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After more than two years of pandemic life, many people are familiar with the worry and fear that can be triggered by a sore throat, a snort, or fatigue: Do I have covid-19? This thought often causes a rush to grab the coronavirus test kit at your nearest home or find a test site. But sometimes, when the test turns negative, the result can have a seemingly miraculous effect.
“I felt tired this morning, maybe a sore throat. Was that a sign of a headache?” Vice staff senior writer Shayla Love tweeted, noting that her boyfriend had recently tested positive. “He did the test, it was negative, I immediately felt 100% good.
“It’s funny how you start to feel better once the covid test comes back negative,” another person tweeted.
For some experts, this experience reflects the link between body and mind. “We’ve learned that social, emotional, and behavioral factors influence health,” said Kaz Nelson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine. “This mind-body connection should not be underestimated. It is real and very powerful.”
But before exploring the mind-body connection when it comes to coronavirus testing, Nelson and other experts want us to emphasize that test methods are not 100 percent reliable and that rapid home antigen testing is widely used. in particular, they can produce false negatives that lead people to mistakenly believe that they are not infectious.
Also, it’s important to remember that the symptoms of covid, whether it’s from acute infections or “long covid,” are not “imaginary symptoms that we can simply imagine far away,” Nelson said. “There is a real health problem, a real consequence for the neurological system and other organ systems in the body.”
The key question, he said, is, “How do we understand this powerful mind-body connection” in the context of all the other sources of information we have?
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To have a “nuanced understanding” of the different ways people can react to the trials and tribulations of living with covid-19, it is critical to recognize the effects the pandemic has had on our lives, wrote Lekeisha Sumner. clinical psychologist, in an email.
“The public has had to deal with the effects of considerable uncertainty, mixed public health messages, stigma and fears associated with infection, changes in our social and economic circumstances, prolonged fears of infection. , changes in daily habits and the grief associated with climbing. rates of illness and death, although they are expected to work at pre-pandemic levels, “Sumner wrote. “We are living with extraordinarily high levels of prolonged stress levels with fragmented social networks.”
Worrying about getting covid, in particular, is often a major source of stress for many people, and the human body can react to certain stressors with physiological responses, said Rosalind Dorlen, a clinical psychologist and a member of the psychiatric department. Overlook Medical Center. a Summit, NJ
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“The whole covid climate has triggered stress responses,” Dorlen said, due to the ramifications of becoming infected. After all, a positive or negative result could be the difference between continuing to live or needing to isolate yourself and potentially developing more serious outcomes of the infection, such as a long covid.
“Every time our brain is anticipating the consequences of something and then assessing the threat and then responding to or focusing on that threat, this can influence the experience of [physical] “When this threat is removed, it leads to relief and a decrease in sensitivity to the body and symptoms.”
Some regions of the brain are responsible for detecting unpleasant stimuli, such as pain, while other areas are involved in the emotional response to these sensations and how much attention you pay to them, according to Nelson. This emotional response, he said, can increase or decrease a person’s sensitivity to physical feelings. He added that a negative coronavirus test is an “indicator of socio-emotional behavior that causes relief” and could change someone’s emotional response to their symptoms.
For example, Dorlen said, if you take several deep breaths or say to yourself, “Oh, I’m fine,” after receiving a negative result, you may feel stress and anxiety begin to subside.
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Another possible explanation for why you may feel better after a negative test may have to do with the nature of the symptoms, said Albert Ko, chair of the Department of Microbial Disease Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. . Common mild symptoms, such as sore throat, congested nose or runny nose or feeling tired, can have several causes, many of which are “very transient,” he said.
“You wake up in the morning, you probably have your nose covered in allergies. It gets a little postnasal drip. It hurts your neck,” he said. “Then you get tested and the symptoms will probably go away because most of the sore throat and postnasal drip get better during the day.”
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Still, Ko said, just because you take a negative test and you feel better doesn’t mean you can be absolutely sure you don’t have covid. “If you have a negative test, but you have a strong suspicion that you have been exposed, you should take another test,” a day or two later, he said.
Among those who use rapid antigen testing, “there are a lot of people who get false negatives even when they have covid,” Nelson said. “If your symptoms subside and this is a false negative test, then of course this is working against our infection mitigation and control goals.”
Actions, he said, should be reported by multiple sources of information other than evidence, including physical symptoms, risk of exposure, and community spread rates. “These are all sources of information that you want to consider when making decisions about your behavior.”