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As neuroscientists, we will drop/cancel/arrange life around experiments, grant proposals, manuscript submissions, etc... without hesitating; but we stop and think about the impact of participating in a passion outside of work will have on work. For me, working from home during covid helped me to see the imbalance and provided me with the time and opportunity to address the imbalance. I have given myself permission to pursue my passions outside of work with the same commitment and dedication that I have given to my career. It was not easy, and I felt a lot of guilt at first (almost like I was having an affair on work if I chose prioritise another passion).

I learn from the COVID-19 pandemic that our hippocampus could be so confused... Let me explain it, it supposes that the hippocampus is related to the identification of the environment, we can distinguish the differences between a concert hall versus a restaurant, and as a consequence, we behave differentially in both places. But, what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic isolation?... suddenly the university and our home were the same places (the same as the work or elementary school, etc) at the same time in the same place we had to take our classes, in our bedroom, kitchen, study or whatever place in our house. That was the difficulty for our hippocampus, the main expectative was, "It's home, the place for rest, watching TV, playing video games, etc" However in the pandemic, we change that to; "Now is the office, the university, the seminar hall, etc", Huge change for processing!!. Consequently, our behavior started to change, and we tried to adapt, but sometimes our hippocampus failed. For example, the guy who was walking in underwear while somebody was having an interview; the guy who was having a meeting with a kitty filter; the students in pajamas in class. All these examples are a sample of hippocampus failures, at the beginning, we were having trouble in adaptation, concentration, in attention, because the context said it's a place to rest, but the reality said is your workplace now!!. Nowadays, we have to understand that the new forms of communication, interaction, and participation will be with us forever. In my case, I use the new technologies as a tool for better communication, and for a new form of interviews, but only as a tool. In my work, I'm learning to separate my private life, some times is easy to say: "We zoom on Sunday" "We zoom at night" etc, but it's not ok, we need our private spaces and our family deserves their spaces with us.