Why Is It So Hard To Stay Home?

Americans have, on the whole, been asked to stay home for the time being. The goal of this is to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 virus so that it does not overwhelm our healthcare system. If you want to understand more about this approach an internet search for “flatten the curve” will provide lots of information about it. This pandemic requires a national response, a call to inaction. But staying home has turned out to be really hard for most people psychologically. Why is that?

‘Staying home,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘self-quarantine,’ or whatever you want to call it forces us to acknowledge that something real is happening. Something that is different than what we have seen before. Something that is beyond our ability to fight without extreme measures. And all of that is incredibly scary. It’s scary to think that this could hit anyone. It’s scary to think that the ‘best healthcare system in the world’ could be overwhelmed by this.

As we distance ourselves we are left with fewer distractions, which is in many cases a huge change from normal daily life. Change is always hard. Even the best changes can cause anxiety or unease. And these particular changes are certainly not due to good circumstances. It is no wonder then, that this feels hard...it is hard.

Next consider that, when faced with a crisis, humans are hardwired to action. We get an adrenaline rush and we feel like we just need to do something--anything. In our empathy we want to be present with one another. Many of us honestly want to help. And we want there to be heros. And we want those heros to be out in the open doing heroic things. But in this case we are being asked to embrace inaction. Self-quarantine doesn’t feel heroic, but it is the single most helpful thing the average person can do right now. Staying home is heroic.

And then when we finally choose to or are forced to stay home we are left alone with our thoughts. I don’t know about you but my brain can be a scary place. There have been a lot of nights that I have stayed up hours past when I was tired simply distracting myself on my phone for fear of being alone with my thoughts. Humans have incredible imaginations. Those imaginations have given us so much great art, stories, technology, and more. But those same imaginations also love to imagine the worst case scenarios and play them out in our heads over and over again. It is no surprise that the situation we are in is creating an incredible amount of anxiety.

But, as with so many things in life, the only way out of this is through it. There is a company called Epic whose tagline is “Run into the storm.” That phrase refers to bison herds. When a storm is coming towards a herd of bison they respond by running directly into it. In this way the herd spends the least possible time actually in the storm. “Run into the storm” has become something of a mantra for me. In this case, running into the storm means embracing social distancing. If we all do this and take it very seriously then the length of time required to slow the virus will be shorter than if we only do this half-heartedly. I encourage you to embrace the heroics of staying home. You are a hero. Run into this storm (by staying home).