Coping with COVID - Cultivating Emotional Resilience

0:02 A listener production. Hey guys, you're listening to Crappy to Happy. I'm cast done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, mindfulness meditation teacher, and author of the Crappy to Happy books. And in this. Series, we talk about all of the things that might be making you feel crappy, and I give you the tools and techniques to help you overcome them. Obviously, right now we're all feeling pretty crappy about. The coronavirus pandemic. So I'm here at home at the Sunshine Coast, hanging out with my cow, the rest of my animals, my lovely family, just writing out this coronavirus crisis. This is going to be the third and final episode in these solo episodes that I've been doing to try to help you stay as positive and as healthy and as well as you can be. And I want to just start by saying that I hope you are doing okay wherever you are. I know that we're all kind of getting a bit of ca and fever now. I personally am grateful to be living where we live, not just where I live on the Sunshine Coast, but living in a country that has done a really good job of managing the pandemic, but I think it's also fair to say that we are kind of all feeling a little bit of that cabin fever and wanting things to get back to some kind of normal as soon as possible.

1:21 So on that I. Wanted to talk to you today about giving you some strategies to cultivate emotional resilience, which is so important, but it is especially important in the face of this kind of chronic and unrelenting stress, which is what we're really all experiencing at the moment. And we've talked before about when this whole thing started, there was this kind of wave of panic, and there was fear. Nobody knew what was going to happen, or how it was going to look, or how it was going to affect us. And I think that the longer that we stay in this scenario, and even as the immediate threat, you know, particularly of the massive collapse of the healthcare system and all of those things that we were fearful of, even as those risks kind of seem to dissipate, we are still in this really unusual situation where we're stuck at home, we don't have access to our normal outlets and our social activities.

2:16 We've all got our kids at home. If you've got kids, you know, trying to manage them and keep them entertained and keep them educated and do our jobs as well. And it's like a pressure cooker. So it is this sort of chronic stress that we're all experiencing. And what people have been saying to me is and what they've been asking for my help with, is how to make sense of this just waves of emotions. They'll say, like one day I feel fine, and the next day I'm like in floods of tears. One day I'm just like a mad person cleaning the house and getting on top of things. And the next day I'm just like lying on the couch and I can't get up and I can't move. And there is this thing, this isolation fatigue, I so exhaustion a lot of people are talking about. So I wanted to talk to you about that today and give you some insight and some understanding about what we're all experiencing on a physiological level, and some real strategies that hopefully will give you some practical tools to help you to manage your response whatever that might be. So, whether you're up in panic stations, or whether you are just down in depression, what you can actually do to move through those stages and maintain your health and your well being and continue to operate at your best. So I think the first thing that I want to talk about, and this is stuff that will not be unfamiliar to you, is just about how our stress response works. And I want to say too

3:48 that the stuff that we're talking about today, this kind of chronic, unrelenting stress. While it is very specific to the situation we are in with the coronavirus, this is not unique to the coronavirus pandemic. We often before we landed here, even in our normal, everyday, busy lives, many of us experienced chronic, unrelenting stress just because of the pace of our lives, work deadlines, our addiction to our devices, all of that sort of stuff. So I am hopeful that what I share with you today will be useful, not just for now, but will help you to. Build a bit of a toolkit. I guess that can also help you even as we emerge on the other side of this and you go back to some kind of new normal. So let's talk about stress. We know that when we are faced with a stress or a threat or a perceived threat, whether it's real or whether it's imagined, then our body and our brain mobilizes our fight or flight response. It's very normal, it's very human. There is a part of our brain that is its only job is to scan and look for possible danger. Again, whether it's real, whether it's not.

