To support your wellness through the COVID19 Pandemic, I have created a series of posts titled Emotional Fitness. In this first Emotional Fitness post I highlight 3 common reactions to the Pandemic. In the next two posts I offer 4 tips to ease your mind and 4 tips to refuel your resilience.
Let’s start from where we are at! COVID19 has pulled the rug from under our feet and many of us are struggling to regain our balance.
As with all new experiences, when we find it difficult to name exactly what is happening to us, it is also much harder to identify what to do about it.
So, here’s what is happening to many of us:
1. We are grieving
2. Our mind is cycling through flight, fight, freeze reactions
3. We feel less resilient
1. Grief
The first common reaction to the Pandemic has to do with our emotions, specifically grief. There have been a lot of sudden changes, which for many of us has meant a lot of losses. Some losses may have been relatively “smaller” in scale (e.g., changes in work/school routines, awkward grocery shopping experiences, cancelled graduation or birthday parties), and some may have loomed large (e.g., loss of our sense of safety, of shelter or financial security, and even the loss of loved ones).
The “size” of the loss does not always correspond to the intensity of the grief.
This means that you might find yourself grieving deeply “smaller” losses and being surprisingly resilient as you face more significant ones. That is because grief “does us”, so to speak, we don’t “do it”. Grieving is painful, but fundamentally healthy and natural, as our minds are designed to process our sadness and disappointment around loss. Because of that, grief has its own rhythm, it comes and goes at its own pace. We don’t really get to decide how much to feel it or when to feel it or for how long. There is nothing to “fix”, nothing for us to do about it, except welcoming the sadness when it comes and letting it go when it leaves, while accessing support throughout it.
2. Flight, fight, freeze
The second common reaction to the Pandemic has to do with our minds. The mind can tell that we are feeling a bit disoriented and it will try to save us using all of its favorite strategies!
The first favorite strategy of the mind is fight. How does fight look like during the Pandemic?
Fixing/problem-solving: you might have been on the go since it all started trying to keep your life afloat (e.g., moving all your work online, applying for unemployment, researching business grants)
Overthinking, often fueled by reading the news! You might have been trying to predict what’s to come and what you can do about it
Preparing (e.g., gathering supplies…where did all the toilet paper go??)
All of these “fighting” strategies can be very helpful, even needed, in the short-term, but they become exhausting if they are sustained for too long.
The second strategy the mind uses to try to save us from feeling disoriented is flight. During the Pandemic, flight can look like:
Denial (e.g., “What’s all the fuss about?”)
Procrastination (e.g., “I’ll figure something out later about the groceries and the mask I need to get to the store”)
Avoiding the situation provides you with a break and allows you to slow down a bit, but again it’s not a helpful strategy in the long run as it doesn’t allow us to adapt to our new reality.
And when your mind gets really tired of fighting, and doesn’t think flighting will work either, it deploys its final strategy: freeze.
Freezing during the Pandemic might look more like depression. You might feel hopeless, like giving up or shutting down.
Once again, it’s perfectly ok to recognize that you are really tired and that it might be indeed time to shut down for the day and go to sleep, or that it might be time to do absolutely nothing for a bit. But it’s no fun nor does it improve our actual situation if we get stuck there for too long.
3. Less resilience
The last common reaction to the Pandemic has to do with our stamina. You might have noticed that you feel less resilient (e.g., you get irritated or discouraged more easily, you are more distractible or more easily fatigued). Where did our resilience go? How could I have changed so quickly?
You haven’t changed, but in a very short time we have been forced to meet a lot more needs in much fewer ways.
I think of this like having to put more eggs in fewer baskets, where the eggs are our needs, and the baskets are what we use to meet our needs. Not only we have to put more eggs in fewer baskets, but some baskets are missing altogether, some are lopsided, some have holes… In short, our well hones coping strategies are not as effective or not available at all.
Just as our emotions and our minds are asked to work overtime, we don’t seem to have the “umph” we need to sustain their efforts.
So, what can we do about it? First, these are two great mental health resources:
the new COVID19 Coach app (free for everyone)
Project Parachute (probono teletherapy for COVID19 Frontliners)
Check them out and share them widely!
You can also look at additional resources found at the bottom of the prior post. And in the next two posts I’ll offer 4 tips to ease your mind and 4 tips to refuel your resilience. I’ll see you there!