With the increasing number of Covid-19 and upcoming national lockdown, it’s quite common to experience some emotions such as stress, anxiety or fear.
While these emotions are not necessarily a bad thing – a certain level of fear or stress could help us to stay alert and keeps us safe, however, when fear possesses us then it could become truly debilitating. We will lose contact with our frontal cortex and become reactive to the situation, we might also lose compassion, humor, perspective and all the other executive functioning.
Here are some tips to help you to stay alert yet calm, and live with difficult emotions during such a challenging time.
#1: Recognise and name your emotions
Recognising and naming your emotions has a profound impact to calm our nervous system. Naming them means you acknowledge whatever is predominant at this moment. You can simply investigate and write them down on a piece of paper, it could be fear, anxiety, agitation, worry, etc. A research from UCLA describes how when you name an emotion, it reduces the limbic activity, the unpleasant emotions, and it activates the prefrontal cortex which gives us much more mental space and awareness to respond rather than react.
Below is an emotion vocabulary chart that might be helpful for you.
Image source: Verbalists
When you name a fear, it loses its power.
#2 Allow the emotions to be
Most of us want to run away from difficult feelings, this is human nature and how our brain is designed. When I was teaching my clients about accepting difficult emotions, they sometimes come with a “bargaining mind”.
They will whisper to themselves and say: “Alright, I will allow you to be here only if you will go away. ” and after a while, they might whisper again: “I have allowed you to be here for one minute, when will you actually go away…?”
Well, these strong emotions are very smart and they know your trick. If you don’t wholeheartedly accept them, they will actually stick longer and grow stronger- just like the old mind trick ” Don’t think about a pink elephant”. After all, what we resist persist.
It will be hard to accept the difficult emotions 100% without much deliberate practice, but at least try, even just 10% or 20% – try to cultivate some level of willingness to let it be there.
And now, you might wonder, how the heck do I actually “accept” these difficult emotions when they are truly unbearable??
Well, here comes the third tip.
#3 Observe your body sensations
You can set a 15 min alarm and find a quiet spot for yourself. You can sit there and close your eyes, and start naming all your emotions. After that, you can start sensing all your body sensations, from head to toe, from toe to head.
Your body hears everything your mind says and it will manifest in many different ways.
So scan your body from head to toe, and then toe to head. Are you sensing a headache, tight shoulders or chest? Do you have a dry throat? What about your fingertips? How is your lower back feeling? Slowly but consistently scan your body, by doing this it will:
1) distract your monkey mind and all the crazy thoughts flying in your head;
2) calm your nervous system.
This is actually the essence of mindfulness, which is easy to learn yet hard to practice.
I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for nearly 1000 hours but my mind still wonders around all the time. Every time when I try to focus on my body sensations, it only lasts for about three seconds then it will go away, but that’s okay, as long as I keep coming back.
And that’s the key to mindfulness practice – it’s the art of starting again and again.
Training our brain is like training our muscle, what you practice grows stronger.
So just keep trying, if you find 15 mins too long for you to start with, then 10, five even just one minute will do. It works only if you actually practice it. You can try 5 min in the morning and 5 min in before you go to sleep. The research shows it helps you to sleep better 🙂
#4 Be gentle to yourself