How to Manage Your Pandemic-Related Anxiety

Image by Miguel A Amutio

As I write this, I have just had to close my therapy office again – having only started in-person sessions around a month ago, after 18 months of Zooming. It’s extremely disheartening, for myself and my lovely clients – it was such a joy to see them, as fully formed, three-dimensional humans again, instead of just a head-and-shoulders view on a screen.

But just when we thought we might be turning a corner, Omicron happened. And in some ways, it feels like we’re back to square one. In the UK, that means offices closing, people being advised to work from home, parties and dinners cancelled, back to wondering whether we will see our loved ones over the holidays. It’s hard to keep your spirits up, to avoid feeling gloomy and wondering if it will ever end.

Reasons to be hopeful

And yet, there are reasons for hope, even in these challenging times. I, like millions of other people in my country, have been triple-jabbed. I am so profoundly grateful for that – and know how incredibly lucky I am. Billions of people around the world haven’t had a single dose of vaccine, let alone three. And my remarkable good fortune – being born in the right place, at the right time, with access to miraculous and life-changing vaccines – means I am around 97% protected against the Delta variant and 75% against Omicron.

What a blessing. And, although I will have to go back to seeing my clients on a screen again, what a miracle it is that we even have technologies like Zoom! Otherwise this last 18 months would have been infinitely harder, for them and for me. Another blessing.

Also, in the UK, we have a free National Health Service. Let me say that again, for those of us who take this amazing, life-saving wonder for granted. We have a health service that is not only word-leading in many ways, staffed by the most skilled, patient, compassionate, heroic people I could ever hope to meet – but it’s free. My jabs were free. The ICUs that have saved countless lives in the UK are free. The GPs who have also saved thousands upon thousands of lives, also free. The ambulances that rushed people to receive life-preserving treatment. Free.

It’s OK to feel anxious

Please remember this and try to find reasons for gratitude, especially on the darker days. (Research shows that gratitude is a great antidote for depression, among other beneficial effects). At the same time, I don’t want you to force yourself into feeling fake-positive, if that’s the last thing you feel right now. A global pandemic is deeply anxiety-provoking for us all, in different ways and to different degrees. So it’s OK to feel anxious.

In fact, it’s healthy to feel anxious, sad, upset, lonely, hurt, grieving, angry, frustrated, down or whatever emotions might be running through you right now. As I’m always telling my clients, emotions are what make us human. Of course, we all like the positive ones – joy, excitement, love, pleasure, pride… But in order to feel the good stuff I’m afraid you also need to feel the bad, because if you suppress, detach or dissociate from your negative emotions, I’m afraid that you won’t feel many of the good ones either.

That’s because the part that detaches is a bit of a blunt instrument – it just pushes all emotion down, good and bad. So it’s fine to feel anxious right now – I certainly do. And it’s also helpful to remember that getting through this pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint (and yes, that’s what the image is for). I know it already feels endless, but it will take time for Covid to become endemic, like flu or the common cold. Time, as well as vaccinating everyone (including those billions of people in poorer countries), mask-wearing, social distancing, room-ventilating and all of the other stuff we should be doing right now.

I hope that all helps, a little. And I would like to send warm, loving, compassionate thoughts to you, whoever you are and wherever you’re reading this around the world.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Why Your Anger Can Be a Force for Good

Image by Sushil Nash

I have always thought that anger gets a bad rap. More than any other emotion, anger is seen as dangerous, threatening, something to be avoided or repressed. That is partly because of its portrayal in the media, where we see a parade of angry, destructive, violent or even murderous characters. In most TV programmes and movies, anger is clearly a Bad Thing.

But anger can also be scary for us if we have suffered at the hands of angry parents or other family members when we were kids. If you had a very angry, shouty, hurtful dad, it makes total sense that you would see anger as something scary, to be avoided in others and perhaps even yourself. I see this all the time in my clients, who have often been hurt by destructively angry people as children.

