I've been a
remote worker for two years so working from home is nothing new but most days
I'd end up outside of the house for errands or just going down the street to
say hi to neighbors. Instead I went out and drove around. Even twenty minutes
of a change in scenery helped out quite a bit. Back when I lived in a midrise
condo in the central business district of a large metro, it would have been
much more difficult to achieve this small bit of scenery change without
passing through spaces shared by a couple hundred neighbors. Cabin fever is
going to be distributed unevenly throughout this event.

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scotty79
How does it differ from excruciating boredom?

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dijit
So, aside from irritability and perhaps paranoia, are there any more symptoms?

It’s fun that you can’t be diagnosed with it as it’s not a defined medical
definition but how can you know if you’re on the slope to experiencing
something like this?

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DyslexicAtheist
speaking only from my personal experience it can trigger depression, loss of
motivation, and a feeling of an "empty head". e.g. place me in front of a
window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if you would ask me what I'm
thinking about I wouldn't know. Also increased anxiety when the quarantine is
over.

~~~
circlefavshape
> place me in front of a window I'd stare out of it for several hours and if
> you would ask me what I'm thinking about I wouldn't know

Isn't that called meditation?

~~~
nkohari
Meditation is an intentional pursuit; it's about focus rather than
daydreaming.

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awinter-py
As always, the inuit word for this is best

I would use a product called 'Piblokto' almost no matter what it did

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derefr
I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life, and spent at least some time in
seclusion in each one. And I _have_ experienced the “cabin fever” feeling
before... but not everywhere I’ve lived. In some environments, it happened
easily and immediately; in others, it never did. I’ve tried to think about my
environment at each juncture to figure out if the situations where I _did_
experience “cabin fever” had anything in common.

Every time I experienced the symptoms described in the article (restlessness,
lightheadedness, insomnia, irritability, etc.) I was living in a modern,
rather-well-sealed apartment building; or was on a long road-trip in a modern,
rather-well-sealed car; or was on a long plane flight; or was staying in a
modern hotel room in a high-rise; or I was camping in a tent or camper-
trailer.

Meanwhile, I’ve never experienced these symptoms while living in an old,
drafty brick building (repurposed office building); or while living in a
Victorian-era farmhouse; or while staying in a low-rent motel; or while
camping under the stars.

My conclusion is that “cabin fever” is a feeling you get when your living
space is not well-ventilated. Specifically, when there’s no way to create a
through-draft of air, so even opening windows won’t force out the air deeper
in the home—leading to that air becoming stale, creating a built-up “cloud” of
CO2, other gaseous bodily wastes, and exhaled aerosolized water droplets (you
know, those things that viruses travel on.) It happens faster when more people
are cooped up together in a small space, because this cloud of stale air gets
denser, faster; and because there’s less time when everyone is gone at once,
where the air can “recharge” by slow through-insulation-barrier gas exchange.

If the problem is stale air, then just “going outside” is only a temporary
fix, because the air will usually be just as stuffy when you return (unless
you leave for hours and leave your windows open and fans on.) On the other
hand, you _can_ be fine while inside indefinitely, if you open a window and
then sit right beside it, where the outside air can reach you. _But_ this will
only work if there’s enough wind to push the air into the house a small bit;
_and_ it seemingly has no effect—possibly for purely-psychological reasons?—if
the air outside is humid, as it is in e.g. Hong Kong. (But going outside in
humid places still works for temporary relief. Weird.)

And that last realization leads me to the secondary conclusion that the (or
my, at least) human physiology is responding mainly to aerosolized-moisture-
content in the air (in some way that’s distinct from responding to the
evaporated humidity) as a proxy metric for the other, harder-to-sense air-
quality measures. So, in theory, you _might_ be able to reduce the qualitative
of “cabin fever” just by buying a dehumidifier.

But really, I wouldn’t recommend it; there’s pretty good documentation about
the subtler, less-self-apparent effects that a high CO2 concentration in a
room can have on people, and on how much CO2 does tend to build up in closed
or not-well-ventilated rooms—especially people’s bedrooms at night.

Relevant links:

\- Tom Scott’s _This is Your Brain on Stale Air_ —
[https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA](https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA)

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome)
(when this same thing happens in offices)

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui)
(which, at its practical core, seems to be about arranging the contents of
living spaces to avoid having objects act as _baffles_ to the through-flow of
air)

~~~
Tade0
Both my current and previous landlord cheaped out on windows, which were badly
sealed in both cases leading to these apartments being rather pleasant to be
in for longer(think days).

Well, at least after we bought a Roomba which took care of all the dust
generated by people and animals inside.

