It is a large virus that when I talk or cough it drops to the ground at only one metre twenty. It is a single-stranded ribonucleic acid virus, and it has the spine-shaped glycoprotein that recognises the cells of the lung alveoli and uses them to replicate, stays on surfaces for a while and if we touch them we load our hands with virus; that protein dissolves with soap. The best thing is that it doesn't stay in the body. It now affects 3 per cent or 17 people per million. Every year the flu infects ten thousand per million. The Spanish flu of 1918 infected one in twenty people. The 50% of those infected with the current virus will have no symptoms and may be unknowingly contagious.
All this is to say that the virus is not in the air, that we can avoid it because it is on surfaces, that we keep the five feet of personal proximity and wash our hands with soap because there is no better virucide than it, and none cheaper.
House confinement tests our identity because we are a body made to move as much as possible and that is now restricted.
We are social mammals, our mind has a displaced part of it inhabiting the world around us, the world itself being a part of our mind that is now shrinking and limiting.
Confinement also limits who we are; made up of group relations, we are connected by night through dreams and by day with the environment. An important part of our identity is what we do, what we spend our time on, and now we can't do what we always do.
All this is held back in confinement and causes stress.. If we confine an animal in the wild, after a while it will show signs, if it is a dog, its hair will fall out with somatic disorders afterwards.
If we do not move very often from middle age onwards, we will experience joint discomfort, because, although it may not seem like it, osteoarthritis, like atheroma plaques, starts very early. Exercise can improve and slow down inflammatory processes by producing anti-inflammatory cytokines. If sedentary life persists for a while, these cytokines will pass to the brain and alter some of its structures, resulting in depression and anxiety. If we have mild hypertension it will go up without us noticing it. If we don't move our abdominals we will get constipation. We will sleep badly as we abandon healthy habits. This means that we must move our bodies every hour, physical exercise increases cerebral and joint irrigation, improves our mood by the production of dopamine and enkephalins, so it must be fundamental.
Light meals with a 60% of fruit and vegetables, dairy products and nuts, almonds, pistachios and walnuts, which, together with that are sedatives and provide us with vitamin D that our skin will not be able to synthesise at home due to the lack of sun. As we do not move our muscles enough, we will lose muscle mass, sarcopenia, which leads to the need to eat meat, proteins and other foods that we all know contain them to prevent the loss of muscle mass.
We should not continue to eat as if we were active, but rather in small quantities, improving breakfast as the main meal, because it is the least fattening. For breakfasts, I recommend blending a variety of fruits in a blender and adding two or three pre-ground nuts. I give a lot of information on this subject in my book Mediterranean diet and physical exercise.
Having a group constitution it is crucial to be connected to our friends, colleagues, family and with very little television to keep us up to date with the dead, we know we can infect and be infected, it is enough.
Our body needs food and almost constant daily exercise to nourish the mind.
It needs a variety of stimuli as nourishment. Every day, it reads Don Quixote, travel books, humorous novels, history and professional subjects. On the other hand, our mental life is being healed, enriched andbecause the media have stopped their devastating work of presenting us with little characters in all areas, to show us what enriches, stimulates and capitalises our minds with people of real value and merit: soldiers, policemen, health workers, professionals in other areas who keep Spain running, setting an example of what they have real value for. And the crisis shows us some politicians who only care about their own interests and that we citizens are worth nothing to them, capable of lying, of interrupting the task of national salvation in which we are engaged in order to continue their demolishing, disruptive work, of fragmenting the unity we need.
The music is a stapleClassical music, if possible and according to taste, is what continues to move us through time. A saeta, flamenco, Spanish song, opera, as well as classics such as Mozart, Albeniz or Rodrigo.
Unfortunately, for years our society has been removing a fundamental element from free and pay television programming: the humour. We have a disruptive humour, with bad humour and most of it politicised or as a support for power. We have been deprived of musical films, films with humour, with intelligent dialogue, with plots accessible to those of us who are neither violent nor attracted by the catastrophes that modern special effects present us with. But it would be a good recipe to be able to watch films with human themes, as I say, humour, musicals, historical films, anything that stimulates healthy emotions. Even our children have deformed, strange cartoons with no possibility of identification with their characters.
The televised appearances by our militaryThey are doing us a lot of good, because they present us with honesty and good work, because our fragile trust in politicians who, since a hundred years of that respiratory virus, like this one, the now and provisionally weighted and valued as scientists, already knew that pandemics would come and will come with periodic pandemics.
I conclude by saying that to keep the body healthy we need culture and the arts. We have all the museums and libraries open, and discipline and concentration on daily tasks and physical exercise. But we know that the mind needs to become obsessive in times of crisis, and focus on a schedule similar to the one we had. It is a foundation of what we call mental hygiene.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Specialist in management training, group and couple therapies.