Managing Coronavirus Anxiety and Your Mental Health
If the coronavirus epidemic is triggering or upsetting you, we get it. Jessica spoke to Roisin Lanigan for ID Magazine about how to manage your mental health through this difficult time.
Since the coronavirus outbreak first began hitting the headlines in January, there have been two distinct camps of response. There are those who think that the whole thing is overblown, that the media are fearmongering with constant negative headlines and that we’ll all ultimately be okay. When we’re nervous, anxious or worried, our body releases adrenaline, which can cause inflammation and induce a stress response in our body. While in the right circumstances, this is an important evolutionary tool to keep us alive, prolonged stress can actually impair our immune system by putting it under too much pressure. By this logic, remaining calm and looking after our mental health isn’t less important than being healthy; it’s necessary to remaining healthy in the first place.
“There’s an evolutionary advantage to how our thinking works, and the negativity bias we work at means we’re more aware of the danger, making us more likely to stay alive,” says cognitive hypnotherapist Jessica Boston. “But it also means we’re more likely to remain in a constant state of panic, especially as the continuous bombardment of information in our modern lives creates the illusion that there is always a threat looming.” This state of hyperalertness means that those suffering from anxiety frequently create a “worst case scenario” over things like the coronavirus outbreak. But there are steps to reducing these scenarios, which can manifest as difficulty breathing, chest pains, sweating and inability to focus. “Anxiety thrives off uncertainty,” says Jessica. “One remedy in reducing your anxiety is, first of all, to remind yourself to breathe, take a look around you, ground yourself and don’t live in your imagination, and second of all, give your unconscious mind as much certainty where possible.
Take a break from the news cycle.
Obviously, we rely on the news to let us know whether things have changed where we live, if quarantines have been put in place and if changes to the law in response to coronavirus will affect our day-to-day lives. What we don’t need to do, though, is sit refreshing Twitter all day, seeking out more bad news to scare ourselves with.
“It’s hard not to be stressed when we are constantly bombarded with fearful information. There is no point in succumbing to a fear pandemic before a disease pandemic has even taken hold. Your best prevention against the virus is avoiding stress because the more you stress, the more susceptible you can become to viruses, as stress can dampen your immune response.”
If you’d like to work on your NEWS ANXIETY, click below to read about how I could help you today.