4:59 Our brain and body reacts in exactly the same way, and when that fight or flight response is activated, we experience things like elevated heart rate, dry mouth. The blood is shunted away from our vital organs to protect them and into our arms and legs to ready us to act and to fight off this danger or to run. And of course the other it's not just fight. Or flight, it is the fight flight freeze response, and freeze describes that kind of reactive immobility where we wait to decide what our next move is going to be. And the animal kingdom, actually the freeze response is when they drop and they play dead, and in humans that can be like a dramatic dropping blood pressure, it can be fainting, it can be responses like that where it is almost like a play dead kind of response.

5:53 So that's all very normal. The thing about the fight flight freeze response is that it is supposed to be short and sharp. We are supposed to if we perceive a threat or a danger there is something that's going to hurt us. Then it is activated. We do what we need to do to get out of that situation. We either fight off defend ourselves against that threat. We are the run in the other direction, but we get ourselves out of danger and then everything returns back to baseline. And so we have this Our body is designed to return to homeostasis, which is to always bring us back into balance. And if you imagine this on a kind of a curve, we have a baseline, which is when we're resting, we're calm, everything's okay, we feel good. It's a parasympathetic nervous system is in operation, and that's our rest and digest response. And then in the face of our general daily ups and downs, stresses, deadlines, our fight or flight response is activated and then it comes back down. So we're constantly moving through these waves, even if if we're not in immediate danger. There's no threat to our life. Just the daily demands of life and the daily challenges that we deal with, we'll have us moving through these waves up and down, up and down back to baseline. We know just by looking at the animal kingdom how the fight or flight response is supposed to work. If you've ever watched I think we've

7:23 talked about this before a David Attenborough documentary, like the gazelle sees the lion, you know, bolts and then as soon as they're out of danger, they're just backed eating grass again. Put like not a care in the world. They're not overthinking about where was the line, where's the next line going to be? What happened? Did I cause that was this my fault, which is what our. Human brain does, which is why we tend to be so much more generally stressed out and overthinking and anxious than the animal kingdom generally, because we have this mind which continues to create things to be afraid of or to be stressed out by. Anyway, back to our day to day functioning. So if you imagine that curve up and down, up and down, that when you are operating within that.

8:12 What we call the window of tolerance. The window of tolerance is if you imagine your baseline is when you are at rest, your upper limit of what you can cope with in terms of stress. If you imagine that like an upper limit, so there's a bottom line and a top line, then the space in between there is what we call your window of tolerance. And as long as you're staying inside that window, you're operating at your best. You are able to receive. Information, to process information, you're not overly panicked or anxious, you can think rationally, make good decisions, and your body stays in that sort of its natural state of just responding and relaxing. So responding and it's relaxing. A lot of people, even in a normal situation, even pre coronavirus, get to a stage in their life where they're operating very close to the upper limit of that window of tolerance.

9:13 So when you are experiencing chronic stress again, whether it's real or whether it's imagined, whether it's just to do with your busy job and your deadlines and your kids, or you're going through tough times, you're going through divorce or financial problems or all the things that we deal with in life, if you are not getting a break from that stress, if you don't have strategies to come back down to that baseline, then of course we're very adaptive too, and so we eventually we get used to that level of stress and that sort of becomes our new normal. And I've seen this in my clients in my clinical psychology practice many many times where they have really hit their limit, and it's because there's just been this gradual piling of stressful scenarios. First they're having issues with their relationship, or then they've lost their job, or theny having a problem with their boss. Keep on layering these extra layers of stress without ever having effective strategies to come back down and to relax and to discharge those emotions. And so what people find is when they're operating very close to the upper limit of that window of tolerance, is it can take nothing at all to set you off to burst into tears, to be going into rage and anger, or panic, or unable to sleep.

10:31 All of these are effects of what we call hyper arousal. So we have our normal physiological arousal, which is what we've talked about, and then if you bust through that upper limit, you get into this hyper aroused state. And that is what a lot of people have been sharing with me that they've been experiencing because of what we're dealing with at the moment because of this chronic, unrelenting stress and pressure that we're all dealing with, this constant uncertainty, this lack of predictability, which, as we've discussed, our human brains are designed to like certainty, We like predictability, So if we don't have that, there is this low level, this humming of stress and anxiety and uncertainty that's ticking along all of the time, and so a lot of us are very close to the upper limit. So some of the symptoms of that hyper arousal are things like being flooded with emotions, feeling really dysregulated, like you have no control over your emotional response. It's a sense of hypervigilance.

