Mindfulness and the Post-COVID Brain: Minds, Monkeys and Mud

How do post-COVID symptoms interfere with meditation?

Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Key points

• COVID has been a massive global trauma, with effects that persist both psychologically and medically.
• A persistent state of lingering symptoms, post-COVID, can interfere with meditation.
• A look at the details of the struggle, both in "monkey mind" and "tune-out."

This is the third (of four) posts on the surprising, poorly appreciated presence of cryptic suffering under the pram cover, the umbrella term of "Post-COVID." For more than a few of us, our bawling New Year's bambino has been accompanied by a confusing mix of physical, emotional, cognitive, and attentional symptoms that defy easy explanation. In the first two posts, we identified and validated its most common aspects and worked through the prevailing, developing understanding(s) of how a long-resolved viral infection can supercharge our immune systems to overdo its job.

In nursing a few more words (sorry) out of this topic, let's look at how these weird, sometimes even disabling phenomena can interfere with a functioning mindfulness practice. Then we'll flip the kiddo over (whee!) and look at ways to manage meditation amid the goo. I'll fall back on a metaphoric see-saw* familiar to meditators: the spectrum of distracting stuff that interrupts the smooth sailing of the mind in sitting practice. Let's think about monkeys and mud.

(My Own Inner) Planet of the Apes

On one end, we find the so-called "monkey mind." The field that we attend to while grooving on the breath, gratitude, or whatever, goes all monkeys with typewriters with additional input to pull us off track. These distractions can include:

• Primary physical inputs caused by the post-COVID symptoms themselves, such as joint pain, heart palpitations, variable fatigue from the recent night's sketchy sleep, and mood changes that often include anxiety and depressive effects. Especially intrusive are cognitive struggles; sticking with a sequence of intended targets for observation, or even just one, getting scrambled in returning to the attentional plan when the inevitable losses of attention arise. These are miscues of "executive functioning" that can dent in any smooth flow of "watch-get lost-regain and watch."
• Then there is the secondary impact—usually, our judgmental reactions to our minds in struggle. Harshly judging a tough day on the cushion is already a challenge of meditating. Our reactions to the primary stuff listed above can spin up just more upset—irritability at the moment, anxiety and dread-casting of incipient dementia, anger at that unmasked dope on the plane who coughed all over his seatmates through a flight three years ago. (But enough about me.) It can be hard to sit calmly through all that, trying to coax the monkeys back into the jungle, or their cubicles. It can be, um, bananas.

Mudslide!

On the opposite end of the attentional struggle is not a mind simmering with simians, but instead mud, sludge, and pea soup. Again, meditators know this "tuning-out" as an inevitable experience in many sittings. Rather than an intensity of mental phenomena, there's a slowing or even shutting down of attention.

• Here, the gross fatigue of post-COVID states piles on calm lucidity tipping easily into sluggishness. The cognitive "fog" makes it hard to rouse attention to even notice the state, let alone act to try to regroup, settle, and re-attend. The usual palliatives to the mud require a bit of physical and attentional juice that's just not available.
• As with the monkey mind, reactivity to the struggle present at the jungle gym may also be in play over in the mud puddle. In the case of tune-out, it may even seem like a no-go to even continue. Bye-bye playground; meditation turns into nap time. Which, of course, may be the best thing to do, to be pragmatic.

What do we do about these post-viral spoilsports of mindfulness? We'll cover that in part IV. A spoiler alert, consider it a mindful lesson in radical acceptance of the (difficult) moment.

* Please, be careful with babies on see-saws. Your PSA for today!