Whenever I get sick—which, recently, seems to be every few months thanks to all the viruses going around—I don’t handle it very well. I mope around the house and beat myself up for falling behind on my responsibilities. I get annoyed when anything slightly inconvenient happens—e.g., my food delivery gets delayed or a work email comes in right when I crawl into bed to nap. I generally feel like I could cry at any moment. In other words: I act like a baby.
There’s a scientific reason why being sick makes me weepy and whiny: Mood changes are a symptom of a syndrome known as “sickness behaviors,” which experts define as a set of behavioral changes that can occur during infections like COVID, the flu, and the common cold. Getting sick can diminish your mood; make you feel sluggish; and even impair your memory, attention, and brain performance. Sickness behaviors can cause you to not want to be around other people and make it difficult to sleep and eat. Aside from the whole coughing-sneezing-sniffling-puking deal, it’s one of the main reasons why getting sick is such a drag.
Here’s exactly how being sick can turn you (me) into a giant toddler.
When you’re exposed to a pathogen, your body produces cytokines, small proteins that spread throughout your body to regulate inflammation. That inflammatory response is incredibly effective at preventing infections and kickstarting the healing process, but it can also make you feel worse before you feel better: Though cytokines, and the inflammation they trigger, are a crucial component of your body’s immune response, they can cause all kinds of uncomfortable symptoms, including fever, headache, body aches, and malaise.
Cytokines also travel to your brain—specifically within the hippocampus, a region that deals with mood, Ashwini Nadkarni, MD, a psychiatrist and instructor at Harvard Medical School, tells SELF. As inflammation builds in your brain, you may experience mood fluctuations and cognitive issues, like attention and memory problems, Dr. Nadkarni explains. In short: The cytokines are probably what’s causing you to feel extra tearful and irritable when you’re under the weather.
There’s a long list of neurological and psychological symptoms that fall under sickness behaviors. “Fatigue, malaise, lack of motivation, poor concentration, loss of interest in things you usually enjoy, poor appetite, trouble sleeping, emotional instability, and crying—all things we see in depression,” Janelle Duah, MD, a Yale Medicine internist, tells SELF. It’s known that inflammation plays a major role in developing depression, and that people with depression generally have higher levels of inflammation related to their immune system.
Your body isn’t doing this by coincidence. Research suggests that sickness behaviors may serve a legit purpose—forcing you to slow down and conserve your energy so that your body can focus on healing. Some scientists believe that sickness behaviors motivate your loved ones to take care of you to help you recover faster. (This is good news if you feel needier than usual and are dreaming of the days when your caregiver coddled you with chicken noodle soup and Popsicles).
Sickness behaviors vary from person to person—and from illness to illness.
There are a couple of things that influence how moody you become when you’re fighting off an infection. First, if you already deal with a mental health issue, like depression or anxiety, getting sick can make matters worse, Dr. Duah says. Second, the more severe the symptoms of your infection, the greater the hit your mood will likely take, research suggests—but even totally asymptomatic infections can make you feel sad and irritable.
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