Sian: Lockdown anxiety and how to control it

Whichever one you are experiencing there are some general principles you can follow.

1. Put things into perspective. Exaggerating possible, but not likely, outcomes does not prevent them from happening, it doesn’t stop or solve anything. How likely is the virus to kill you? If we go back to March the government had us so scared, we were frightened to set foot outside the door. It depends on your age and underlying health conditions. If you are a healthy child, teenager, young adult it’s not likely to affect you anymore than flu or you may even have mild to no symptoms. The older you get the more chance (but not a guarantee) that you may have it more severely. 50- and 60-year olds can also experience no symptoms. Its worth noting that the average age of death from COVID-19 is 82 years of age. The life expectancy in the UK is 81.

If you are in an at-risk group and take all the precautions necessary if you have to go out. Therefore, by using masks, visors, distancing, taking vitamin D and keeping as much of a fit mind and body as possible you are reducing your risks significantly.  Don’t mix often with those that mix a lot. Even then if you get it is not a guaranteed death sentence, though you might be very poorly.

5. Don’t watch the news! On TV or online. They present you with a doom and gloom world that you can’t do anything about. The headlines are designed to grab your attention by stimulating your fear and emotional centre. They are rarely absolute truths in and of themselves.

6. What you fear is diminished by facing it. You can do it all at once or in bite size chunks. This can be relevant for leaving the house, shopping or going back to work. This is because the amygdala, the organ in your brain responsible for anxiety and fear, can only learn not to be fearful of something by re-experiencing it and seeing that you didn’t come to harm. It learns. It changes its programming through emotion and experience. For example, that old story about getting back on the horse immediately after a fall. The fall may trigger a trauma, (an unresolved terror that repeats itself in a time-loop like it was happening in the present moment). You can’t tell the person to get over it as the loop doesn’t understand English. By getting back up on the horse ( which will be terrifying) the amygdala learns again that riding is more or less safe. To definitely cancel out any trauma by going out on the horse every day after the fall would make sure a new loop was written over any possible trauma ones.

9. Health anxiety can develop when the above symptoms are mistaken for something life-threatening due to the symptom being accompanied by the anxious/terror feeling. The brain puts two and two together and gets five. A lot of people end up in A&E believing they are having a heart attack. Or have repeated trips to the doctor believing they may have cancer. Checking the internet to self-diagnose is the absolute worst thing to do for increasing anxiety

10. Mindful meditation in particular is pretty good for accepting and dealing with anxiety. When you fight a thought or try and control one, you just feed them more energy and they get stronger. Mindful meditation accepts they are there and then gently ignores them. They lose their potency and you can begin to feel calm.  Similarly, if you fight anxiety you also fuel it.