Living online

“I’m fine at home”

“As a re­sult of the pan­demic, we may have found a cer­tain plea­sure in being at home,” says Mer­itx­ell Bausili, a psy­chol­o­gist at the ITAE Psy­chol­ogy Cen­tre. “But we have to be care­ful that there is no sense of anx­i­ety be­hind it. We don’t want to be think­ing: ’I’m fine at home be­cause going to the su­per­mar­ket makes me un­com­fort­able’,” she con­tin­ues.“ Some peo­ple in­sist they are very com­fort­able work­ing from home and doing every­thing on­line. But when you ask them when they go out, they say it’s to take out the rub­bish or the dog,” she adds. It’s not about ’nor­mal’ or ’ab­nor­mal’, says the psy­chol­o­gist, it’s about look­ing at what’s healthy and what’s not. And re­mem­ber­ing every­one has their own way of doing things. Yet “stay­ing locked up is not healthy. Doing so makes it in­creas­ingly com­fort­able, and sud­denly you find you haven’t been out for six months, and then it’s be­com­ing patho­log­i­cal.”

Ac­cord­ing to the ex­perts con­sulted, the pan­demic has ex­ac­er­bated so­cial pho­bia, ago­ra­pho­bia and anx­i­ety. “With­out a doubt, peo­ple who al­ready had a con­di­tion have got worse. In the case of those who did not have a pathol­ogy but who are prone to anx­i­ety and wor­ry­ing, Covid has acted as a cat­a­lyst for cer­tain fears that they had learnt to live with and that had not pre­vented them from being func­tional. We were forced to stay at home be­cause of a dan­ger and this trig­gered an alert in the brain: ’There is dan­ger out­side’.”

Source of well­be­ing

Enric Soler is a uni­ver­sity lec­turer and a psy­chol­o­gist spe­cialised in in­ter­per­sonal re­la­tion­ships. “One of the most im­por­tant sources of emo­tional well­be­ing for hu­mans is so­cial in­ter­ac­tion, so when we’re with friends we feel sat­is­fied.” We are liv­ing at a time when, like it or not, we need to make con­stant ad­just­ments, he in­sists. Al­though things have been bet­ter in the past few months, we are look­ing at the pos­si­bil­ity of a sixth wave of in­fec­tions and the ap­pear­ance of new vari­ants, which in­di­cates a time for change. “Hu­mans can’t make ad­just­ments overnight. It’s pro­gres­sive. Adap­ta­tion also in­volves a kind of mourn­ing. For ex­am­ple, when we had to adapt to being locked down, we mourned the loss of free­dom,” says Soler.

How­ever, re­sort­ing to an on­line life has proven to be a dou­ble-edged sword. While it can make us more ef­fec­tive, it can also be an ex­cuse not to leave our lair. “In gen­eral, human be­ings have a strong aver­sion to lone­li­ness. There are plenty of peo­ple who will stick with a re­la­tion­ship even if they see that it has no fu­ture, so as not to be alone. And then there are those who choose to be alone. If be­fore this cri­sis you were a per­son who pre­ferred your own com­pany, then per­fect. But for those who need to go out it is a dif­fer­ent story,” adds the psy­chol­o­gist.

Mean­while, the pos­si­bil­i­ties of­fered by tech­nol­ogy and dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion are nei­ther good nor bad in them­selves. “If we add the power of at­trac­tion that screens have to the fact that phys­i­cal con­tact might be dan­ger­ous, even after you have been vac­ci­nated, then we have the two in­gre­di­ents for what is hap­pen­ing: stay­ing at home for five days, and not even being aware that you haven’t been in touch with any­one.” This is not healthy, Soler warns, adding that while we can re­late through tech­nol­ogy, there is no sub­sti­tute for phys­i­cal con­tact: “When it al­lows you to stream­line basic tasks like shop­ping or sav­ing time for so­cial re­la­tion­ships, then tech­nol­ogy is a help.”

Fear of the un­known

Home is usu­ally syn­ony­mous with shel­ter, but that can be taken to ex­tremes. There are peo­ple who would like to go out but who have reached a point where they can no longer bring them­selves to do it. Va­len­cian psy­chol­o­gist Laura Fuster posted an ar­ti­cle about ago­ra­pho­bia on her In­sta­gram pro­file this au­tumn. It has be­come her most read post. “We’re see­ing a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in cases of ago­ra­pho­bia,” she con­firms.

