I noticed a few months ago that my body had developed a tendency to go into what I called 'emergency mode'; I was always tense, I had trouble sleeping, and I rarely felt relaxed or at ease.
I knew what it was about: the pandemic had taken up an inordinate amount of my attention, and anti-COVID social distancing measures had shrunk my usual pool of relaxing pleasures. After so many months, the pandemic was finally getting to me.
There were costs to being in emergency mode for days on end. I could feel it was wearing me down and depleting my body. It also made me much less available for the ordinary pleasures of being alive.
I started to pay a lot more attention to taking care of myself than I usually do.
In normal times, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about stress management because usually I sleep without difficulty, and feel reasonably relaxed most of the time.
I have had periods in my life where a big project at work or a crisis in my personal life pushed my stress levels through the roof temporarily, and during those times I developed a grab bag of tricks to dial my body down from being stuck in emergency mode. In recent weeks I've had to resurrect pretty much all of the practices I learned at those times in the past.
Decades ago I even taught stress management workshops. I now find myself revisiting the basic principles of stress management I once taught.
I'm guessing that you, the reader, may also be feeling more stress than normal. I suspect you too have experienced times in the past when life was more stressful than normal. Whether you know it or not, you probably have your own bag of tricks to mellow yourself out when that is required.
I'm going to tell you what I've been doing, not because I think what I do will work for you, but because I suspect, in reading about what I do, you may be reminded of what has worked for you in the past.
One of the things I do remember clearly from those long ago workshops, is that what worked for me to manage stress didn't work for other people, and vice versa.
Some people at those workshops swore by meditation. Others fervently advocated for the power of prayer. Still others relied on affirmations. All three groups of people spoke with enough conviction, I'm sure that those particular practices worked a hot damn for them personally.
When I tried those things, it wasn't as if they weren't helpful, they just worked less well for me than other techniques I had found. So I would ask you to read what follows not as a set of specific prescriptions, but rather as an aid to help you remember what you might have done in the past to keep your stress levels from spiralling out of control.
With that important caveat, here's a laundry list of what I've been (re)learning in recent weeks:
1) It's okay to feel stressed. Because no-one in my immediate circle had caught COVID, or lost their job, or been displaced by forest fires or floods, I sometimes berated myself that there was no justification for me to be feeling stressed.
But I did have reasons to feel stressed. Though I haven't caught COVID, I've now had 22 months to be nervous that it might happen. My normal routines have gone through long periods of significant disruption. My social relationships and recreation habits have also been disrupted.
Simple empathy means that none of us have gotten through the past year without some level of second-hand distress. Hell, I couldn’t even go to the grocery store without all those masks shouting 'pandemic' at me.
Feeling stressed is a very normal response to the very abnormal conditions we have been living through. Occasionally I need to remind myself of that.
2) Self-care is a priority now: Whenever I slip into emergency mode, one of the things that can make that state chronic for me is that my four-alarm-fire mind tells me that because there's an emergency happening that means there's no time for anything as frivolous as chatting with a friend, having a hot bath, or going for a walk when the sun has come out for the first time in days.
There's now a post-it note at the bottom of my computer monitor reminding me: "Self-care is most important when you don't have time for it!"
3) Self-monitoring: Stress often sneaks up on me when I'm not paying attention. For that reason, I'm now monitoring more closely the various early warning signals my body and behaviour give me.
A really good early-warning signal for me is tightness in the back of my neck.
Whenever I notice I'm forgetting things more than normal, or wanting to eat constantly, that tells me my stress levels are well above normal.
If my wife and children start behaving in irritating ways, that's a really good clue for me that I'm stressing out, and taking better care of myself needs to go immediately to the top of my priority list.
4) Do It Now: One of the things I have found to be true about stress for me that seems to be true for most people is that the earlier I step off the staircase of stress, the easier it is for me to mellow out. The higher I allow my stress levels to go, the harder will be to return my body to non-emergency mode.
