{"id":73409,"date":"2026-02-07T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T06:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=73409"},"modified":"2026-02-06T10:11:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:11:25","slug":"qotd-stress-in-the-post-lockdown-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/02\/07\/qotd-stress-in-the-post-lockdown-world\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Stress in the post-lockdown world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I think emotion is something like the brain’s immune system. Just as you need to take your share of cuts and scrapes and bruises in order to get tough physically, you need to suffer the slings and arrows in your mind to get mentally tough. I might go so far as to relate it to the hysteria we see on social media \u2014 indeed, to hysteria in general. Consider the prevalence of bizarre allergies etc. that only hit once the helicopter parents started going all out to protect their kids from even the most minor cuts and scrapes. That can’t be a coincidence, any more than the huge uptick in behavioral problems like OCD can be.<\/p>\n

Note that by “mentally tough” I don’t mean “carrying on like the Marlboro Man”, necessarily. Anonymous Conservative has a similar theory, that he relates to amygdala development, and maybe it’s that. I certainly saw a lot of incidents that look like what he calls “amygdala hijacks” back in my teaching days \u2014 kids would melt down and go catatonic, over the most inconsequential things. They’d never been faced with “failure” before, so not acing a silly little unit quiz hit them like the end of the world.<\/p>\n

Just as I’d bet the cumulative retail price of all the shit we’ve sent to Ukraine that the triple-masked, lockdowns-forever covidiots are now getting floored by the kind of minor sniffles they’d have shrugged off three years ago \u2014 because they’ve maybe perma-fucked their immune systems, and that’s before<\/em> all the side effects of the not-vaxx \u2014 so kids who have never been exposed to grief, frustration, and failure get floored by tiny bumps in the road. It’s total systemic shock, and I’m not joking \u2014 I’d bet long money that they actually break out in hives, get weird rashes, and so on, because the kind of stress chemicals that can turn a tough, healthy young soldier into a shell shock case will do all kinds of damage to someone totally unprepared.<\/p>\n

I guess this is the tl;dr \u2014 I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on tv, but I’m betting that those stress chemicals play an important role in ordinary<\/em> cognition; they’re necessary for proper brain function. But they’re tough; your brain needs exercise in order to be able to handle those chemicals efficiently. If you don’t get it, your brain gets “fat”, in the same way your body gets fat if you load it up with too much of a good thing. And it’s recursive \u2014 those stress chemicals get stored in fat, too. So just as obesity is comorbid for just about everything \u2014 seriously, being fat is the absolute worst thing for your general health, bar none \u2014 so having a “fat brain” by not getting enough “exercise” totally destroys your ability to keep your head, to think clearly and logically.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Quick Thoughts”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-04-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think emotion is something like the brain’s immune system. Just as you need to take your share of cuts and scrapes and bruises in order to get tough physically, you need to suffer the slings and arrows in your mind to get mentally tough. I might go so far as to relate it to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,41,13],"tags":[1202,456,906,539,139,1462,519],"class_list":["post-73409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-epidemic","tag-hysteria","tag-mentalhealth","tag-pandemic","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-stress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-j61","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73409"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100739,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73409\/revisions\/100739"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}