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. In a second post I offered 4 tips to ease your mind. Now I will share 4 tips to refuel your resilience.
So, let’s get right to it!
Resilience strategy #1: Slow down
Remember that we have been thrown on a very steep learning curve as we have been asked to adapt to a lot of changes in a very short time. Think of yourself in “energy saving mode”. Allot more time for everything, from getting up in the morning, to think through your grocery list. In other words, don’t try to keep the same level of effectiveness and productivity as you had before. Much of your energy is going towards adapting to all the changes and keeping yourself and your life afloat. Give yourself as much extra time as your life allows for.
Resilience strategy #2: Create new life rhythms
A lot of your routines have been disrupted and many events have been cancelled. Your mind needs to have something to look forward, it needs to know when a break is coming. If your mind only sees losses and nothing good coming its way, it will start panicking.
Have you ever been really hungry? If you also knew when you were going to eat, you were probably annoyed, but ultimately ok. But if you didn’t know when you were going to eat, you probably felt panicky. That’s because it takes a lot of training for our minds to learn to tolerate uncertainty while feeling discomfort. And most of us are still in training!
So here is how you can give your mind some “breaks”:
Offer your mind something to look forward to by giving some cadence to your days and the week. Create and plan for some “special” events (e.g., breakfast for dinner, game night, alone time in nature early in the morning, weekly video chat with a good friend, a new beautiful puzzle, a picnic on your porch under a full moon, a wellness or fun online event) and change them often enough for your mind to stay excited about them. The good news is that our mind is beautifully resilient, it doesn’t need to solve all problems to feel ok. It just needs to know that some comforts are coming.
Resilience strategy #3: Don’t go at it alone!
Some of us are used to be the ones in charge or might value doing things for ourselves by ourselves. If there was ever a time to revel in our deep interconnectedness, that is now! Ask openly for what you need (at home, at work) and give yourself what you need. And I mean what you need, NOT necessarily what you want. Be careful about indulging, a treat (whatever that is for you) here and there is lovely, but remember that we don’t have as much resilience so we don’t have as much room to recover if the treat also depletes us.
Mobilize ALL of your resources (social, spiritual…), this is the time to lean on them!
Resilience strategy #4: Keep your priorities and values front and center!
Among all the things you don’t have control over right now, this is definitely one you have FULL control over: no one and nothing can take your values away from you! Now, values are different from goals. A value like kindness, is not the same as a goal like “today I’ll reach out to my friend who lives alone”. Values are what orients us in life, they are never finished and they can be channeled into an infinite number of goals. And we can keep practicing them no matter what!
What are your most cherished values (e.g., kindness, family, patience, community, caring, giving…)? Center your day around them, perhaps choosing one for the day or per week.
The more space you give to your values, the more your life will feel meaningful and fulfilling.
Thank you for allowing me to center my day around my value of supporting you and of sharing what counseling and psychology have to offer.