I have a journal with 102 categories of medical observations about myself, and over the longer term it gives me insights about my body/mind system that I could hardly gain from literature. Now because it fits into this topic, I’ll share the latest insight it gave me. Of course, strictly speaking it’s only my own theory about myself. But you might find elements in it that you can generalize.
So: both after the earthquake in Nepal, and now in the coronavirus pandemic, and in one more situation in the past, I observed that my body/mind system can switch to a kind of high-alert mode more or less immediately, and then stay there for considerable time (weeks to months).
I’ll attempt to illustrate this with the time around the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. @natalia_skoczylas had arrived 4 days before me and gone through the first 7.8M earthquake already when I arrived. She and everyone with that experience would notice all the little aftershocks, and I wouldn’t notice anything. Natalia would scold me for scaring her by accidentally pushing against our office table (because it felt like an aftershock). Then there was a second, 7.3M earthquake, and afterwards I was also in that high-alert mode, being very sensitive to any slight aftershock and getting scared by any sudden movement that felt like one. We’d make little competitions of guessing the magnitude of the aftershock and then looking it up online, and quite often we were accurate earthquake sensors.
The interesting observation to me is how it only took one un-ignorable moment of danger to switch me to this high-alert mode. Some call this trauma or a psychological adjustment disorder. I think it’s just an operation mode of the nervous system that we’re largely unaware of but that is very useful in times of danger. It’s also normal that this kind of high-alert mode fades again after a few months without that danger. Just be patient. Don’t stress yourself about “having anxiety” or something.
tl;dr / back to the topic: I find it useful to be aware of being in “high-alert mode” because it helps to react to statistics more rationally. Such as, by calculations (cf. micromort). I mean, numbers are just not compatible with a primal flight reflex, while both are useful. 