I had a long chat this morning with a counsellor from the Caltech Staff and Faculty Consultation Center. The last three months have been A LOT, for many of us. I wanted to share what I found helpful. This post is for anyone else new to managing anxiety.
There will be nothing new here for people who have dealt with this before. And I don't know if any of this is helpful long-term yet. But, it was helpful even in the moment to have more information, and to feel like there were possible solutions, so I wanted to share them.
(I specifically enjoyed how the counsellors at Caltech, who must deal with a lot of stressed scientists, were like "Okay, let's break this down. It's SCIENCE. Here's the chemistry. Here's the biology. Here's how you hack them.”)
1. Validation. Everyone is over-loaded. There's an actual freaking pandemic happening. Everyone is over-stimulated with bad stressors and under-stimulated with good stressors. Everyone is scraping by.
2a. Your body is having a physiological reaction to this heightened stimulation (allostatic load). There are tigers everywhere. You can only handle so much stimulus and stress before your bucket begins to overflow, and your 'frustration barrier' drops to non-existent.
2b. This can lead to snapping at everyone at the end of the day, for instance, or lacking the emotional capital to face the next day. You can only handle so much negativity before negativity becomes a 'habit' in your brain.
3a. You can't change the external stimulus. You can't fix the pandemic, or race relations in America, or five year olds being five year olds. You need to find small ways during the day to siphon off that bucket of stimulation.
3b. You need to hack your body's physiological reaction to the stimulation. Every time a stimulating trigger happens, you need to counter it, physically, with a different trigger. Break the cycle of trigger -> reaction -> stress in your body's bucket.
3c. One hour of yoga at the end of the day isn't going to do it if your bucket is already full. This was particularly useful for me to hear, not to think of it as 'all or nothing' but as small things where even a couple minutes at a time makes a difference.
Everyone will have their own counters that work best. Here are some of the things she suggested.
4a. Mindfulness: notice a negative thought pattern and narrate it. "I notice I am panicking about how I will never get through my to do list." Create separation between the thought and your reaction to the thought. Don't attach to the thought or judge it. Just notice it.
4b. Last night I was thought-spiralling in bed instead of sleeping and I ended up reliving a mistake I made YEARS ago and actually caught myself at one point and was like 'Wait, how did I end up here?' Disrupt the spiral by stepping out of it and noticing what you're doing.
5a. Breathing. Two minutes of deep breathing changes your physiology, your body chemistry, in a way that counteracts the changes that a stressful trigger makes.
5b. Got an aggravating email that made your heart race? Breathe for two minutes. You still have to deal with the email. But your body benefits from the work you did to change the physiological response.
6a. Break up the day. At the same time we are over-stimulating our stress hormones, we are under-stimulating our physical and emotional systems. Spending 20 hours a day in your bedroom because that's where you work AND sleep these days is under-stimulating.
6b. Especially if you're conditioned to significantly more variety! Set up different stations and move from one to the next every couple hours. Change things as often as you can (and not just your zoom backgrounds).
7a. Ritualise going to your happy place. Physically imagine the sensation of being somewhere warm and happy. Make it as vibrant across as many senses as possible. Feel the sun and the breeze. Spend a few minutes there.
7b. Again, it's biohacking. You're changing your physiological state. The more you practice it, the easier it will get. Most people don’t fall out of bed and run a 5K the first time they try, they need to train - and this takes training too.
8. There were a few more that she mentioned (hydration, nutrition, sleep) that I don't think need much more explanation, and one (cold training) that I don't know anything about yet, but those ones above seem like things I could incorporate.
I'd be happy to hear from everyone else what works for you! In terms of changing your thinking/feeling/doing during the pandemic to manage day to day anxiety.
