Your Brain Has Already Made This Normal
How to adapt more easily to a strange new reality
I was going through my typical quarantine day — sweatpants on, couch-bound, a Zoom happy hour scheduled for later that evening — when it hit me: I’d settled into a rhythm. I wasn’t chafing against the confines of quarantine the same way I had in the beginning. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in the past week or so, I started to think of this strange new life as just… life.
Even in the best of times, change is hard. And right now is certainly not the best of times. When our most basic routines — work, school, fitness, socializing, running errands — disappear, it’s normal to spend some time feeling disoriented.
“If you have a routine, your brain is expecting certain stimuli at certain times,” says cognitive scientist Denise D. Cummins. “Change puts your brain on high alert, detecting all the deviations from what it was expecting.”
But your brain can’t sustain that high alert indefinitely. As you form new routines, you also form new neural pathways—the connections between brain cells that strengthen with repeated behavior. Even in bizarre circumstances, we’re wired to be adaptable. Which is why the novelty of this new way of life has given way to monotony — and why monotony, in turn, is beginning to give…
