Another casualty of the pandemic: Our ability to worry about anything else

Enlarge / This looks worrisome, but I've got a pandemic to panic about. (credit: Gerhard Pettersson / EyeEm)

It's safe to say that the first two years of the pandemic left a lot of people exhausted and emotionally drained. A new study suggests that the exhaustion showed a reduced ability to care about other global problems.

The work relied on surveying all English-language Twitter for tweets related to climate change both before and during the pandemic. The researchers involved found that the number of climate-related tweets dropped roughly in proportion to rising COVID-19 cases and that the remaining tweets tended to be more optimistic than those in pre-pandemic times. Overall, this suggests that the pandemic taxed what some behavioral scientists call our "finite pool of worry."

In the deep end

The idea of a finite pool of worry is probably pretty intuitive to most of us. Worrying about something takes a toll on us emotionally, and that toll comes from a finite pool of emotional reserves. Once those reserves are depleted, we actually couldn't care less-we lose the ability to worry about things that we would otherwise find concerning. That's not to say that we'd say they're not worrying if we were asked-we just aren't likely to spontaneously expend attention on them.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments