chapter 1- and so it began...

Three weeks into lockdown. It didn’t sound so bad at first, being able to sleep in and work in your pyjama pants (or no pants!) Home is where the heart is, right? But like many others, Sarah was finding that these novelties quickly wore thin when the restrictions keeping everyone as house-bound as possible were being imposed indefinitely. The lack of social interaction, the lack of division between work and home life balance, and the excessive screen time were taking a toll on everybody. As a particularly empathetic person, Sarah struggled perhaps the most with the pain it was causing so many people that she cared about.

So many of her friends had lost their jobs, encountered other hardships, delayed medical treatments that were ‘elective’ but that they truly needed. It felt like people needed to band together more than ever, but everyone was just so tired from trying to process everything that was going on that even speaking on the phone or video calling anyone (outside of mandatory work meetings) just felt impossible. Sarah had become really fed up of the exhaustion that was plaguing her and all of her loved ones.

Being highly attuned to the human condition and the plight of others, Sarah often kept up with medical and psychology research findings. She had read an article that had explained an awful lot. It was about how the lack of sensory information people were getting through their screens was actually making people far more tired due to the brain trying to fill in these sensory gaps and the lack of stimulation. Sarah could completely relate to this. Most of her energy was spent on trying to problem solve or keep up at work, so the idea of doing anything that she enjoyed felt pretty much impossible.

Sarah was sick of how inescapable the topic was as well. She had realised that she needed to keep an eye on the kind of media she was consuming, as it affected her mood. Admittedly, Sarah had decreased her engagement with the news by the end of the first week of lockdown. The uncertainty for the foreseeable future and seriousness of the situation were starting to make her feel anxious, which she decided was unhelpful given that the situation was entirely out of her control. She only really skimmed the headlines of online news websites that she trusted not to sensationalise the facts.

As she scrolled down the page, a headline piqued her interest: “Speculation that lockdown will propel our already increasing obesity rates for the long term.” Sarah normally loathed the fearmongering that tended to surround any talk about the “obesity epidemic”, but she did have an interest in public health in general. She hesitated to click the headline. At least the article would surely be far less bleak than the effect current circumstances were having on mental health, and Sarah did feel somewhat out of the loop of current events. The page loaded.