Corona Fatigue

Being hooked to online updates about the virus is causing anxiety and sleeplessness. Here’s how to use social media better

- Lindsay De Freitas

It's 11pm. She crawls into bed and unlocks her phone. Checks Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. Repeats.

When she next checks the time, it’s two hours later. She started off scrolling and scrolling and then got drawn down the rabbit hole of Covid-19 conspiracy theory videos and articles.

This has happened almost every night since the national lockdown started on 27 March, Cape Town-based schoolteacher Kelly-Ann Petersen* admits.

Before she knows it, it’s 2am and she realises that yet again she’s going to be getting too little sleep.

“The funny thing is that every morning when I wake up, exhausted and blearyeyed, I tell myself I’m not going to fall into the same trap again that night,” Kelly says. “But then every night I end up convincing myself that I’ll just quickly check social media before I doze off, and it happens again.”

Prior to national stay-at-home orders being implemented, Kelly would always spend a few minutes checking what everyone on her social media feeds was up to before going to bed but was far more disciplined about logging off when she felt sleepy.

“These days it’s news about the coronavirus that keeps me online. I keep checking to see what people are sharing about the pandemic and lockdown rules. I’m checking to keep abreast of everything, but a lot of what people are posting on social media actually riles me up,” she says, adding that on a few occasions she’s even replied to some particularly thoughtless posts and landed up in spats.