Staying afloat tinashe10/6/2023 ![]() ![]() In other words, don’t cut your emotions off, since labeling them as “bad” or “unwanted” in your mind will only make you want to think them more. To stop yourself from going down rabbit holes, the best thing to do is to not deny yourself those rabbit holes. The first thing I’d suggest from my own experiences and from the multitudes of posts by psychologists I’ve read over the years is something paradoxical. With that said, how do we stop ourselves from getting into these mental quagmires of catastrophic thinking? How do we manage what feels like a never-ending nightmare? The answers are easy in theory-simple even-but require diligence over time to see full results. We are all sharing some part of the burden of COVID-19’s No matter where we are in the proverbial boat, we’re all Way they were everything has changed from top to bottom, and that can be hard Virus, you might be weighed down by the stress of things simply not being the The virus or know people who have died of the virus.Įven if you don’t know anyone personally struggling with the There are other families, including other relatives of mine, who either have I can beĬounted among the luckier ones-while I’m doing quite okay with my immediate family, Narrative while simultaneously recognizing the very real stress that socialĭistancing and the threat of the coronavirus is causing on all of us. I had to mentally stop myself from creating this victimizing What if the social distancing never ends? What if my living arrangements will become permanent? What if I’ll never get to promote my book again with a book tour? What if I’ll never go to the mall again? What if the only outings I’ll go to are grocery store runs? What if all of my best-laid plans for a post-quarantine body and post-quarantine career are all for naught? What if I’m just wasting my time and should just stay in bed since everything’s going to hell? However, the shock of staying indoors and away from social gatherings for months or even, in the extreme scenarios, years at a time sent me into a small, but intense panic, and my mind went into a mental state I often struggle with-catastrophic thinking. Thankfully, I found that Johnson & Johnson is working towards having a not-for-profit vaccine to be available by early 2021, so hopefully, if everything goes well, we will have something to help us out in the future. And a large portion of the study hinged upon a world where there was no COVID-19 vaccine. And the key word I think researchers would want us to remember is “intermittent”-we won’t have to be sequestered in our homes forever, just at certain periods of the year (or years, if we’re going by this preliminary study). The study is probably best described as theoretical-a scientific thinking-out-loud session, if you will, in order to help hospitals manage and plan for its current and future patient loads. What was supposed to be a relaxing shower turned into one in which I mulled over how long America’s social distancing could last after reading a YouTube community post about how Harvard scientists have theorized that without a vaccine, the country could have to endure intermittent social distancing until 2022. I will admit that I have finally hit a wall in my social Culture, issues, lifestyle, mental health, social distancing
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