Remember last year in January 2020 when something called the ‘Coronavirus’ was a piece of news from China? A year and a half hence, COVID has reached almost every house in India. I’ve had it. You probably also did.
This year, therefore, everybody has somebody who has been affected by COVID or they themselves have been affected. Very rarely will we know anyone who hasn’t had COVID. One of the aspects that we often tend to ignore when it comes to extraordinary situations like this is our mental health and how the situation is affecting us covertly. In order to understand our inner mental working better and to know how to deal with the situation whilst mentally strong and healthy, Homegrown spoke to Mumbai-based Psychotherapist Dr Rizwana Nulwala who practises at Krizalyz Counselling and Psychotherapy and has experience of over 15 years.
Dr Nulwala acknowledges that we are all experiencing a certain level of distress. Pre-existing mental health conditions are also getting exacerbated. More so, at this point, since everyone’s focus is on the immediate medical attention that is to be given, many of us aren’t being able to focus on our mental health and the impact of this combat on our mental and emotional well-being.
Dr Nulwala points out that given the situation, different people might be experiencing different kinds of anxieties. She highlights these five:
i. Generalised Anxiety
ii. Anxiety from the anticipation of a dreadful and unmanageable future.
iii. Specific phobia, such as fear of open areas or germs.
iv. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder from bearing sudden loss or going through extenuating circumstances.
v. Existential phobia from thinking about the future, including thoughts that question the relevance of life as it is.
Here are 12 tips from Dr Nulwala that might take a little time and lot of mindfulness but that can surely help you with your mental health in these rather challenging times.
- Be in the now. Focus on what’s happening at the moment. Anxiety emerges from fear of the future because we know that we can’t control the future.
- Put a break on Googling symptoms. Engaging with inaccurate data makes you even more anxious. Rely only on medical and mental health expertise.
- Don’t engage with information – distressing news, specifically, if you don’t have the capacity to deal with it.
- Every night, write down the last 3 episodes when you were resilient and dealt with things you didn’t know you could deal with. This will help boost your confidence.
- Remember that how you deal with difficulty is a choice.
- Make a gratitude journal, but more importantly, make a problem-solving journal where you write about how you solved different problems that arose throughout the day.
- Build the mental health muscle: flex, manage and learn to balance.
- If you have severe anxiety or pre-existing mental health conditions, talk to a mental health professional.
- Seek mentorship to get advice on how to come out of functionality crises.
- Reframe your frame of mind: think about things that you can do with a simple modification.
- Break up your day. Don’t look at time as a whole day or a whole week and get anxious. Plan but don’t worry.
- Motivate yourself by doing one thing that brings you joy every day: watch something, play with your family, talk to people, or set up Zoom parties.
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