Brain Behaviour Research Foundation of India | Blog

These days headlines in daily newspapers have become quite predictable. Everywhere and in all walks of life, people are incurring losses, be it financial, job loss due to economic recession, deaths of loved ones due to pandemic or just a crazy forest fire burning down lovely homes, like in America. This is what we have been hearing from people or media these days. It appears, as if, suffering has become the new pandemic. The psychological cost behind these loses is unimaginable. Degrading mental health of people, in general, is evident. The big question is,whether we are making ourselves psychologically resilient to face these loses or not? Will there be a psychological pandemic after this? There is no doubt that the sufferings are immense and in most of the cases unrepairable. Lack of advance psychological preparedness among people is one of the reasons. In fact, nature’s fury has just caught all of us unprepared. Our psychological vulnerabilities were exposed, forcing us to feel depr...

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...

Intolerance of uncertainty is often representative of tension disorders that range from generalized anxiety to obsessive-compulsive disorder. COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the uncertainty over the economy, employment, finances, relationships, and in fact, physical well being. We have different capacities for tolerating the different levels of uncertainty in life. Some people enjoy taking risks and living unpredictable lives, while others find the randomness of life deeply distressing. But everyone has their limit. If you are feeling overwhelmed by uncertainty and worry, it is important to know that you’re not alone; many people are in identical situation at present. In an interesting survey by the People Management and also the CIPD, supporting people’s mental status and well-being is the foremost challenge for nearly 70% of employers. Macro-levels of humanity apart, people’s mental status is getting affected on the individual level in India, due to the following: 1. Anxiety over ...