Confidence Intervals

Motivation. It’s not really the word you want to think about when you’re staring at your home/work assignment and longing for Animal Crossing, Halo, or Cookie Clicker (please not Cookie Clicker...the chocolatey chipey black hole of soo many misplaced hours!). You know you should do the thing, but even washing your house sounds more appealing than the thing you need to do. Another casualty of COVID-19...our motivation. It feels weird, because it’s not like we’re too busy to get the sleep we need, and really, the amount of assignments to complete hasn’t increased that much, if at all. So how does it make sense that every thirty seconds finds a new excuse for a distraction that will make us feel better than the effort of a job completed? Perhaps it’s because we feel helpless? This isn’t going to apply to everyone, but for some people, there can be a sense of helplessness in the middle of this pandemic. We’re told we can’t go to work unless we’re essential, and if ...

This is the first post in a series that I am doing for the Psychological Services Center, located at Regent University, a department/school mental health clinic that serves the student population of Regent University and the surrounding community. With so much of the world in a constant state of unknown, and most of the world being confined to their houses for the last month, many are seeing their mental health affected. At times, people can get confused about why their mental health is affected. “I’m just stuck in my house, it’s not like anything is really happening to me.” And yet, there are a lot of reports of a lack of motivation, concentration, and energy. Declarations of newfound productivity are played out on the couch in front of Netflix and a bag of Cheetos. Marriages have been feeling tense, and the joys of parenting are starting to look more like struggles. Fears about being infected with a new strain of a disease we don’t know much about are fighting for attention ...