How to Manage Your Pandemic-Related Anxiety

Image by Miguel A Amutio

As I write this, I have just had to close my therapy office again – having only started in-person sessions around a month ago, after 18 months of Zooming. It’s extremely disheartening, for myself and my lovely clients – it was such a joy to see them, as fully formed, three-dimensional humans again, instead of just a head-and-shoulders view on a screen.

But just when we thought we might be turning a corner, Omicron happened. And in some ways, it feels like we’re back to square one. In the UK, that means offices closing, people being advised to work from home, parties and dinners cancelled, back to wondering whether we will see our loved ones over the holidays. It’s hard to keep your spirits up, to avoid feeling gloomy and wondering if it will ever end.

Reasons to be hopeful

And yet, there are reasons for hope, even in these challenging times. I, like millions of other people in my country, have been triple-jabbed. I am so profoundly grateful for that – and know how incredibly lucky I am. Billions of people around the world haven’t had a single dose of vaccine, let alone three. And my remarkable good fortune – being born in the right place, at the right time, with access to miraculous and life-changing vaccines – means I am around 97% protected against the Delta variant and 75% against Omicron.

What a blessing. And, although I will have to go back to seeing my clients on a screen again, what a miracle it is that we even have technologies like Zoom! Otherwise this last 18 months would have been infinitely harder, for them and for me. Another blessing.

Also, in the UK, we have a free National Health Service. Let me say that again, for those of us who take this amazing, life-saving wonder for granted. We have a health service that is not only word-leading in many ways, staffed by the most skilled, patient, compassionate, heroic people I could ever hope to meet – but it’s free. My jabs were free. The ICUs that have saved countless lives in the UK are free. The GPs who have also saved thousands upon thousands of lives, also free. The ambulances that rushed people to receive life-preserving treatment. Free.

It’s OK to feel anxious

Please remember this and try to find reasons for gratitude, especially on the darker days. (Research shows that gratitude is a great antidote for depression, among other beneficial effects). At the same time, I don’t want you to force yourself into feeling fake-positive, if that’s the last thing you feel right now. A global pandemic is deeply anxiety-provoking for us all, in different ways and to different degrees. So it’s OK to feel anxious.

In fact, it’s healthy to feel anxious, sad, upset, lonely, hurt, grieving, angry, frustrated, down or whatever emotions might be running through you right now. As I’m always telling my clients, emotions are what make us human. Of course, we all like the positive ones – joy, excitement, love, pleasure, pride… But in order to feel the good stuff I’m afraid you also need to feel the bad, because if you suppress, detach or dissociate from your negative emotions, I’m afraid that you won’t feel many of the good ones either.

That’s because the part that detaches is a bit of a blunt instrument – it just pushes all emotion down, good and bad. So it’s fine to feel anxious right now – I certainly do. And it’s also helpful to remember that getting through this pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint (and yes, that’s what the image is for). I know it already feels endless, but it will take time for Covid to become endemic, like flu or the common cold. Time, as well as vaccinating everyone (including those billions of people in poorer countries), mask-wearing, social distancing, room-ventilating and all of the other stuff we should be doing right now.

I hope that all helps, a little. And I would like to send warm, loving, compassionate thoughts to you, whoever you are and wherever you’re reading this around the world.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Protect Your Mental Health in a Pandemic

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

As the pandemic nears a deeply unwelcome anniversary, many people are struggling. In the UK, it’s nearly a year since the first lockdown – a year like no other in most of our lifetimes. And that year has, of course, taken its toll on us, both physically and mentally.

When I speak to my clients about how to cope right now, I always start with this idea – it’s just a really hard time. It’s OK to be struggling. That doesn’t make you weak, or lacking in resilience, or whatever self-critical thoughts you might have. It just makes you human, like everyone else – and it’s a really hard time to be human right now.

Reasons for hope

That said, of course it’s crucial that we all do everything we can to look after our mental health at the moment. It seems to me that, having run a 12-month marathon, we are on the home straight. As I write this, 15 million people in the UK have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

This is a wonderful, miraculous thing. We should all be deeply grateful for the brilliant, unbelievably hard-working scientists who produced a vaccine in record-breaking time (as well as the tens of thousands of volunteers around the world who made successful vaccine trials possible). And to the heroes of our NHS – the doctors, nurses, physios, cleaners, receptionists and every other person who has risked their lives to save ours.

