Cabin Fever

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...

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...

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

How does it differ from excruciating boredom?

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?

As always, the inuit word for this is best

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

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome (when this same thing happens in offices)

- 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)