To support your wellness through the COVID19 Pandemic, I have created a series of posts titled Emotional Fitness. In the first Emotional Fitness post I described 3 common reactions to the Pandemic. A big one was your mind’s attempt to save you by using its fight-flight-freeze strategies, all of which can be useful for very short periods of time, but are not effective in the long run. In this post I offer 4 tips to ease your mind, and in the next post I will share 4 tips to refuel your resilience.
So, what does your mind need stay grounded and not spiral into an increasingly frenzied use of its fight-flight-freeze strategies?
Here are 2 “do’s” and 2 “don’ts” for you. Let’s start with the “don’ts”…
1. DON’T expect usual levels of competence and effectiveness in either yourself or in what is available to meet your needs
“Wait, what? But I need to be twice as on top of everything, not less!” I know, but we are all going be quite imperfect as we learn and adapt to all the ongoing changes around us. So be as gentle and patient as you can with yourself, while your mind learns as fast as it can how to best navigate this new world of ours.
“And what do you mean that I shouldn’t expect a great fit in what’s available to meet my needs, just as I need more of that!” Yes, but the world has shrunk significantly and we don’t know exactly when it’s going to expand again or what that will look like. That might be the bad news, but the good news is that to be ok we don’t have to meet our needs perfectly or in the same way as they were before. What we must find is that sweet spot of getting our needs met “enough”, whatever that is for each of us. You will probably find yourself becoming quite creative at maximizing what is available to you.
Think about it as getting to that refreshing sip of water drop by drop, rather than by opening a faucet.
2. DON’T expect that a strategy/decision will work the next day or the next week
Things are changing fast and our available response may not be powerful enough to sustain us for the long haul. That refreshing sip of water that you earned drop by drop will need to be replenished more often and in different ways. Make micro-decisions that seem fitting for one day or week, then re-assess what might work for the next. And remember the “don’t” #1 above: you are adapting to a lot of changes in a very short period of time, so be gentle and patient with yourself and you learn how to navigate all this!
Ok, so what are the “do’s”?
1. The first and perhaps most important one is:
Peek at the future but stay in the present
In other words, peek at the future just long enough to stay informed and make decisions that must be made today, but keep your mind focused mostly in the present.
As you are reading this, your mind is already getting grumpy at you for even considering such a thing: “And how could that be possibly helpful?” it might say. This is because I’m inviting your mind to ease on its number one strategy: fight. But it’s actually essential that we perfect that balancing act, especially now.
Here is why:
Our mind are designed to scan the unknown for dangers and problems, and right now we do not know what the future will bring, so the more our mind looks at the future, the more problems it will predict and the more anxious we will get. And what does the mind do when we get anxious? It goes into into overdrive trying to solve all those problems, of course. But as you probably already know, you can’t always solve future problems (especially those that might never come to materialize), so your mind ends up maybe solving a couple of problems, but mostly spinning its wheels and exhausting you in the process. So, peeking at the future by staying in the present is an essential practice. At which point you might ask: “How much in the future, exactly, am I allowed to look at, and what do you mean by the present?” Here is the answer: the more anxious you feel, the shorter the present you should focus on. On some days, that could be a few months, and on other days that will be a few min! Your anxiety will tell you…
2. The second “do” is this:
TRUST yourself to be able to handle it (whatever it is)! Be careful about your mind’s tendency to terrorize you.
Remember, our minds are designed to scan the environment (present and future) for problems, and the media is designed to provide our minds with plenty of scary material…yikes! While COVID19 has been a devastating experience for a number of communities globally, it’s equally true that change and uncertainty doesn’t mean only disaster, it has also meant (and it will continue to mean) possibilities. And when it comes to possibilities, if we can envision them, imagine them, and believe in them, we get to shape them too (Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a great read if you are looking for some inspiration in trusting your own power to shape history).
But whether we are going to face disaster or we are going to re-imagine our world in more just ways, it will make a big difference to your wellbeing and inner strength if you can trust yourself to handle whatever might come, so that you can meet it with all you got. Again, don’t let your mind exhaust you in the preparation for battle, keep your strength for the battle itself!
Now you have the 2 “don’t” and the 2 “do’s” to help your mind stay grounded during the Pandemic. In the next post, I’ll offer 4 tips to refuel your resilience. I’ll see you there!