Life in the living room is wearing me out

Every night for the past five weeks or so I have been hit by tiredness at about 8pm. I am hardly waking up at the crack of dawn, so it’s all a bit odd. Nor rushing about the place like I used to in pre-lockdown life. It’s not just me: everyone I know is reporting the same strange sense of lethargy, despite physically doing far less.

The reason we’re so tired from being on our own in the house all day is stress – allostatic stress, to be exact. The conditions surrounding the lockdown are indeed stressful; most of us are glued to news telling us of an ongoing nightmare, a nonstop flow of death, grief and incompetence. Add to this the worry about our own health and that of our loved ones, not to mention the injections of anxiety caused by running those errands that we can’t avoid. What social interactions we do have – by Zoom or FaceTime – are so blotchy and full of lag that we have to work overtime to interpret what’s going on.

This accumulation of stressors adds up to allostatic load, and it’s damn tiring. Nancy Sin, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, explained that as our stress hormones increase, under lockdown “we’re having a lot of these physiological adaptations, each time we feel stressed or worried”. Over time, these repeated hits add up.

Other researchers have pointed out that simply being alone can be tiring because it requires a lot more vigilance. We’re pack animals, and in our packs we keep each other safe.

Those of us isolating on our own are more vulnerable to threats and therefore more on guard. Identifying those threats now takes the form of constantly reading the news, only to find an environment booby-trapped with acutely stress-creating updates. Who knew life in the living room could be so tiring? Now excuse me: I need to go and lie down.