Mental Health during Coronavirus. Part I: Anxiety

Dear Human Being,

To put it simply, these days are weird. Sometimes it feels like the world is coming crashing on you. Other days are calm, productive and engaging. Overall, it is as if we are that dog from the burning room meme, but less cheerful.

Amidst the world health crisis and international quarantine, it is easy to overlook single individuals. It seems like people have turned into a statistic -  mere numbers, changing hourly on the "infected cases" counter. Tens turn into hundreds, into thousands, into a million. But behind those digits are actual lives, stories of people. It saddens me to think that it is so easy to lose individuals in the collective. But it saddens me even more that there are a million others locked in their homes with a seemingly simple but actually daunting task.

I read somewhere that if you look at the bookshelf and cannot find the book you want to read - write it. This is me doing the same for a blog post on mental health during Coronacrisis. I hope to share here some of my experiences and more importantly - tips.

I will start with a rough truth. Living with a form of anxiety is stressful. For me, it entangles every aspect of my life from career and relationships to how many spoons of sugar to add to my morning tea (It goes something like this: "I want three spoons of sugar like my grandma used to make. But sugar is bad for my body. I will get fat. I am already not exercising enough. I should have been working out instead of this breakfast. What a loser." Fun stuff, as I said). Now imagine daily anxiety on is a level 2. Suddenly, a monster stumbles into the room and shoots this anxiety over the roof, right to level 50. Oh my god. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Now everything is also accompanied by the fear of infection. Senses are suddenly tuned to detect a cough 2 kilometers away. The only comforting smell is the stinging and overpowering smell of hand-sanitizer (my allergic self even misses the smell of flowers).

Then comes the panic. Somehow it is considered shameful to panic these days. People start sentences with "I am not panicking but...". Why? I admit I have panicked a few times - after reading the news, talking to my family far away, using public transport. I felt stupid for being "irrational" and "dramatic". I don't think that is reasonable though. I don't think panicking over a pandemic is dramatic (realistically, a pandemic is dramatic in itself). As long as you aren't hoarding food and supplies others might need, it is absolutely okay to be scared every once in a while.

So, I panicked for an hour or so. After it was gone, I went back to usual fretting, until a new beast awoke - health anxiety. Because I have been paying such close attention to my every breath, suddenly I started noticing stuff that seemed wrong. What if I am infected? What if I have some other disease? Am I sick? Do I need to see a doctor? Every little irregularity seemed like a symptom, I felt like a leper with a bell around my neck, ringing, demanding attention. What I needed was to be sure I was okay, but it wasn't the right time to distract doctors.

This was and still is my experience. I believe that many, even those who haven't experienced much anxiety before are facing similar issues now.

It is natural to feel scared. It is natural to be restless. It is natural to fret. More importantly, it doesn't make one weak or unreasonable. The same goes for the sudden drop in productivity. Anxiety and fear tend to take up a lot of mental capacity and even if we aren't actively thinking about them, all these worries are playing in the backs of our minds. Please be understanding of your own needs and, more importantly, kind towards yourself and others.

• Breathing exercises

There are many breathing techniques available online that ease anxiety. I will share just a few tricks I myself use.

First, I figure out how I am breathing. For that, I put one hand on my chest and the other on the abdominal and observe. If the chest hand rises higher, it means that I am taking short breaths like in a stressful situation. This simple worry-barometer tells me when I need to try a few exercises.

I start with inhaling slowly (4 seconds), holding it for another 4 seconds and then exhaling through the mouth (6 seconds). It is also fun to keep the mouth like a little tube and hear the air blow out of it, like blowing on the candles. Only there are many candles. Maybe it is your hundredth birthday.

Another trick is the one my grandpa always showed me. He called it "Letting go of all the weight." He would stand straight and keep his feet at the shoulders' width, then he would inhale deeply, simultaneously bringing up his arms, tensing every muscle in them. It seemed as if he was lifting the burden of the whole entire humanity. And then as he reached the top of his head he let go. Suddenly, he dropped his arms simultaneously dropping all that weight off the imaginary cliff and exhaling through the mouth.

• Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Here we come to another technique - tensing and relaxing the muscles. Developed in the 1920s by Edmund Jacubson, this trick is based on counteracting natural fight-or-flight response to stress. Our brain is extremely complicated, consisting of elaborate parts piled on top of one another with the progress of evolution. As such we have "old" systems that are responsible for recognizing actual danger and we have cortex structures working on life's intangible aspects like imagination. Funny thing is, no matter how complex, the brain gets confused with all these structures. It has trouble discriminating between actual and imaginary danger, so it activates the same systems. Our task here is to trick the brain again, relaxing the muscles it has prepared to fight or flee with, thus, making it believe the danger is gone.

Sitting comfortably or lying down I tense and relax different groups of muscles. It could be toes or fingers (curling and releasing), shoulders or thighs (squeezing them together and letting go), stomach (taking it in and relaxing) and even full body.

• Mindfulness and Meditation

I can talk about meditation for hours. I am sure you have heard someone yacking about it already, so overhyped. Everything overhyped is a scam, right? Surprisingly, not in this case. Meditation is tough, but helpful. From a million techniques out there, I have tried some and am still looking for the perfect one for me. So far, I use the simplest sounding one - sitting and not thinking. Sounds horrible. It is. For the first few times, it is hellish. The mind gets all over the place, suddenly, brushing your hair becomes a matter of life or death. Or there is a dreadful itch (don't even get me started on itching). Yet it is possible. I have tried and quit many times, but there was one tip that got through to me - it is okay to be bad at meditation but to continue doing it. "Just keep trying," I tell myself after another fleet of restlessness ruins my peace. Eventually, it becomes easier. And then you get to sit with yourself on the bench and observe, quietly with a little smile (the bench scene is taken from Sarah Wilson's "First we make the beast beautiful" - an infinitely relatable book on anxiety).

Finishing up Part I, I want to say that these are tough times full of uncertainty and fear for the whole of the human race. In an already scary and confusing world, we, human beings, can struggle to get through complications like a global pandemic. But we can still be kind to ourselves and each other. Take care, dear human being!