Field Notes #33: Is the pandemic really over?
Can we decide this pandemic is over based on how we feel? Plus, First Sleep and Second Sleep and how Morning Pages tidy up my brain.
Hello, friends! Happy Wednesday! It’s sunny, cool, and beautiful in the Hudson Valley these days, with the wild fluctuations of a season in transition. Today’s high: 81. Friday’s predicted low: 46.
Substack informs me that this particular newsletter will take you about 8 minutes to read. Thank you for spending 8 minutes with me today. For a little extra time, if you feel inspired, you could leave a note in the comments — I’d love to hear your thoughts. Today’s Field Notes has 3 interesting things I’ve run across lately about the pandemic, two-part sleep, and stream-of-conscious writing.
1} Does the pandemic feel over to you?
I am really curious about your answer to this question:
This is on my mind because 60 Minutes on Sunday aired a clip of President Biden at the Detroit Auto Show saying: “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you noticed, no one’s wearing masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape. So I think it’s changing, and I think this is a perfect example of it.”
What! Is this true? It seems like a press conference or CDC statement would have been a better place to drop that news than the floor of a car show. And I’m not the only one who wondered.
Stat News published a terrific article on this question, "Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? The answer is more art than science.”
I learned:
There is no set definition of a pandemic.
Could the World Health Organization say definitively when it’s over? Nope, says Alexandra Phelan, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. Not their decision.
The U.S. does have an emergency status in effect, which is still active and helps secure faster response, funds for vaccines, etc. It comes up for renewal soon. But that’s different than the pandemic status.
Then I got to the part in the article where Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, explains that we could consider when a pandemic ends in two ways: “by looking at what the disease is doing to humans physically and psychologically.”
Physically — about 350 people in America are dying each day from COVID and about 4,000 people are hospitalized daily, according to the CDC. By that metric, many experts say the pandemic is not over.
Psychologically — it’s up to how we feel and act.
“It’s over when people decide that it’s over. … And most people seem to have decided it’s over,” said John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 Spanish flu.
Most of the experts who spoke with STAT echoed a version of Barry’s remarks: In some respects, the pandemic is over when people stop taking measures to protect themselves, when they stop following advice about how to lower their risk, when they resume pre-pandemic behavior.
Dr. Osterholm agreed:
“Everyone right now is fairly focused on the psyche. They want to move on. They’re done with the pandemic. And I think that [Biden’s] comment reflects that.”
One last point from the experts: We won’t know if the pandemic is truly over until more time passes. Even if it feels over, even if the case levels plummet further, there could still be another wave coming. So wait and see.
As for me, I waver around “mostly yes.” I don’t think the pandemic is 100% over yet. The case numbers and deaths are serious. Psychologically, I still have COVID-19 on my mind. I wear a mask in the grocery. I haven’t flown since 2019. I’m also part of the 30% of Americans who haven’t gotten COVID yet. But I agree, life does feel so much better now than it did in 2020. We aren’t quarantined at home; there is not remote school (thank goodness!); we are seeing family and friends. But this varies dramatically. Many people with compromised immune systems still need to be very careful, and the lack of precautions makes much more difficult, unfortunately.
Like so much of health, where each of us is physically and psychologically is personal.
How are you feeling about the pandemic?
2} Two parts of sleep
(Side note: I need new podcasts Any recommendations? Please leave in the comments! Thank you in advance!)
I was re-listening to an old favorite this morning in the car, an interview with Jane McGonigal on the Tim Ferriss show, and they were talking about sleep, insomnia, and waking up in the middle of the night. Jane — Dr. McGonigal, but she feels like Jane to me! — is a futurist, a game designer, and an author. She mentioned that in order to look ahead into the future, “we try to look back at least twice as far, and look for patterns in the past in human culture and history.”
Then she described how humans used to sleep. Before electricity was invented, “The normal human sleeping pattern was to be awake in the middle of the night for two to three hours. And people used to sleep in what they called First Sleep. And then they would be awake and they would do stuff.”
People would apparently do chores, have conversations, get things done! Then they would go back to sleep for Second Sleep. (This is apparently also called biphasic sleep.)
Jane pointed out that “if your insomnia is in the middle of the night, you may actually just be more in tune with natural human sleeping patterns.”
She elaborated:
“I’ve definitely gone through periods of my life where I’ve fallen back into that two-sleep cycle, and if you know that it’s natural and actually kind of the original human sleeping pattern, it can take away some of the anxiety.”
“And you can get amazing stuff done in the middle of the night while everyone else is asleep, and if we can kind of let go of the worry, This is weird, something’s wrong with me. I have to fix it, and think about maybe in the future, we’ll go back to the way we used to sleep in the past, or not try to force people out of it. Maybe there will just be two ways of sleeping.”
Fascinating, right? Do you ever do two-part sleeping? How do you feel about it?
3} Morning Pages
In the classic creative book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron describes “Morning Pages” as one of the two pivotal tools in creative recovery.
“Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages– they are not high art. They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind — and they are for your eyes only,” she explains on her website.
A writer friend in one of my creative groups recently challenged us to do five days straight of Morning Pages. I’m haphazard at best about Morning Pages. I don’t love writing long-hand, and I find I get bored recording whatever mundane worry is floating around in my mind. I’d rather type than write, but who knows when you hit three pages of long-hand writing?
(Another writer friend shared 750 Words, a marvelous website for Morning Pages, in which you can have a private account to write daily. 750 words is apparently the count for three pages, and the 750 Words website lets you know when you hit the magic number and rewards you with cool badges for streaks and other milestones. I haven’t tried it yet, but the tool looks pretty nifty.)
Now I’ve been writing my 750 words most mornings (in the Day One Journal app) and I noticed something odd…
I had a few terrific days of writing after the Morning Pages, and then I started getting antsy. Can’t I just go straight to my writing projects? Why am I wasting time on this Morning Pages drivel? Nothing I put down in the Morning Pages is that interesting. It’s such a dead end. It’s just whatever flies around in my mind. By definition, not worth writing down!
But here’s the thing.
When I did finally skip Morning Pages, the writing I turned to next was … muddier, fuzzier, less focused.
Somehow, someway, doing Morning Pages first allowed me to be clearer, more focused, more efficient in other writing.
OHHHHH!
I realized it must be like meditating over the keyboard or the pen. Some people describe meditating as watching thoughts drift by like clouds, just observing them, not judging them, letting them go in and out of your mind. In some ways, that’s exactly what Morning Pages feel like to me, except I’m recording the cloud thoughts, and in that way, letting them pass through me and out.
Huh. Mental health via 750 words daily. If you have never tried Morning Pages, I challenge you to try it for five mornings straight. (And let me know how it goes!)
I hope you have a lovely rest of the week, filled with your favorite kind of sleep and your favorite kind of words.
To our journeys,
Brianne