Mindfully Managing the Perfect Stress and Anxiety Storm of COVID and the Holidays
By: Becky Searls
Tags: Neuroscience, Growth Mindset, Anxiety, Mindfulness, Covid 19

I also recommend the book Upward Spiral by Dr. Alex Korb to learn more about your brain’s different areas and neurotransmitters. It’s truly incredible how much learning about how your brain works can help with understanding and managing your anxiety.

Practice #3: Be Open and Honest with yourself, and, potentially, others

Practices #1 and #2 should help a lot in the moment of a downward spiral to calm your nervous system and become more aware of your feelings through kind , loving curiosity. At this point, you have a choice: feel your feelings, difficult as they may be, or push them down.

This can be really really difficult.

So, I recommend starting with yourself. It’s very hard sometimes to acknowledge how you are feeling, even to yourself. You may feel intangible pressure from your work, family or friends to fill preordained roles and carry out responsibilities that no longer feel in tune with what your current feelings or stressors are, especially during COVID.

That’s OK!

Perhaps a good way to start is practice #2: get curious about it, and journal. Once you slow your thinking down to your writing pace, you may get a little more clarity and awareness. Some of the feelings that come up may be uncomfortable and you may feel like you don’t have the time or energy or emotional bandwidth to deal with them.

I get that!

I also would suggest, it’s important to give yourself permission to feel all your feelings, no matter how difficult (note: even positive feelings may be difficult to feel, especially right now. That’s okay too).

Because here’s the thing: If you don’t feel your feelings…they (unfortunately) don’t just go away. They come out eventually, through poorly timed, possibly uncontrolled emotional outbursts that cause relatively more damage to your closest relationships than a hard but calm conversation would have. Or, it’s even possible that unacknowledged feelings may even manifest through physical symptoms of pain or illness.

So, start small. Perhaps go back to the question from practice #1:

How am I feeling right now?

And just try to answer honestly to yourself. The Mood Meter App is a simple tool to facilitate this quickly.

I like to habit stack a little and set my apple watch to send me breathe reminders hourly. When I get that notification, I pause to take a few deep breaths which calms my nervous system down. Once calm, I ask myself how I’m feeling (often using the mood meter app to help me get more granular in labeling) and then I get curious about it. As I get curious, my awareness grows and I unclench, sometimes just a little, but it’s enough to unwind a tiny bit and shift my behavior or thinking. I’ve learned (and am still learning) these practices through the unwinding anxiety app.

Awareness is everything. Without awareness, you can’t realize you’re caught up. How you achieve that awareness can vary. While something like therapy or talking to a friend could be very helpful, the strategies above seek to help you self-soothe at any moment, even if you find yourself unable or unwilling to reach out to others for help.

Once you are able to be emotionally honest with yourself, if and when you feel ready, sharing your worries, thoughts, concerns and anxiety with trusted loved ones can really help. I personally have found that once I started talking about how I felt (which, again, required me to know how I felt), other people shared their feelings too. I realized their feelings weren’t that different to mine, even if perhpas their specific situations or stresors were. And that shared understanding helped me feel less alone.

It also helped me reinforce that showing up authentically, as opposed to some masked people pleasing emotion denying version of myself, is always going to be met with more compassion. When you show up with all of your messy feelings and are transparent about them, others can truly see you. And, when you let someone truly see you, they often see themselves and their own anxieties reflected back. This vulnerability is when true connection and empathy can be exchanged and that, in turn, cultivates a deeper, more meaningful relationship.