4 Tips to refuel your resilience during the Pandemic

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.

May you be safe

May you be healthy

May you find some ease during these times!

4 Tips to Ease Your Mind During The Pandemic

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!

3 Common Reactions to the Pandemic (MORE RESOURCES AT THE BOTTOM)

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?

1. 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)

2. 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

3. 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:

1. Denial (e.g., “What’s all the fuss about?”)

2. 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!

Resilience and adaptability through COVID-19 (RESOURCES at the bottom)

“What do I need?” is the magic question that unlocks our power to face the challenges ahead. It’s like weight training: the heavier the weight, the stronger the muscle must be to lift it without injuring (or lift it at all). This means that the greater the challenge, the more we need to train and nurture the “muscles” that will help us rise to the moment.

And COVID-19 is bringing quite the moment!

Given the scale of the pandemic, the potentially dire consequences, the onslaught of alarming news, and the escalating restrictions we are asked to comply with, it’s no surprise that we feel anxious! As a species, we are designed to detect danger, and at the moment the messages are not exactly subtle...

This all presents our minds with a unique challenge that does not naturally fit with our beautifully designed problem-solving capacities.

So, what do we need? There are MANY RESOURCES circulating on the internet (I LISTED a number of them AT THE END OF THIS POST; two of them are designed specifically for health providers). They are all wonderful and very effective.

However, your mind is going to try to steer all of your energy away from what you need and towards solving the wrong problem.

How so?

When we feel unsettled, our mind tries to help us by doing what it does best: creative problem-solving. Now, our mind is extremely good at solving problems. What it’s really bad at is solving feelings.

And COVID-19 presents a unique challenge indeed, which doesn’t have an obvious solution: it’s invisible, not easily controllable, we don’t know much about it, and it can be lethal.

This creates in most of us two overwhelming feelings: loss (e.g., of our sense of safety, freedom of movement, income, connections) and uncertainty (about what the future will bring for us, our loved ones, and the world).

Our mind doesn’t have a concrete solution to prevent those feelings from rising (we really can’t stop change from happening and we can’t predict the future), and so it goes to task trying to minimize the actual feelings or get rid of them altogether.

Have you ever tried getting rid of feelings? Not a winning proposition…

But that doesn’t stop our mind from trying! And to do so it begins using shortcuts:

• We minimize (it’s no big deal!): both the feelings of loss and uncertainty are gone

• We rush to catastrophizing (it’s all lost!): at least the feeling of uncertainly is gone, even though feelings of loss are intensified (when stressed, the mind is all for playing whack-a-mole if there are any short terms benefits at all)

• We use an all-or-none strategy (I’m either 100% safe or 100% unsafe!): the feeling of uncertainty is minimized, but again not without side effects

Here is a full list of our mind’s common shortcuts (we usually have a couple of favorites that we tend to cycle through, find yours!)

These shortcuts might relieve the immediate sting of feeling loss or uncertainty, but we are no further ahead in copying with our reality.

And we are going to feel loss and uncertainty for a while. In fact, we always feel them, as change is the only constant in life, but many of us are not used to feeling them quite so intensely for quite so long.

What is required of us is resilience and adaptability. How do we access them?

Our greatest wisdom (i.e., resilience and adaptability) emerges from a state of centered (not overwhelmed) alertness, which requires a certain amount of inner resources. So answering the magic question (“what do I need?”) and learning to sustain the feelings of loss and uncertainty is key.

Don’t let your mind distract you by hijacking all of your inner resources to seek ineffective solutions to the wrong problems (i.e., trying not to feel the feelings of loss and uncertainty).

You need your attention to remain squarely on finding micro-moments of refueling in the midst of all the fast-paced changes (that’s a “problem” your mind is actually good at solving!). The more effectively you take care of yourself, the more creatively and powerfully you are going to be able to rise to the moment and stay the course.

As you become increasingly more effective at refueling, you can use those resources to actualize your values (e.g., caring for others) and positively impact what you have influence over (e.g., your loved ones, your neighborhood, your clients).

