How Catching Covid Can Change Your Personality - Dr Diana Fleischman | Modern Wisdom Podcast 290

I certainly am feeling better every day, and kind of more like myself. But there was a period of, of a week or two after I caught COVID where I knew I wasn't infectious, I was, like, going for a walk outside, and strangers scared me more than they usually do. I was much more socially anxious.

(wind blowing) Talking about whether COVID can change your personality. Uh, what even is that question? What, what are we on about?

So, there's a lot of evidence that viruses and bacteria try and change host behavior. So, there's some really interesting stuff about that, how they might try and change your behavior in order to make themselves transmit more easily. But also, about how you, as an organism, your, your goals and priorities from a, from an evolutionary perspective change a lot when you have an infection. So, if you're healthy, you might have certain goals like seeking out new people to engage with, seeking out new social and mating opportunities, feeding, foraging, stuff like that. But when you are sick, your fundamental goals really change. And what I'm thinking about, since I, since I just recovered from COVID, is about how my personality changed, and how there might be millions of people who have had COVID who now feel different. And during COVID, you have this incredible level of inflammation. Many people who are long-haulers and otherwise have what's called a cytokine storm, which is a level of inflammation. And when you have high inflammation, it tells your immune system, it tells you that you have an infection, and that you should behave accordingly, which involves a whole bunch of different aspects of personality and behavior changing.

So, is there a little bit of a battle going on? There is the pathogen which is trying to find its way around, and then there are the defenses of the host which are trying to stop its way to get through.

Yeah. So, there are some things that you're... if you think about what you feel like when you're ill, there are some things that are good for the pathogen and good for the host. So, one example of that is sneezing. Sneezing clears you out. It's good to get the pathogens out, but the pathogen also wants you to sneeze, 'cause it's the best way for you to spray everybody with copies of itself, right? So, that's one way in which your interests are aligned, so long as you're not, like, sneezing on your kids, right? But there's other things where your interests are not aligned. So, fever is one way that your interests are not aligned. The, the virus and the bacteria, whatever you're infected with, does not want you to have a fever, because a fever is really optimal for you. This is why I get very frustrated when people take antifebrile, you know, anti-fever medications when they're sick. I, I never do, because the fever is really the best possible thing for you to be, uh, you know, doing. Um, also, you know, there's other things, like, there's a reason why you're more interested either in not eating or eating familiar foods when you're sick. That's because unfamiliar foods might have pathogens that will compete for access to your immune system. Uh, so they'll, they'll be more costly. Uh, and also it takes a lot of energy to digest. So, in that sense, your body's also winning and... as an appetite suppressant. Um, if a, if a virus or a bacteria could really properly manipulate you, they'd probably try to make you hungry.