Yeah, you’re stressed
Surprise. It’s a pandemic, after all. But with stress comes ideas for coping.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and self-isolation, many people have reported a decline in their own mental health — for good reason.
Humans are naturally social creatures. It’s literally in our nature. Being cooped up in our houses restricts the amount of interaction we can have- not to mention the state that the world’s in currently. Many of us are worried about unemployment, finances, classes, family, and the whole not-getting-sick thing too.
Getting headaches? Can’t sleep? Unmotivated or don’t have enough energy to get out of bed? Yeah- that’s stress.
With nearly a third of the world population — 2.6 billion people in some form of isolation, dealing with symptoms of stress, depression, and/or anxiety, what are some innovative ways can we get the help?
Online Help
Naturally, with a majority of the world on lockdown most businesses have moved online. Lucky for all of us- this includes therapists.
An article by Kastalia Medrano is rather helpful in how to find yourself a therapist online- she does a good job explaining the process.
Now, are you going to have to give up your online therapist once we’re allowed outside again? Probably not. As Medrano says, therapy just got more accessible. You don’t need to go anywhere to talk to a professional. Good news! We can all be couch potatoes while we’re talking to a therapist now.
There’s also the Crisis text line, which allows you access to social workers and clinicians 24/7 by texting “HOME” to 741741. Yes, this existed before the lockdown went into action, but now that we’re all stuck inside and stressed out beyond belief, they’ve seen a spike in people texting in. So you’re not alone in feeling this way.
Apps on Mobile Devices
If you don’t feel like being a social butterfly, there’s also about 800 apps designed to help your mental health. Some, like Calm require a paid subscription that allows you access to all sorts of help ranging from meditation, ways to cope with stress and anxiety, and background noise to get that sleep we’re all deprived of. Lets all admit it here, Netflix and YouTube eats away at our sleep.
Even the CDC lists ways to take care of yourself. They recommend taking breaks from social media or the news and some dedicated you time to alleviate stress.
So why talk about innovation? I’ll be honest- this is an assignment for a college class. But mental health is a subject I’m rather passionate about and hearing how so many new ways have come about when the world is in disarray is rather inspiring.
A lot of inventions have sprouted from this pandemic, from new face masks to cameras tracking which employees have been in close proximity to each other, all of them sprouting up because of a few patterns that Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From highlight.
Most-if not all- recent innovations have been born from necessity and come around at the perfect time for them to be popularized. If you tried to pitch a new face mask in 2019, I highly doubt you’d see success for one simple reason: no one needed one. While that example is great and all, it doesn’t relate to mental health so let’s rewind a bit.
Before this entire pandemic happened, I hadn’t heard of online therapy. If it existed, it wasn’t popular because it wasn’t something many people needed. Now that we’re all confined to our homes and a lot of us are dealing with increased stress and anxiety about the world and how we’re going to survive, there’s an increase in demand for therapy. It’s only natural that we turn to the internet to still find ways to connect and make this work- so therapy became available online. It adapted to fit the new needs we had.
This mirrors the idea of the Adjacent Possible that Johnson outlines. The long and the short of it is that inventions need to come about at the right time and build off of pre-existing technology. Online therapy came about because it needed to and the foundation existed for it to properly work. Zoom and Google Meets had to exist before for this to work- if it didn’t, we’d all be stressed, alone, and probably out of ice cream.
So- yeah. You’re stressed. I’m stressed. We’re all stressed. It’s like a sadder version of “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”
But there’s been countless new ways to find the help you need to get through this, and the existing ones have seen a spike in traffic. You’re not alone in feeling like the world’s falling apart.
Just take it easy and hug that tub of ice cream.
