How Catching Covid Can Change Your Personality - Dr Diana Fleischman - #290

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Dr Diana Fleischman, and we're talking about how catching COVID can change your personality. When we get sick with a virus like COVID-19, our bodies respond, but our behavior and personality also change in a number of important ways, and sometimes it doesn't change back. So today, expect to learn why avoiding new foods when you're ill makes evolutionary sense, whether needing the bathroom reduces your belief in free will, why extraversion is reduced when you're sick, what Diana thinks about evolutionary psychology's place in mindfulness and much more. This is just super fascinating evolutionary psychology stuff, peering under the hood into the source code of why we do the things we do, why we act, the ways we act. Yeah, I really, really enjoyed this one. Lots to take away and I'd be interested to know if you've noticed any odd impact that being ill with COVID or any other illness has had on you. Feel free to drop a comment in the YouTube channel or at ChrisWillX wherever you follow me. Also, before we get into the sponsor for the show, don't forget to press subscribe, please. Thank you. The little subscribe button on your app. Just give it a little tap, tap it away. Makes me very happy. So if you do that, that would be great. In other news, this episode is brought to you by brand new sponsor, the Hybrid Pillow. The Hybrid Pillow is the first pillow to combine traditional comfort with revolutionary memory foam support technologies. The pillow is basically a blend of memory foam on the outside, and in the middle, it's encasing a 50-50 blend of duck, feather and down. So it's the best option if you're looking for a supportive pillow that has all the comfort of a traditional one. Having a hybrid mix pillow provides the orthopedic support of memory foam, which relieves pressure buildup around the neck area, keeps your head and spine aligned, while the feather and down core softens the pillow and make sure that you stay cool and comfortable throughout the night. If you've tried other memory foam pillows but found them too firm and uncomfortable, this is for you. It will help reduce muscle soreness in the morning, it keeps your spine properly aligned throughout the night and reduces how much you wake up from head movement. On top of that, they guarantee a better night's sleep or you get your money back. So head to thehybridpillow.com and use the code MW20 for 20% off everything site-wide. That's thehybridpillow.com or there is a link in the show notes below that you can follow and just use the code MW20 for 20% off plus that guaranteed better night's sleep or your money back thehybridpillow.com. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Diana Fleischman.
Diana Fleischman, welcome to the show.

**Diana Fleischman** (3:05)
Thank you.

**Chris Williamson** (3:06)
Pleasure to have you here. Talking about whether COVID can change your personality, what even is that question? What are we on about?

**Diana Fleischman** (3:15)
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 goals and priorities 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. What I'm thinking about 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. 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.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
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.

**Diana Fleischman** (4:35)
Yes. 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. 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 because it's the best way for you to spray everybody with copies of itself. 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 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 anti-fever medications when they're sick. I never do because the fever is really the best possible thing for you to be doing.