How to Take Care of Your Mental Health During the COVID-19 Crisis?
During the inaugural session of Lockdown Conversations, I was supposed to talk about mental health. Still, I felt I wasn’t very coherent due to internet problems (which is a total lie. It was because I was scared to speak in front of an audience).
Note that I’m not an authority on the topic of mental health, but I’ve been suffering from health anxiety for the past few years. I’m on medication and seeking therapy to manage it, and it has helped me immensely so far. The tips mentioned here are derived mainly from third-wave therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT).
Anyway, I’d like to talk about how you can learn to manage your anxiety here. I want to keep the article concise and crisp. So here we go:
- Anxiety is often triggered because of a rational or irrational belief or ruminating about the occurrence of an event. Fear is tangible, e.g., a dog chasing you. Worry is intangible, e.g., you sitting at home thinking about a dog chasing you, which kick starts an anxious thought pattern. Worry is often the beginning of anxiety
- The rationality or irrationality of a belief is decided by the probability of its occurrence. The chances of a ceiling fan falling on you when you’re asleep are very thin; hence it’s an irrational belief. The anxiety surrounding COVID-19 is rational, considering its contagious nature and how fast it is spreading. I understand I’m not reassuring at all here, but taking precautions is the only thing we can do
- While we can’t control the external circumstances, we can prepare ourselves for it. For instance, we wear a helmet or seat belt when riding a bike or driving a car. This doesn’t reduce the risk of accidents but ensures that the risk of injury is drastically minimized
- It’s essential to become mindful of our thoughts that flare up worry or anxiety and analyze them against the common cognitive distortions. In such cases, conventional thinking errors include overgeneralization, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, and emotional reasoning
- Learn to distinguish between thoughts and facts. That’s where mindfulness comes in. You thinking about you getting diagnosed with the coronavirus is just a thought and not a fact. The only way to verify this is by conducting a test. So, know that thoughts need not be true. THEY ARE JUST THOUGHTS
- Avoid indulging in reassurance-seeking behaviors. These are activities people with health anxiety do to reduce the anxiety or ensure that they’re alright, but it never works that way. In the case of COVID-19, reassurance-seeking behaviors could be, trying to cough compulsively, checking body temperature regularly, and checking for other proven COVID-19 symptoms
- DON’T GOOGLE YOUR SYMPTOMS. DON’T. JUST DON’T. It thrives on your confirmation bias. You’ll pick-up only those things that conform to your existing beliefs, or the thoughts your “think/feel” are right, i.e., emotional reasoning
- Be mindful when it comes to consuming news. Twitter is a rabbit hole. New updates, cases, incidents are reported every second, and it gets addictive. The problem here is many times, the updates/cases are not verified, and you might assume something like the truth, which could very well be false news. Trust the doctors, WHO, and other verified institutions/entities to seek information
- There are a lot of conspiracy theories making rounds as the disease is spreading. Stay away from them. They won’t do you any good, and you don’t need them to be honest. Also, avoid watching content that could potentially make you feel sad, for example, that video of the Saudi Arabian doctor breaking down in front of his kid. Your mental health is your top priority at the moment, and avoid anything that can adversely affect it
I hope these tips will be of help. Let me know if you feel my experience can be of help to you. If you are finding it challenging to manage your anxiety, I would highly encourage you to get in touch with a mental health professional.
