Remember back in the good ole days four months ago when the biggest stress in your life was juggling kids' school schedules and activity schedules with your own work schedule and trying to manage a household and care for yourself sometime in between? Those were simpler times. It's almost as though 2020 saw us struggling and said, "Oh, you think THIS is bad?!"

For everyone juggling unemployment, working remotely, NTI, and basic living, you are not alone. Those feelings you are having are, unfortunately, completely normal. Maybe you're snacking too much or not able to eat because your brain can't hear the hunger signals through all the stress noise. Maybe you're mortally afraid of running out of toilet paper and you've been to seven stores this week. It's all a completely normal reaction to a really abnormal situation.

When we are exposed to constant and unrelenting stress, this thing happens to our brains called an amygdala hijack. It basically short-circuits our ability to respond to a situation rationally and flips the switch on the survival center of our brains. Instead of saying, "but I have enough toilet paper to make it to next week" our reptilian brains respond with, "but what if there's no toilet paper next week! Better safe than sorry!"

Learn more about the psychology of pandemic fatigue, as well as resources and techniques for coping, from the infographic below.