🍽️ ✈️ While many of us are enjoying the chance to socialise and travel normally, some are clinging fearfully to the safety behaviours from during the pandemic.
➡️ What was once a rational response to danger has become a “maladaptive” response as the danger recedes
🔎 A professor at London South Bank University and another from Kingston University first identified the phenomenon.
They hypothesised there would be coping behaviours early in the pandemic, which, while initially helpful, may become problematic, especially during reintegration
These behaviours may include:
🤝 Not touching things
🚆 Avoiding using public transport
😨 Worrying
👀 Monitoring environments and other people for the presence of the virus
📌 “In people who use these coping strategies consistently, excessively, daily, with the view they will keep them safe, [it] may inadvertently ‘lock’ them into Covid-19-related fear and distress and hinder their reintegration and return to normal,” researchers say
📄 Data collected in both the US and UK bears out this theory.
📈 Findings suggest that those at a greater risk from the virus are more prone to Covid anxiety syndrome.
Are you experiencing Covid-related anxiety now lockdown is easing?
📌 Experts say cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be helpful.
CBT aims to “actively break those negative cycles of thought and action,” said Dr Salem, endocrinologist and researcher at Imperial College London
🔚 “We’re not going to see the true impact until the pandemic is completely over," said Owen O’Kane, a former NHS clinical lead for mental health.
📈 O'Kane predicts an increase in anxiety disorders as lockdowns end, not only around Covid fears but worries about reintegration
❌ The true scale of the problem is likely to be larger than what is evident now.
🥼 Clinicians can help by encouraging people to “step out of fear mode” and start making some gradual behavioural changes, says O'Kane telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…
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🔴 Manchester United fans’ protests against the club’s owners descended into chaos after Old Trafford was stormed.
🚔 Bottles and barriers were thrown at officers with one requiring treatment for “significant slash wound” to the face telegraph.co.uk/football/2021/…
⚽️Thousands of fans gathered around the stadium to voice their disapproval of the Glazer family's ownership and their attempt to join the closed-shop league.
🇬🇧 More than twenty years after the idea was conceived and double the estimated price, HMS Queen Elizabeth has set sail on her maiden voyage as part of the UK Carrier Strike Group Deployment, the biggest deployment of UK naval firepower since the Falklands War
Weighing 65,000 tonnes, travelling more than 26,000 nautical miles and visiting a total of 40 countries over seven months, HMS Queen Elizabeth will sail through:
⚓ The Mediterranean Sea
⚓ Arabian Sea
⚓ South China Seas
⚓ Indian Ocean
⚓ Pacific Ocean
📚 On the morning of 9 March, 2019, Hilary Mantel finished writing The Mirror & the Light, the third volume of the Wolf Hall trilogy she had spent 15 years on
🏴 "I wanted to leave the reader feeling that it was a tragedy, but not a disaster. Cromwell changed England, and he probably did everything that he set out to do. So although he must have gone to his execution in great distress, I don’t think it would be with regret"