The vaccine, bit by bit, will give us all hope and eventually help us end this long, incredibly difficult time. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do to help ourselves, right now, to make daily life easier.

Try these three things

As a therapist, I would like to share the three most important things I think you can do, today, to stay well as we tough out the final stretch of this hard year:

1. Remember that you have been through tough times before. Very few among us have never had to cope with tough times in our lives. Most of us have had our hearts broken, been divorced, or otherwise suffered for love. Many of us have dealt with bereavement (and all of us will, at some point in our lives). Maybe we have had tough times financially, lost a beloved home, or friend, or even a pet.

   To be human is to suffer sometimes. But we humans are also remarkably strong and resilient. Usually, we find a way through, bounce back, even emerge from tough times feeling stronger. If any of that’s true of you, then you can cope with this too – you are way stronger than you think.

2. Find beauty in small things. There have been times this year, I must confess, when I found it hard to feel positive or hopeful about anything. Especially on cold, grey days in January, when every day was like Groundhog Day (wake up, breakfast, shower, dress, work, eat, Netflix, sleep, repeat), my mood was hovering somewhere down there with the temperature.

   But even on those days, thanks to a long love affair with mindfulness meditation, I remembered to find beauty and meaning in small, beautiful things. A hug from my wife. A warm text from an old friend, or a grateful client. A goldfinch guzzling away on my bird feeder. Children laughing in the playground.

   Even when things seem bleak, there is always beauty, always meaning, always reasons to be grateful for this one precious life, if we just stop, breathe and look for them.

3. Do something for others. There is a Pali word, Dana, which is roughly translated as generosity, or giving from the heart. And in every major religion – Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity – there is a similar word or guidance to give selflessly to help others.

   This could be volunteering at a foodbank, or training to be a volunteer vaccinator, or just checking in on an elderly neighbour from time to time. Not only does this help those who are struggling right now, there is good evidence that practicing altruistic giving is highly beneficial for your mental health. The very definition of a win-win situation, I would say.

Finally, please remember that just making it through the day is as much as some of us can do right now – and that’s perfectly fine. Just try to take care of yourself, be self-compassionate (I wrote about this in my last post) if you can. And remember that one day, this will all be over. We all just need to hang in there until it is.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Manage Your Coronavirus-Related Health Anxiety

Image from CDC

Do you struggle with health anxiety? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of people around the world face a daily battle with this anxiety disorder. I often tell my clients that, if you’re prone to anxiety, your health is one of the easiest things to obsess about, because of course humans are vulnerable to health problems.

We all struggle with our health, dealing with everything from mild problems like the common cold to serious illnesses like diabetes and cancer. And we are all mortal, so have to accept that one day, our life will end. It’s natural — in some ways even logical — to worry about your health.

Now, of course, we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis. In the UK, as I write this over-70s are encouraged to self-isolate, many businesses have shut down and all schools are closing from tomorrow, we are all being encouraged to adopt social distancing and stay home as much as possible. And I’m sure the restrictions will get more and more severe.

The reality is that Covid-19 is a scary, unpredictable and long-term problem that we are struggling to understand and contain across the globe.

Kryptonite for the health-anxious

So I am anxious. My friends, family, colleagues and neighbours are anxious. Anxiety is a normal, healthy, proportionate response to a global crisis like this. It’s hard for everyone right now.

But I think — as well as the high-risk groups of people who are especially vulnerable to a serious reaction to the virus — this crisis is extremely tough on people with two types of mental-health problem: contamination-focused OCD and those with health anxiety (formerly known as hypochondria). I am going to focus on the latter problem in this story, but there is a huge amount of information about, and help with OCD on the MIND website, if you need it (mind.org.uk).

Health anxiety is one of the anxiety disorders, in which people develop an unhelpful preoccupation with their health. A useful definition I once read is: ‘The catastrophic misinterpretation of benign physical symptoms’.

