Tips to help you stay well and cope better In times of difficulty, crisis or stress every one reacts differently. Everyone has different coping skills and a preferred means of coping and adjusting to new situations. At Relationship Matters, our Psychologists and Counsellors have come up with their top tips to help people stay well and cope better. There are other tips, but if you start here you can find your own set of resilience skills that work for you, your family and circumstances.
Avoid the bad (health or other catastrophic) news
We all want to keep up to date, but when the news is full of “catastrophe” and heightened emotional language, this can trigger or exacerbate health related or existing anxiety. If you find yourself checking and reading the latest updates compulsively, it's feeding the anxiety. Try having a news detox, or allocating yourself a time limit for reading or watching news, for example, once a day. If you’re really worried about missing something crucial, you can always tell friends and family to contact you in the event of an emergency situation in order to keep you informed.
Try not to seek constant reassurance
Seeking reassurance can make you feel calmer in the short term. Like a sugar high, it is always temporary and the brain creates a feedback cycle where you become increasingly reliant on reassurance to reduce anxiety and emotional flooding, which itself only serves to reinforce the anxiety. It’s natural to want your loved ones to tell you things will be OK, but when you start needing that reassurance several times a day it’s time to take a step back. Tell yourself, “I’m safe, secure and I’m OK right now..”.
Introduce an absolute ban on Dr Google and Googling or checking for symptoms for yourself and the family
Dr Google is not, and never will be, your friend, especially not when you are a sufferer of anxiety. Nor will message-boards and forums. Try to remember that people visit these places when they have reason to be concerned. Once you start understanding it’s a skewed information lens, you’ll be better able to put things in perspective. At best the internet provides broad-spectrum information, it not personalised to your or your situation, age and medical status. Lie star signs predictions, the information on the internet can be interpreted in many, many ways! Go to the reliable Government or official health sites for advice about health action and information. Avoid influencers and other dubious sources of information.
Try a countering technique to your negative self-talk
We all say hundreds of words and sentences to our self every day, it's normal. If the balance of the internal conversation turns to a negative doom and gloom focus, then use some tools to rebalance your thoughts. One of the best is a CBT exercise which involves confronting a persistent negative thought with a rational counter-statement. For example, if your persistent thought is “Everyone I love will die from this virus” you can counter it with factual statements such as “Actually, most people who get Covid-19 are likely to make a full recovery.” “the likelihood I’ll catch it is very low”. I’m safe and well at the moment”. Tell yourself ten things that you are grateful for at that moment in time. Just because you think it, doesn’t make it true!
Stay Active
Even if it’s just star jumps, get off the sofa and chair and move around. Exercise will help get the anxiety-related hormones out of your system and channel them appropriately. Find that old stepper in the garage, or pace around the verandas! Do stretches and bends, dance to a video or music that you love. Look at yoga on the internet, stay mobile!
Grounding exercises
From guided breathing to using a favourite scent, grounding exercises can help bring you back to reality. Stretch, tell yourself the things you can touch hear and feel at that moment in time, recite poems or something from memory, do maths calculations, do Sudoku or play chess. There are dozens of ways that you can centre your mind and engage yourself in the here and now. Sometimes, something as simple as sitting on the floor can help and breathing more slowly in and out….reading, listening to music, and listening to (and naming) the noises outside and around our house and environment will also calm your mind and body.
Allocate yourself a daily ‘worry period’
Give yourself half an hour to worry about this issue to your heart’s content, and then you have to go and do something else. When you are worrying, ask yourself “what am I actually concerned about?” Try to be specific and ask yourself “Can I do anything about this right now?” No? Then park it until later. If you find yourself worrying out of the hours, say to yourself, now’s not the time, I’ll worry about you at 4.00 o’clock, I’m ok”
Treat yourself well
Anything that will give you a little boost can help. Don’t beat yourself up with negative self-talk or endless rounds of negative catastrophizing with others. Being good to your self doesn’t need to involve spending money: you can also cook yourself something nice, have a hot bath, or listen to a song you love. Regulate your use of sweets and alcohol. Bake, prepare new recipes from a cuisine you done know…stay in touch with loved ones, friends, social networks and work. Be grateful remember what makes you happy and if possible do that at home, reread your favourite books and re-watch movies you liked. Be responsible with on line shopping or other activities! Be grateful.
Remember that your anxious state isn’t permanent
Anxiety is basically the brain thinking “that bad stuff may happen in the future”….it very non-specific and its normal when we are surrounded with a stressful environment full of emotional language. When you are flooded and experiencing it, anxiety always feels as though it will never end, but it will. It’s hard to remember this, but do try. Use accurate facts, not emotional and dramatic language, focus being and responding to others with a smile and clam manner, keep things in perspective. It’s a worrying time, and many of us, myself included, will have loved ones who might be showing symptoms, but the tendency to jump to the worst-case scenario very rarely reflects reality. Be kind to yourself and others but like most tough times Covid-19 and its heirs and successors, too shall pass.
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