No OP but similar situation. It's easy to make the difference: I've been in terribly stressfull situations before. I went to live in Mali, started business, got Malaria, lost everything to the war and had to start all over, going back to my country.

It's not the same. Covid got me bad.

But strangely, only after the third dose of vaccine. Right after it in fact, and ever since.

But it's possible we will learn we are coupounding effects on a lot of fronts: stress from the situation, covid itself, unexpected side effects from the vaccine, and maybe something else.

Hard to tell.

But yeah, this is not regular run of off the mill, stress response.

For myself: because I went through a couple of real world crises without batting an eye and the moment of onset coincides perfectly with the moment of onset of COVID-19.

As for the upheaval: some experienced it as such, for me it actually reduced stress considerably because I didn't have to travel for work anymore which normally would take about 25% of my time and was always super stressful, it also caused a lot of follow on stress because that 25% needed to be made up for somehow.

I'm no longer spending 2+ hours in traffic on 2 of the most busy expressways in the nation each day. We've had (until recently) enough funds to ignore the losses from not working.

My stress level really didn't rise, but my ability to move and do things fell off a cliff.