The most com­mon de­f­i­n­i­tion is that ago­ra­pho­bia is the fear of being out in the open. Yet per­haps a bet­ter de­f­i­n­i­tion is a fear of suf­fer­ing an anx­i­ety at­tack in a place where you’re alone with­out the help you need, or where you might be seen and feel ashamed. An ago­ra­phobe is some­one who knows what it is to suf­fer an at­tack of anx­i­ety in an out­door set­ting. “These peo­ple had no con­trol over what was hap­pen­ing to them. Feel­ings of anx­i­ety are pow­er­ful and ex­tremely un­com­fort­able. Those who suf­fer from it may be afraid of these feel­ings,” she says. Hence, it makes peo­ple who have these fears want to stay at home, where they feel safe. Even the mere thought of ex­pos­ing them­selves to what fright­ens them causes them anx­i­ety.

As with every­thing, there are dif­fer­ent de­grees. Some peo­ple are afraid to go to a busy shop­ping cen­tre where they will find them­selves in a crowd. And there are those who can’t even go next door to buy a loaf of bread. Anx­i­ety can be good, say the ex­pert, be­cause it warns us of dan­ger. The key is to dis­tin­guish whether the dan­ger is real or not. “Anx­i­ety leads us to avoid dan­ger or to es­cape. If we do some­thing we see as dan­ger­ous we try to make sure we have some se­cu­rity, a com­pan­ion or a mo­bile phone. Yet the treat­ment re­quires us to do the op­po­site: to work to see that what we fear is very un­likely to hap­pen. And that if it does hap­pen, we have the tools to man­age it. Part of the ther­apy is ex­po­sure, to stop try­ing to avoid the prob­lem and to ap­proach sit­u­a­tions lit­tle by lit­tle, grad­u­ally,” she adds.

The prob­lem is avoid­ance after hav­ing had an un­pleas­ant ex­pe­ri­ence. “The peo­ple we see have been avoid­ing these sit­u­a­tions for a long time. If we un­der­stood the me­chan­ics of anx­i­ety, if we were taught it, we wouldn’t suf­fer half the prob­lems we do. We’d see when we’re anx­ious and would un­der­stand what’s hap­pen­ing to us.” It is the same with the fear of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion, the fear of being re­jected, of not know­ing what to say, which the ex­pert claims the pan­demic has also made worse, and for which she gives the same rec­om­men­da­tion: do not avoid it.

Dr Con­nie Capdev­ila is a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, psy­chother­a­pist and mem­ber of the gov­ern­ing board of the Of­fi­cial Col­lege of Psy­chol­ogy of Cat­alo­nia. She spe­cialises in anx­i­ety and pho­bias, and points out that hu­mans have in­nate re­ac­tions to dan­ger, whether tan­gi­ble or imag­ined. We are pre­pared for dan­ger, but also for joy. “Our ner­vous sys­tem is ready to de­tect both dan­ger and safety. When we come into con­tact with loved ones, their voices, their fa­cial ex­pres­sions, it calms us down and makes us feel safe,” she says. For her, the pan­demic “has chal­lenged the ner­vous sys­tem, be­cause it has made us avoid so­cial con­tact, which is what gives us se­cu­rity.” And we have been hit by losses of all kinds for al­most two years. “We’re ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a men­tal health cri­sis. The pan­demic has in­creased our vul­ner­a­bil­ity to the symp­toms of anx­i­ety and men­tal dis­or­der,” she adds.

The pan­demic has also brought to­gether the fear of going into pub­lic spaces due to the virus and ago­ra­pho­bia. What’s more, ago­ra­pho­bia, with the dis­pro­por­tion­ate fear that makes peo­ple avoid sit­u­a­tions out­side that they find threat­en­ing, can over­lap with forms of ob­ses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der, such as the panic caused by a fear of germs. In short, the pan­demic has sparked a cock­tail of fears. “If your fears are out of con­trol, then you have to go to a psy­chol­o­gist,” says the ex­pert, but in al­most all cases she rec­om­mends re­lax­ation as a basic re­quire­ment.

And on­line ac­tiv­ity? “It’s one thing some­times stay­ing at home to spend some time on-line, quite an­other is turn­ing it into a lifestyle,” she warns.