Managing Anxiety in Stressful Times
It’s a beautiful, sunny morning. You wake up and the thought of “playing hooky” goes through your mind. If you had your way, you would stay home and play catch with your dog in the backyard. Or, perhaps, you would finally get to that spring cleaning from two years ago. You see yourself lounging on the couch reading your favorite novel. The thoughts are pleasant and calming.
It’s a beautiful, sunny morning. You wake up to the sound of a newscast that says restaurants, coffee houses, and public places of meeting are closed, and people are being “advised” to stay home — which is code for “Do not go out, or else!” Your dog, the spring cleaning, and the book and couch are all still there, but these are no longer pleasant nor calming thoughts. Instead, you find yourself filled with fear and anxiety.
“Why is this so hard?” you ask yourself.
The human brain is an anticipation and solution engine. Outside our conscious awareness, we are constantly on the lookout for what comes next so that we can choose proper actions. Right now, many things are uncertain and there is no way to correctly anticipate important aspects of life as a whole — and our brain knows this. The present moment escapes us because of the indeterminate big picture.
The truth is no one ever knows what the future holds, and we all have experienced rapid, all-encompassing changes in life — marriage, having a child, a promotion, starting or ending college, and the like. All of this is easier to handle because we have some sort of mental image of what to expect and we usually want or chose the change. As for not knowing the future, we tolerate that because of our ability to notice patterns. If we have gone to work and come home every day and received our paycheck at the end of two weeks for years and years, then we feel safe in our anticipation the same will continue. Now, however, our familiar life has been interrupted. Everything is unclear and we have no assuring pattern with which to calm ourselves. It has been said multiple times on various news-related shows this is “unprecedented.” It is true. The fact you feel anxious makes sense.
Many of you now have been given mandatory time off and could spend the day today playing with your puppy or chatting with your children or cleaning your house. Yet, you find yourself spending hours combing websites looking for news. The need to do this may feel insatiable and you may not understand why. Your mental search engine is looking for answers on which to build predictions. Few-to-none exist right now. In the face of what is going on in the world, enjoying the day feels wrong and trite — and yet, doing that would most likely be the best course of action.
So, how on earth do you do that? How do you let go of all the upheaval, threat, and fear in the world and pull out Monopoly or a favorite mystery writer’s book? Is it even a responsible thing to do to ignore all of this?
No, of course not, but that is how the brain works — “all or nothing.” The goal is not to ignore the present situation. We simply do not want to carry the weight of it all day long. Imagine if you have a bucket and your job was to fill it with bricks, carry it across the yard, and empty it into a large ditch. You can manage that job because offload the bricks regularly. If you had to keep holding the bricks with no respite, you would break. The ability to put the bucket down gives you the chance to regroup, heal, and refresh. We need to put the mental bricks down sometimes to rebuild our natural reserves.
Again, you might ask, how on earth do you do that?
Consider these ideas to start.
Time Chunking. The world is uncertain right now. Feeling irritable, anxious, and upset is normal. You really do not know what next week holds. However, you probably can guess what the next two or three hours hold. Therefore, limit your thinking to what you are more likely to be able to predict. If it is 10:00 am, think only about what will happen until noon. Carry a notepad around and if something pops in your mind that will happen after noon and you need to remember it, write it down. Every couple of hours, you can pull the notepad out and check it for anything you need for the next two hours and then go back to limiting your thinking. If a worry about next week comes up, feel free to write it down and then push it away. The next skill will help you do this more easily.
Schedule Worry Time. Each day when you wake up, start the day with fifteen or twenty minutes of pleasant activities. Then, decide at what time in the day you can sit down and actively and mindfully “worry”. The other word for this is “plan”. If you are faithful to sit down and use your problem-solving skills to attack your problems daily as best you can, you will find your worry and rumination reducing. Thinking two hours at a time becomes much easier if you know there will be time in the day where you can put concerted effort toward your worries. It also helps to have a sense of internal permission to set your concerns aside. Find a way to check on news only at certain points in the day and not every few minutes. Set alerts from trusted news sources (CDC, CNN, or WHO, for example), keep your phone in another room, or set specific times of day to check only. All these will allow you rest in between and that rejuvenation is necessary to keep you going strong.
10:10:10 Technique. Another way to help your brain with its need to guess the future is the 10:10:10 technique. To do this, whenever you must do something difficult, you would ask yourself, “How will I feel about this in ten minutes…ten hours…ten days…ten weeks…ten months…etc.?” For our current situation, in ten minutes you will likely still feel anxious and uncertain. Same with ten hours. In ten days, however, it is likely we will have much more understanding of our situation and in ten weeks, things will most likely be working their way back to (a possibly somewhat new) normal. Even if you cannot say what will happen next, you might feel better just knowing this is unlikely to last forever.
See Yourself Coping Well. Ultimately, a great deal of change is bound to happen, more for some people than others. It will not help you to ignore these hard realities. What might help you is to envision yourself handling the change well. Give your brain a visual picture of what a feared outcome would look like if you handled it well. Suppose you lose your job. Instead of seeing your worst-case-scenario, imagine handling the news with concern but calm. See yourself picking up the phone to call your nearest unemployment or other government agency, seeking out what the next step is. Perhaps you see yourself asking friends and family for help and receiving it. Actually see yourself handling everything with calm and wisdom. Stop. Breathe. Look for solutions. Most of life’s challenges can be navigated and overcome.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to this current crisis. It is, as mentioned, unprecedented. Mistakes are and will be made and anxiety will happen. The important message of this article is to let you know that anxiety will be your companion for a while and that is normal. It is not wrong or weak or bad to feel fear. You also do have some choice and control, even if only over yourself for short bursts at a time. Take the control you can when you can and learn to trust yourself with the changes that lie ahead. You can do this. One day…one hour…at a time.
