Brain Behaviour Research Foundation of India | Blog

One day while walking along the road, I suddenly felt short of breath, while gasping for air, my mind immediately connected the shortness of breath with one of the symptom suggesting to the possibility of having COVID-19. Feeling anxious about it, I spent few moments in reckless rumination of the possible catastrophic consequences that can follow from here. I imagined all the scenarios that can take place, from my own death due to COVID-19 to even the death of my loved ones. All this happened within a span of few minutes. Any one reading this might make fun of this, even I got worried about my own negative thoughts. What happened above was not some abnormality of the mind or some neurological defect. It is just a marvelous machine working at its best, in this case, the brain. During the above episode, my mind was just reading the normal body reactions in an exaggerated way to the extent that I ended up doing self-diagnosis and also imagined all the worst outcomes. These negative though...

What is Toxic Productivity? Our work culture places a lot of value on productivity and celebrates the trade-off between mental health with productivity and achievement. Rarely do we find healthy sleeping schedules, reasonable goals or self-care being lauded. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced productivity as a goal in daily lives. People have been feeling the pressure to achieve radical self-improvement above all else during their time in self-quarantine due to various influences.   The belief that if we leave lockdown not having learnt a new language or written a novel then we have somehow failed is a toxic productivity message. This hyper-productive response to the lockdown is perhaps symbolic of an impending mental health crisis within an already anxious and goal-oriented work culture where self-worth is associated with the amount of work one accomplishes.   Pushing oneself towards self-improvement, basing it entirely on productivity and feeling overwhelmed because one is...

The COVID-19 outbreak earlier in China and worldwide has led to an extraordinary threat to peoples’ physiological and psychological health and wellbeing. By the end of month June 2020 cases all over the globe have crossed the mark of 10 Million and majority of survey worldwide show the increased amount of mental stress in people. Coronavirus global map https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html People also have a great need for information from the media to make sense of the situation, and to protect their health. Information-seeking behaviors may reduce anxiety caused by uncertainty during a disease outbreak or disaster (Heath & Gay, 1997; Lachlan, Spence, & Seeger, 2009). However, while helpful, media exposure may also create new problems. Large volumes of information may amplify the perception of risk, and fear-based messages by the media may have negative effects on media consumers who cannot discern real versus fake news, or view more balanced media coverage of the event (Kasper...