5) Dear Diary: Stress ends up in my body, but it starts in my mind. It's not reality that stresses me, it's what I tell myself about reality.
Writing in my journal helps me to identify what's eating at me. Often I drive myself crazy with global big-picture disasters. Remembering that my immediate world is much as it ever was, helps me to get less swept up in that larger soap opera. My fears are almost always about the future. It helps to remind myself repeatedly that right now I have everything I need.
6) Living in my body: When I get wound up with stress, my head starts going a hundred miles an hour. Anything that helps me to live in my body rather than my head helps me to ground in immediate reality. Yoga, Pilates and stretching help bring me back down to living in my body here and now. Even doing mundane household chores tends to ground me.
7) Being tribal: One of the things I've realized is that the more stressed I get, the more alone I feel. I've had to remind myself repeatedly in recent months that I am genetically programmed to be a member of a tribe, and hard-wired to find comfort, solace and security with other human beings.
Talking with friends lightens me up - so long as we don't spend all of our time talking about COVID. Yes, I may do more of that connecting now by phone, or Zoom, but people contact feeds me nonetheless.
I've talked to a number of people who tell me the pandemic has turned them into hermits. I could easily become one too, but I know it would harm me to cut myself off in that way. More than ever, we need each other if we are to get through this.
8) Reining in unhealthy responses to stress: When I'm feeling stressed I tend to want to drink more alcohol than normal. I'm more drawn to caffeinated drinks, snack foods and sugar. All of those things tend to aggravate my stress rather than relieve it.
Christmas is a time when sweet snacks are everywhere. I don't deny myself those seasonal pleasures. I just recognize that this year will require a little more discipline than normal to rein in my sweet tooth. Ditto for alcohol.
I become obsessive when I'm stressed. Checking the latest news on Omicron multiple times a day is an obsessiveness that only feeds my anxiety. Again, though it's hard to eliminate my obsessiveness, I can place it on a shorter leash.
9) Sleep. A not-so-early indicator that my stress levels have been high for a while is that I'll wake at 3 am and have difficulty getting back to sleep.
If I'm not careful, I can then get locked in a vicious cycle. Stress makes it hard to sleep, and sleep-deprivation makes me feel even more stressed and beleaguered.
Perversely enough, I'm more likely to have trouble sleeping if I'm overtired. In times of high stress I know I need more sleep, not less. If I forget that, insomnia reminds me. But the most important thing I can do if I want to sleep well is to not let myself get too stressed for too long.
10) Occasional internet fasts: There's such a deluge of scary news on the internet, it's easy to binge on it. Sometimes it helps me to recover my balance to make my life an internet-free zone for a day. Not every day, just enough to interrupt the part of me that can drown in the data stream.
11) Healthy Distractions: The novels of Isabel Allende have been great at providing me with short respites from the sturm and drang of pandemic life. Watching Christmas movies on Netflix returns me to the normality of pre-COVID life, at least in my imagination. Christmas shopping has been a wonderful distraction from wall-to-wall Omicron this year.
12) Sensual Pleasures: If I live my life on auto-pilot, stress makes me less interested in sensual pleasures of all kinds. Knowing that, I consciously fight those tendencies in myself. In a time when there is less to do in the outside world. I'm now finding more pleasures at home.
It has finally dawned on me that now is a great time to explore new recipes, to put more time into making tasty food, and to enjoy the pleasures of eating together.
I'm taking long, hot baths. I'm listening more to my favorite music CDs. I’m remembering to cuddle with my wife when we first wake up, and before we go to sleep at night.
13) Exercise. Exercise. Exercise: One of the things that's always stayed with me from the days I taught stress management is that stress is the body's way to prepare us for fight or flight. Vigorous exercise tricks the body into thinking we have done one of the other. Exercise also metabolizes the hormones created by stress.
