For the first time since the pandemic started I read two books back to back.

This was huge. Reading a good book centers me. I was an English major in college. I love the arc of a story, the way stories challenge my assumptions and broaden my perspective. I love developing relationships with the characters and accompanying them on their journeys. Books have taught me a lot about how complex life is and taught me how to appreciate that even when it’s painful.

When the pandemic hit and I needed this most, I found I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t read. All I had the mental focus for was news. And I wasn’t alone. Naming and explaining our memory lapses and lack of focus exploded in the news and on social media.

Since March of 2020 I have had the attention span to read one book every so often, and that was a struggle. It had to be really plot driven, not too long and skillfully written. My pandemic reads included ,Girls with Bright Futures, ,Olga Dies Dreaming, ,The Removed, ,Such a Fun Age and ,Turtles All the Way Down.

I started beautiful books I knew I just didn’t have the mental focus to get through and regretfully put them aside until I could come back to them when I could really appreciate them: ,The Overstory, ,The God of Small Things, ,Hamnet, ,The Grapes of Wrath, ,Deacon King Kong and ,Cloud Cuckoo Land.

This month I read ,Sorrow and Bliss in three days on flights across the country. After a pause to honor the amazing experience I’d just had in those pages, I picked up ,A World Apart and finished it.

I took this as a really good sign that some of my cognitive function had been restored.

Baby, I’m back!, I thought, and I reached for The God of Small Things.

The cognitive issues most of us experienced during the pandemic were widely acknowledged and explained, but also jarring. The sustained levels of stress we were under actually changed our brains. The high levels of cortisol secreted as a result of the stress we were under shrunk the part of our brains that deals with memory and emotional regulation explaining why most of us couldn’t remember anything and were quicker to anger than usual.

In the mental health and well-being education I was doing for King County at the time, I urged people to acknowledge this as a part of the landscape and accommodate it. We needed better documentation of projects and decisions to allow for the memory issues we were having. And we needed more grace and forgiveness as we navigated our quick tempers and surprising emotions.

But when vaccines became available and the feeling of being under immediate threat subsided, I started to wonder if my memory and focus would ever recover. I did a little research and figured out there are things I could do to help my brain get out of fight or flight mode and re-develop working memory and emotion regulation that is so important at home and work.

I learned that our brains need help recovering from what we’ve been through and the ways we can help are:

• • Experience new things

• • Exercise

• • Do things that bring you joy like singing and dancing

• • Practice Mindfulness

I also learned that those brain synapses carved by the trauma of the pandemic are quick to reactivate which means we easily fall back into the behavior patterns we’ve used to protect ourselves over the past two years. Those patterns served us well then, but continuing to function that way we run the risk of developing mental health conditions. Have you SEEN the mental health data in the wake of the pandemic?? ,The World Health Organization says there has been a 25% increase in anxiety and depression.

Just as pandemic recovery has to restore supply chains and make labor more dependable, we need to support the full cognitive and emotional recovery of our employees. They need the time, space and support to engage in the practices and activities that will help them heal. There are programs and benefits organizations can offer to aid in this recovery: mindfulness classes, generous leave, flexibility and mental health benefits.

And employees need to work in an environment that does not retraumatize them. Next week I will talk more about the implications of this for an organization – how we inadvertently hold trauma in practices we developed during the pandemic and how we need to purposefully move out of those to recover.