It’s about your psychological health and survival.
As the internet gets inundated with graphs and viral misinformation about COVID-19, and the many ramifications, it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of fear and start imagining a veritable apocalypse.
(It’s also just as easy to err in the other direction and erroneously say that everyone is just over-reacting to a flu bug).
But what’s hard to do in these times of high uncertainty and high anxiety, when the ground is shifting under us and very little is the same as it was two weeks ago, is to manage your internal state.
So here is a Five Step Action Plan to help you gain some equanimity during this unprecedented time:
Step One: Prepare, don’t panic.
There is a big difference between preparingand panicking.
If you’re preparing, you’re logically evaluating a situation, taking the necessary steps keep yourself safe, and monitoring for any major developments.
If you’re panicking, you’re probably not prepared, and likely won’t be able to prepare intelligently either. You become a liability to yourself and others.
So avoid the anxiety of feeling unprepared by actually preparing. Do your research, make a list of what you need, obtain those items, and create protocols to keep your home and surroundings (including workplace if applicable) a safe zone at all times.
Once you have this set up, and you can do it in half a day or less, you can move on to the next step:
Step Two: Operate in reality, not anxiety.
Anxiety is an exercise in future projection, according to the leading neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux.
It takes place in a different part of the brain than fear.
Fear is an instant response to a present danger.
Anxiety is an exercise of the imagination.
And some people are imagining the worst.
So here’s a fact that may help those who have major concerns about the economy, which is likely just about everyone.
During the Great Depression, there was no uptick in deaths. In fact, mortality rates actually improved. So people survived financial devastation. And we will survive the economic consequences of this.
However, there was one distinct category during the Great Depression where there were more deaths: Suicide.
Some people thought they lost everything when what they really lost was their savings, their investments, their businesses. But if you have your self, the people you love, and you all manage to stay healthy through this, you have everything.
The rest, while painful, can be rebuilt, just as it was built from nothing in the first place.
If life gets very tough and we have to struggle, it will make us stronger, it will make us more grateful, and we will bounce back.
The number one priority is to care for your health and your immunity, and adding unnecessary stress hurts both of those.
So do the inner work to have inner calm during all this.
Remember:
You cannot control every event in the outer world, but you can control your reactions to them.
This is an equation from former Brian Kight…
Event + Reaction = Outcome
One half of that equation is fixed. Now is the time to dial in the other half of it, work on your reactivity, and balance your inner world.
This leads us to:
Step Three: Create a self-care regime
While we are disconnecting from others during this time, the social implications of which are going to be staggering, what is going to come up is a lot of the feelings that we medicate through work, sex, the gym, socializing, and generally keeping busy.
The biggest challenge for many is to sit alone with themselves; for others, it’s to sit cooped up with their families pressing the buttons they haven’t worked to remove yet.
So your main job is to really take care of yourself, inside and out.
Make yourself a schedule and stick to it.
Don’t have a morning routine? Time to start one.
Don’t eat healthy meals and supplementation? Time to be the healthiest you’ve ever been.
Don’t have a meditation practice? Time to find one.
Don’t exercise? Find a great resource online and do it daily. And get outside or get fresh air while still social distancing.
Feeling depressed, alone, or anxious? Feel deeply into it, notice it, observe it, and get curious about it. When have you felt it before? What’s it really about? Our neuroses will attach to this new situation. It is a great time to feel in order to heal.
News getting you worked up? Download Freedom or a similar app, and only give yourself access to news and/or social media sites for two small windows of time during the day.
The real goal here is not to sink into malaise or lethargy, but to leap into motivation.
So many people I talk to say that their job gets in the way of their passions. Well, here’s your chance. Many of you can use this time to work on living those passions.
And I can guarantee one other thing: if you do not use this time productively, but instead fritter it away compulsively checking