It's really easy in the busyness of the holiday season for me to neglect my needs for exercise, but I'm now realizing that's the absolute worst way for me for me to 'save time'.
14) Caring for Others: Thinking about how I can help my wife and children better cope with the stresses of pandemic life is not just something I can do for them; I often get the benefit too.
I go mountain biking with my son more for his sake than mine, but the truth is I enjoy both the activity, and his company. If I support my wife in getting exercise by going for a walk with her, I get my exercise too.
15) Get out of the house: I've noticed whenever I hunker down and stay in the house all day, I'm likely to finish my day more stressed than when I started it. Getting out of the house, even if it's just going to the grocery store, somehow makes me feel less like a prisoner of the pandemic.
16) Emergency First Aid: I suspect most everyone who has lived on this planet for more than a few decades has come up with their own form of emergency first aid to combat stress. For me it's to go back to bed in a dark room and consciously breathe into my whole body. I imagine that I'm breathing into my arms and legs, right out to my fingers and toes. Twenty minutes later my body has usually remembered how to relax.
17) Vitamins: I recognize that even if I work at it, I'm probably going to be less mellow than normal, so I take the various vitamins I know are depleted by stress: the B vitamins including B12, Vitamins C and D, Zinc and Magnesium.
That's my personal bag of tricks for staying calm in a pandemic. If you think anything I'm doing will work for you, by all means, experiment to see if that is so. But more important is to spend time remembering what's in your own bag of tricks. Your early warning signals for stress may be quite different than mine. Ditto for your sure-fire emergency first aid treatment. You know better than anyone else what works for you.
I’d like to finish with one more reason to put time and energy into taking better care of yourself.
In the short term, stress boosts the immune system. Over time, chronic stress will deplete your immune system to exhaustion.
Something like 90% of the people who catch COVID fight it off without getting sick enough to go to hospital. Sometimes the battle between the COVID virus and a person's immune system is a very close contest. Anything you can do to boost your immune response increases the odds your immune system will beat the virus quickly.
Many of the ways you can care better care of yourself are also good ways to strengthen your immune system. Vitamins C, D and zinc boost your immune system. So does getting adequate sleep. So does regular exercise. So does limiting your input of alcohol and sugar.
If you do end up fighting COVID at some point, it's best to have your body and your immune system be at full strength for that battle, not undermined by chronic stress.
I remember from back when I taught stress management, that whenever a person felt helpless in the face of some external threat, their stress response was greatly amplified.
I started paying more attention to my self-care initially because it scared me how stressed-out I was becoming. That's now shifted. The recognition that taking better care of myself significantly reduces the risk I face from COVID is making me feel less like a victim of the pandemic. I no longer feel helpless, and that’s making it easier to for me to feel mellow more of the time.
So, yes, putting more energy into self-care will make it more possible for you to enjoy the immediate pleasures of life. But let's not overlook one other important benefit. It could help you outlive this pandemic.
Anything you can do to take better care of yourself will reduce the risks you face from COVID. Anything you can do to encourage and support those you love to take good care of themselves will reduce their risks too.
This is very helpful, as I feel not a single person has not expierenced at least a little bit of excess stress for the pandemic. I know personally this pandemic has mentally taxed on me, on top of our monkey government, it has driven me crazy! I will try all the things you've mentioned, keeping in mind that it is personal preference.
For me its useful to just completely focus on one thing, them on the next. This helps me not get stressed and overwhelmed. I just think ''One thing at a time Mike!" For me this strategy works best, and I recommend all to try it.
In one of your earlier books you wrote about how we take better care of our cars than we do of ourselves. It's so true. Glad to see that you're paying attention to your routine maintenance to keep life humming along.
I'll add a reminder about the power of laughter and play to manage stress levels. Some of us (not naming names) are very intense about what we're intense about. We need to be intentional about seeking silly, making merry, and laughing for the health of it. I often fake good belly laughs to breathe better and feel better. They don't say "Laughter is good medicine" for nothing.