How to Protect Your Mental Health and Life Purpose While Under Quarantine

May 26

How do you typically respond to change?

Think about it for a second. When you encounter something new, do you usually receive the moment with curiosity and excitement? Or do you become suspicious and fearful?

Neither response is necessarily correct. The best response is the one that leads you to the healthiest outcome depending on the situation. But it’s important to remember that both responses are available to us. And choosing the response that is most helpful to achieving safety, growth and flourishing is an active decision you can and must make.

It’s no secret we are in a massive moment of evolution in our society. We are experiencing change at an epic rate with a novel threat that is disrupting the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. However, your response to this moment is entirely up to you. My encouragement if you want to experience a greater level of fulfillment and purpose in your life is to select the option that best benefits your long-term individual health and the health of the wider community.

Let’s consider our options for a moment by first looking at what I call the “oh crap, change” response.

FIGHT, FLIGHT OR FREEZE IN THE AGE OF CHANGE

Because the stakes of this moment are high, it’s normal for our first reaction to be fear or panic. We see change coming and think, “Oh crap.”

Illustration by Joshua Seong. © Verywell, 2018.

You’ve likely heard of the fight, flight or freeze response. In the early 1920s physiologist Walter Cannon began to recognize a pattern of response the body engaged in when under acute stress. Meaning when exposed to a threatening stimulus, the body’s sympathetic nervous system went into action to prepare the individual to get to safety. Adrenal glands would suddenly release hormones, which in turn cued an increase in heart rate, rise in blood pressure and the individual's breathing rate intensified. The goal of all this activity was to get the person to safety or to strengthen the muscles to attack or defend.

“If we are to navigate the coming year of complexity and innovation, we need to move into a more productive response.

Though this is ultimately a positive evolutionary response, we’ve come to find that a body can also have an acute stress response to non-physical threats. For example, a distressing email from a boss about your poor performance or a conflict with a romantic partner can elicit the same fight or flight response as when you are being attacked by a bear. Your brain perceives the interaction as a threat and you instinctively focus on safety.

Let’s consider what this could mean in context if we perceive this cultural moment as a threat.

A fight response might occur when you want to resist the “new normal” and so you aggressively throw everything at this moment that is within reach. You hustle harder and generate a lot of undirected activity. “Maybe it’s time to write my book! Or I can learn a new language. Maybe I should launch a new product!” If we were to look at you from a bird's eye view, we would see you running in circles and expending a lot of energy to develop something without a clear goal.
A flight response might look like denial. You decide to reject the present reality and become hyper focused on things unrelated to the primary change you are experiencing. So you press into relational dramas that existed before the change, meticulously fixate on small projects or actively pretend that nothing has changed with a refusal to do anything different in your daily routine. These are all forms of escape.
Finally, a freeze response occurs when you check out and cease existing. At its best this might look like binging on Netflix (Tiger King anyone?), overeating, or increasing alcohol intake from once a week to a daily nightcap to numb the emotions. But at its worst, you could swing into a depressive state where despair and sadness consume you. If you’re in this state, get help now. Reach out to a counselor in your area to help you process what you’re experiencing.

Have you responded in any of these ways? If so, when and how? Again, these responses are all natural when we perceive the change before us as a threat to our safety. However, the oh crap change response is not sustainable for the long haul. If we are to navigate the coming year of complexity and innovation, we need to move into a more productive response.

And, here’s why.

The acute stress response is not intended to be a long-term state. The goal is to get you to do something. You’re meant to act. In this way, fear serves you well. It encourages you to seek safety.

“Ultimately we’re trying to move you from the emotional response of fear to an emotional response of excitement.

But you can’t continue to exist at that heightened state without it taking a real toll on you.

In marital therapy, we talk about unhelpful fear or stress as diffuse physiological arousal or emotional flooding. Check out just some of the impact of when you’re flooded:

You cannot take in or process new information
You shut down emotionally
You get stuck in repetitive loops of thought or action
Your brain is unable to access information you’ve recently learned
You lose physical access to the humor part of your brain
You struggle to be a creative problem solver
You find empathy challenging and can’t see a situation from someone else’s perspective

Here’s the biggest rub of it all. Most people don’t even know when they are emotionally flooded. The escalation can happen so quickly that it’s hard to identify what you’re experiencing before it’s too late.

So how can you intentionally keep yourself out of this negative and unproductive state? Because I would argue that to thrive during this time you need the capacity to acquire new skills, honor your emotions, think creatively and solve problems all while having fun.

Here are three strategies I recommend to radically reclaim control of your response.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Practice self-care. I’m not talking about taking a hot bath and painting your nails, though those are nice to do when you can. I mean engaging in intentionally self-soothing activities that tell your body you are safe. This means practicing self-talk. Literally grab a piece of paper and write down all of the reasons you are safe in this moment. If you can’t think of any to start, just write, “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.” until you begin to feel calmer. Then do activities that someone would do alone when they are safe. Play. Read a fictional book. Make dinner at a slow pace. Take a nap with the window open so you can feel the breeze on your skin.
Express gratitude. Being thankful isn’t just a nice sentiment. It’s a tactical strategy to combat anxiety. Your brain literally cannot feel anxious and thankful at the same time. So grab that same piece of paper you used earlier and write down five things you’re grateful for right now. Linger over the list. Let the emotion expand around each item as you think about it more deeply.
Imagine the future. Do this with joy and positive anticipation. Ultimately we’re trying to move you from the emotional response of fear to an emotional response of excitement. Excitement is about having hopeful expectation for a good experience in a future moment. This is why vision planning for your life is so powerful for your present emotional state. So I recommend that you start daydreaming and fantasizing about your future. What do you want? How might you live? What wonderful reality would you like to construct for yourself.

I recently did a lifeplan for a client in the middle of all that’s happening right now. She said, “I couldn’t decide if this was the best or worst time to do my LifePlan.” But after the two days she said, “I’m confident this was the best time!” She walked away from our two days together with hope for the fulfilling life she is meant to live and in the middle of life feeling out of control, she has a clear roadmap for how to live.

I want you to have that same level of excitement and eager anticipation for what’s next in your life. Take some time in this coming week to review your LifePlan or make plans to begin developing a clearer sense of your life calling. If you need tools to help you on your journey, reach out to me for a consultation.

This doesn’t have to be a time of despair. Let’s turn fear into excitement because life starts now!