Our journey through COVID-19 is going to feel more like a marathon than a sprint. Treat it as such! Take care of yourself, pace yourself, be gentle with yourself. Give your full power the chance to emerge.

May COVID-19 allow us to recognize our interconnection and interdependence, and broaden our hearts to include everyone. May it inspire us to support and invest in each other; and not just in the short term, but as a new way of life.

With loss comes the possibility of renewal. We can’t choose to avoid loss, but we can choose and commit to bring about renewal.

May you be well, may you be safe, may you feel cared for!

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these resources are for you!

(share them widely)

Befriend your imperfections

As we enter a new year—and a new decade at that—many of us (re)commit to “self-improvement projects”. For most of us New Year resolutions are motivated by what we have come to dislike about ourselves. This means that our desire for change often carries pretty heavy judgments about qualities or habits we deem less than ideal.

While desiring growth makes the world go around, the judgments that fuel that desire can prove tricky.

At the core of our judgments is a difficulty coming to terms with the fact that we are deeply human. While our human bodies have the capacity to manifest our highest aspirations, they do not lead us there automatically or effortlessly. And so we fall short, often. That, in and of itself, is not so much a problem (it’s just part of being human); what becomes a problem is what we do with that realization.

On the one hand, looking honestly at our humanity and imperfections is not an easy proposition; on the other hand, no change is possible without that. Therein lies the problem.

To be sure, our difficulty in looking at ourselves honestly is not due to human nature being intrinsically evil or flawed, which would imply that we simply don’t want to or can’t change. Looking honestly at our humanity and imperfections is difficult because while we thrive through love (hardly a sign of an evil nature…), we are profoundly vulnerable beings (both physically and emotionally) and therefore fiercely protective of ourselves. When we feel scared and in need of protection, physiologically our capacity to learn shuts down. It’s a simple equation from there:

no learning = no growth

Having opinions and preferences is what inspires us to take positive steps in our lives. However, the heavier the judgment (read: shame, anger, hatred, repulsion) these opinions and preferences carry, the more likely they are to trigger our flight/fight/freeze reactions. The more these reactions are present, the more arduous the process of learning and changing becomes.

When we feel threatened by our own judgments, we tend to “flight” by denying our imperfections, “fight” by berating ourselves or lashing out, or “freeze” in paralyzing shame. We can only change what we honestly assess and engage with, and our bodies won’t let us fully come in contact with what feels too painful or dangerous to recognize.

Not only all of these strategies (i.e., denying, berating/lashing out, and shaming) prevent us from growing, they also impair our empathy, compassion, and solidarity for others. “Fighting” by berating ourselves leads us to pity others (i.e., when we accept in others what we find unacceptable in ourselves, in essence we say that something is “not good enough for me” but is “good enough for you”); “fighting” by lashing out may make us less kind by overwhelming our ability to empathize and emotion regulate; and “freezing” keeps us disconnected from others altogether and completely focused inward. However, “flighting” by denying our imperfections is particularly dangerous.

When we devalue our imperfections (read: our humanity) to the point of denying the qualities and habits that make us stray from our values, we foster a specific type of delusion. At both the individual and structural levels, we become invested in thinking that we are “better than”, and consequently view others as “less than”.

This is the fatal link between lack of self-compassion and lack of compassion for others. Denial of imperfections cannot but foster a sense of superiority and a self-righteous entitlement over, or repulsion towards, the “less than”. A very dangerous proposition indeed.

Paradoxically, then, the best opportunities for growth emerge from the least judgmental engagement with our imperfections. Since lack of empathy makes transformation nearly impossible, to become our best selves we must first accept deeply who we are.

Improving oneself starts with loving oneself fully.

Blaming and shaming is a dead end (at least as long as we have a human body designed to protect us). Taking full, compassionate responsibility for our humanity opens the door to immense growth. At both the individual and systemic levels, it is the full acceptance of our imperfections that opens us up to the vision and skills needed to grow and change.

So befriend your imperfections and create the life you want, inside and outside!