That means that, if you have health anxiety, you will catastrophise — one of the common forms of unhelpful thinking styles treated with cognitive therapy — about benign physical symptoms. This means that, if you get a tension headache, you start Googling symptoms (always a bad idea!) and become convinced you have a brain tumour.

If your heart rate speeds up, because you’re stressed, anxious or engaging in physical exercise, you are 100 per cent sure you have a heart problem. You notice a tiny mole on your forearm and worry obsessively that it’s skin cancer.

Coronavirus-related anxiety

If this sounds familiar, I feel deeply compassionate for you right now. It must be hell. Every time you look at a newspaper, Twitter or your Facebook feed, you are confronted with frightening, doom-laden headlines about this awful virus that is sweeping through the global population. You, like so many of my clients right now, must be overwhelmed with anxiety.

But you can’t let anxiety dominate your life. This crisis is likely to go on for months, so you need to take swift and decisive action to help yourself. Here are three pieces of advice to get you through this:

1. Engage your rational brain

Because this all feels so threatening, the ancient, emotional parts of your brain have taken over — primarily your ‘threat system’, which is on red alert right now. This system triggers the fight-flight-freeze response to danger. If you’re super-anxious, you are in flight mode much of the time.

One answer to this is to use your rational brain — the frontal cortex — to calm down the parts that are freaking out. This virus is truly awful, but the vast majority of those who contract it will only develop cold- or flu-like symptoms, then make a complete recovery. Many health-anxious clients I have worked with are young, fit, healthy, often vegan and teetotal — some of the healthiest people I have ever met!

If that’s you, remember that it is overwhelmingly likely you will be fine, even if you get it. So stop catastrophising and take sensible precautions to minimise your risk of contracting the virus: social distancing, mask-wearing, regular hand-washing, and so on.

2. Breathe

When the fight-flight-freeze response has kicked in, your breathing goes haywire. Basically, you start breathing like a hot dog panting — rapid, shallow breaths that will make you feel dizzy, tight-chested and breathless. Not good, if you’re already worrying about a virus that targets your lungs.

So you need to slow your breathing right down, breathe abdominally, for roughly four seconds in and four seconds out. Do that for at least a minute, more if possible. I call this ‘compassionate breathing’, but it’s just deep breathing, so you can do it anywhere, any time if you need to calm yourself down.

Trust me: it’s awesome and it really works.

3. Get some help

Please don’t suffer alone. We are all struggling right now and need all the help we can get. There are plenty of charities set up to help with health anxiety and other anxiety disorders. Here are just a few for those living in the UK:

• Young Minds (youngminds.org.uk)

• Anxiety UK (anxietyuk.org.uk)

• OCD Action (ocdaction.org.uk)

If you need more help than this, I would recommend either cognitive or schema therapy. I have helped dozens of health-anxious people with both approaches and they are proven to be the most effective forms of psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. In the UK, you can get cognitive therapy on the NHS, but it will probably be a long wait. If you’re looking for a qualified private cognitive therapist, visit BABCP’s site (babcp.com).

If you would like schema therapy from me, use my contact form to get in touch.

So if you are having a tough time right now, know that help is out there for you. We will get through this. Humans are remarkably resilient. We will develop a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19 are already being trialled.

Wherever you are in the world, sending you love and warm thoughts from London,

Dan

Online Therapy Available During the Pandemic

Image by Jud Mackrill

As we all find a way to manage the coronavirus pandemic as well as possible, I have moved all of my therapy sessions online. I now offer sessions via Zoom. This means I can offer help to people all over the UK, as well as those living anywhere in the world. I am offering both short-term therapy, to help people through the current crisis, as well as my usual long-term schema therapy.

This is an anxiety-provoking and stressful time for everyone. But it can be especially hard for people who already struggle with day-to-day anxiety, or have an anxiety disorder like health anxiety or OCD. If you have experienced trauma in your life, it may also be triggering unpleasant memories for you, or you may be struggling to cope with the flood of scary headlines about the outbreak.

Please take all sensible precautions to keep yourself and others safe and well, especially older people or those in high-risk groups.

If you would like to know more about how online sessions with me work, I explain all the details in this post. And if you would like help getting through this difficult time, email dan@danroberts.com or use the contact form to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Dan