Skip to main content

Managing Stress, Boredom and Grief during COVID-19 Lockdown

Image
By

It could not be more sardonic that when forcibly confined to our homes and locked into isolation, our earlier hankering for holidays, respite from school and work and time for rest, is turning out to be like Midas’s boon of golden touch!
In this unprecedented period of depressive developments, we are experiencing many types of emotions that are broadly included under “stress”. The international expert David Kessler terms it “Grief” and describes 6 stages which I found helpful to understand my feelings:



1.The 1st stage is DENIAL; like what we felt in early March…..”this is just another scare….happening elsewhere…wont affect us in any way”.
2. It gives way to ANGER: “how can this be happening here? Lockdown on our freedom and movements? Never happened before! The government and enforcement people are victimising us…..we need to raise our voice and fight!”
3. When we run out of options, we start to BARGAIN: “OK.. If we suffer for these 3 weeks, all will be OK again?…we will eat at our favourite restaurant, go on our long planned holiday…..our business will bounce back again?”
4. Many start experiencing SADNESS, watching the numbers of affected and dead relentlessly climb up on our TV screens start spelling doom. Confinement, lack of social interactions, loss of earning dampen the spirits. Suicides are known to go up (they have already)
5. Many finally settle down to a new state of ACCEPTANCE: “ it is here, and we have to bear with it as there is no other way. Let us do what we can from home during this period. This is the new reality for the time being”
6. Search for MEANING: many start asking “ Why did all this happen? Is it Nature taking revenge? Or God punishing us? Why did some get affected and die? Destiny? Karma?...”
Interestingly, these emotions do not always go in a linear fashion. One may feel more than one at any point of time, and some may not go through all the stages.
Some do not like the word “grief” which they deem as “sadness”. Kepler qualifies it as “ANTICIPATORY GRIEF”…a feeling of nagging negativity of anticipating something bad.
Dealing with it:
We need to reorient, reinvent, and reverse some of our attitudes. The most enlightening comment very appropriate for today is from a Vietnamese monk, ”Hello Solitude. How are you today?. Come sit with me, and I will care for you”, implies that you gain control of ‘loneliness’, rather than letting it overpower you.
WFH, video chats, movies, on-line classes and music can keep you going for this period. (Also read the attachment that follows)
If you want to explore the 6th phase, books, and meditation can help. There are several apps now that help you calm your mind, regulate your breathing and perform a daily dose of yoga or meditation.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food supply.
2 comments
Read more

Bad Dreams, Disturbed Sleep

By
  A good night’s sleep, so essential to rest your body and mind, and restore ‘energy” and vitality, is becoming a casualty for many these days. Last week a 58 year old lady complained that she woke up with a startle in the middle of the night dreaming of “drugs”, something she had never been exposed to all her life. Another reported a nightmare in which he felt someone was “strangulating” him by tightening something around his neck, till he woke up feeling choked! Yet another reported dreaming that he was in an ICU of a hospital with PPE draped figures surrounding his bed while he was being prepared to be hooked to a ventilator. Bad dreams can be disturbing to say the least. One wakes up with a startle or in sweat, feeling disturbed and uneasy, and feeling drained. The mood in the morning is usually uneasy and snappy. Creative thinking has usually gone for a toss…postponed to yet another day when one feels more cheerful and positive.   Several factors could be contributing to “
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to get closer to thei
2 comments
Read more