Threat-focused emotion

Another piece of this puzzle is understanding that anger, like anxiety, is a threat-focused emotion. If we feel threatened, by an angry parent, say, our threat system will trigger the fight-flight-freeze response. Feel a jolt of anger? That’s your threat system deciding that fight is the best strategy for dealing with the threat. Or is it a jangle of anxiety? If so, your brain is telling you to either flee (if you can) or freeze (if you can’t).

So anger feels dangerous to us because it’s supposed to – it is literally signalling danger and giving you the fire in your belly to deal with it. Of course, as adults, you generally feel angry (or anxious) about things that won’t do you any physical harm. Plumbers ripping you off. Colleagues being rude. Fellow train passengers delightfully shoving their armpit in your face.

Anger is your power

None of these examples is life-threatening, but they are annoying! And if you want to deal with them, rather than suffer in silence, you need to feel and (healthily) express your anger. That requires assertiveness, which is the healthy expression of anger, especially when someone has treated you badly or crossed a line with you.

This would mean telling that plumber his prices were a ripoff – and that you would get help from a consumer watchdog if he didn’t reduce them pronto. Or calmly but firmly asking your colleague to speak to you respectfully. And definitely telling that guy to get his armpit out of your face!

Healthy anger also helps us protest about injustices, fuelling the Black Lives Matter protests; youth movements across the world, furious about the existential threat of climate change; the Me Too movement or, as I write this, women rightfully expressing their anger about being sexually harassed or worse by men.

If we are not in touch with our anger, or find it so scary that we squash it inside before we even feel it, or allow ourselves to feel it but then keep it inside, so it churns around in a hot, horrible stew, we lose our power. We cannot stand up for ourselves, or fight for what we believe in. And understanding that anger itself is actually neutral – it’s just distorted or destructive anger that is so harmful – is a good place to start.

You are entitled to feel angry. It’s just a normal, healthy emotion – like sadness, fear, love or joy. So don’t let your past rob you of an assertive, empowered present and future. You are worth more than that.

Warm wishes,

Dan

The Link Between Trauma, Stress and Physical Illness

I have long been convinced of the link between traumatic experiences, especially in childhood, and physical ailments such as arthritis, eczema, digestive problems like irritable bowel syndrome and a whole host of other illnesses. So I found Dr Gabor Maté’s book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, to be intriguing.

Dr Maté (a physician working in palliative care and later with addiction in Canada) makes a strong, evidence-based case for the ways in which traumatic or stressful experiences in childhood and throughout our lives repeatedly trigger the stress response in our brain, which causes a cascade of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, as well as many other changes in the brain and body.

This is meant to be an urgent, life-saving response to threats such as predatory animals or aggressive tribes, which were the life-or-death threats humans faced for much of our evolutionary history (which is when our brains were, to a large extent, formed).

But when, say, you have a highly critical parent, putting you down every day throughout your childhood; you suffer abuse or neglect; or are unlucky enough to be raised in a high-conflict family, where the parents are always at each other’s throats, your stress response is being triggered, repeatedly, which the body is not designed to cope with.

Sadly, when combined with your particular genetic makeup, this can make you more vulnerable to a whole host of physical illnesses, including the big, scary ones like cancer, dementia or heart disease; and autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis (MS) or rheumatoid arthritis.

None of this is your fault

Of course, it’s really important to emphasise that this is not your fault in any way, or that – if you are ill now – you somehow brought this illness upon yourself. Dr Maté goes to great pains to explain that it’s the result of these repeated stressors impacting your growing brain and body, which may cause problems in later life. Nobody chooses to have a harsh, critical parent, or to suffer emotional neglect.

But what it does make crystal-clear to me is that, if you have had a highly stressful childhood, it is so important to get psychological help from someone like me (or any other well-trained therapist practising an effective, evidence-based form of therapy). Because none of this is fixed or irreversible – healing those wounds from childhood, learning to feel and healthily release your emotions, becoming less self-critical, more assertive and kinder/more compassionate to yourself… these are all the magic ingredients which form the medicine that combats the effects of your long-term stress.

Warm wishes,

Dan