While striving to endure the pandemic, it’s all too easy to allow worry, fear, panic, and even despair to take up residence in our hearts and minds.
While striving to endure the pandemic, it’s all too easy to allow worry, fear, panic, and even despair to take up residence in our minds. Despite our circumstances, we need to try to keep these negative emotions at bay, as much as is humanly possible.
Anxiety and fear actually have the potential to derail our peace, diminish our hope, and divert our focus, leading us into the ‘What-ifs.’ The ‘What-ifs’ only serve to worsen our angst and deepen our sense of feeling like a victim. These forms of negative thinking perpetuate a cycle of angst and discontentment.
7 Strategies to Quell Pandemic Fear
- Limit your access to
Too much news can be stressful and may provoke mental health issues and even physical ones, such as cardiac conditions or autoimmune flares, depression, and anxiety.
- Stay connected.
Maintain contact with other people using social distancing via the phone, Zoom, email, texting, or whatever safe means you choose to stay connected.
- Keep a j
Journaling can be very helpful in determining if you are slipping into social isolation, negativity, or declining health from stress. Keeping a journal to monitor the status of your mind, body, and spirit can help you to stay on track and make any necessary changes to try to stay positive.
It’s vital for mind-body wellness to stay active and avoid becoming sedentary.
- Meditation.
For a growing number of people, whether they are spiritually minded or not, meditation is an increasingly important way to stay positive, often lessening or eliminating worry, fear, anxiety, and depression.
- Be creative and stay busy.
Especially while staying home due to isolation or quarantine, it may be beneficial to creatively and productively make use of your time through hobbies.
- Reach out to o
Often times, people find that their burden is lessened when reaching out to connect with others, be it friends, family, or work colleagues.
There are many ways to combat the negative emotions and angst experienced from dealing with Covid-19 and the resulting quarantine. Many people have made the observation that the amount that they worry is directly proportionate to the amount of news they have ingested on any given day from newspapers, TV, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Curtailing or limiting how much news you watch may have a positive and direct effect on your ability to cope.
Exercise can boost your endorphin levels. These powerful, natural chemicals, found in the brain, can improve one’s mood without even leaving the house. If you have a treadmill or exercise bike, try to use them regularly. By doing so, you will get stress-fighting endorphins that will help you to stay positive and physically fit. If it is possible to walk or hike outside, while socially distancing, that is a great way to get moving, too.
Writing, drawing, acrylic painting, doing puzzles, sewing, crocheting or knitting, and playing the guitar are all examples of creative hobbies that can serve as diversions from the situation at hand. They can serve to provide much-needed respite and enjoyment during the pandemic. These activities also help to pass the time.
Another strategy is to reach out to others. Certainly, even with social distancing, we all know someone who would appreciate a phone call and like to know they are cared about. Connecting with others in this way is mutually beneficial, and may be very healing for both people involved.