11:36 It's like you're constantly on alert, feeling like you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It can manifest as physical pain, tension, headaches, tight jaw, back pain. A lot of physical complaints are attached to this overload of chronic stress on your body. It's sleeplessness, digestive complaints, panic, anxiety, anger, irritabilit just like losing it. So if you're experiencing anything like that, it is a fair sign that you might have tipped over to busted through your upper limit, and you're in this hyper aroused state. Now, the other thing I want to say about that is that our body can't actually tolerate that for any length of time. So what often will happen is as a part of this homeostasis, as part of this trying to get us back down into normal, what it will often do is then crash.

12:29 So people will. Find that they're in this hyper aroused state for a while and then they crash into this hypo state. And hypo is low, hyper is high if you weren't aware of that, so hypo arousal. It's like when you're stuck in the off position. So if you're stuck on on, agitated, keyed up, can't come down in the hyper aroused state. Then the opposite of that is depression, feeling lethargic, feeling really flat, exhausted, disoriented, having this mental fog, I can't think of what I was supposed to do, really low energy, low blood pressure, disconnected, like feeling quite emotionally disconnected, just flat, exhausted, fatigued.

13:12 So sometimes people will when we talk about the normal stress response and moving up and down in this normal range, and this optimal window and our window of tolerance. There are some people who are just crashing. They're up and then they're crashing back down, and then they're not really effectively coming back to this optimal window. Or maybe they're spending some time in that optimal window, but then they're finding that the pressure is building and they're up and they're panicked, and then they're down. And this is what I'm hearing people say. They're all over the place. The other thing I want to say about this window of tolerance is everybody's window is a different width, So it isn't fair or reasonable to compare your own experience with anybody else's, even if people are in the same situation.

13:59 Things like. Your past experience, whether you've had experienced trauma. We talked about attachment issues in the last episode. If you've had earlier experiences, or past experience, or even genetic predispositions that make you more sensitive to stress and to threat, your window of tolerance will be narrower, which means it just takes less to tip you over the edge. And the important thing about this is that we all have some understanding of where our limits are. This just reminds me of something that I saw the other day where a lot of us have been saying we're all in the same boat, we're all in this together. And I saw something the other day which was, well, we're not actually all in the same boat. We're all in the same storm, but each of us is kind of in a different boat.

14:44 And that both thought that was so perfect because the different boat that you're in, you might it might relate to the personal circumstances that you're in, whether you have still have a job, whether you have family around, whether you've lost your job, whether you're living alone, all of those external factors that will put us in a different boat in terms of how we weather this storm. But there's also this internal world as well, and so just our capacity to tolerate stress and our ability to navigate some of those some of those waves, so the window of tolerance can be widened. And this is what I really want to talk to you about today. The strategies that you can put into place that will either help you when you're up or when you're down to come back to a more normal, optimal level, but also the strategies that you can put into place if you are in your window to stay there so that you're not vulnerable to tipping over the edge. And also the things that will help you over time to widen your window, because obviously that's what we're kind of all aiming for in the long term, is to have a wider window of tolerance so that we can actually more effectively manage all of the normal stresses and difficulties and challenges that we face anyway, even on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic. So I thought that the most beneficial thing

16:19 I could offer you today was some really practical strategies to help you to bring yourself back into that window or to stay in that window. And bearing in mind, this is going to change day today, So the important thing is for you to be really plugged in and really tuned in to where you're at. It may be on a day to day basis, it could be an hour by hour basis sometimes, but when you are using things like mindful nerves to just check in with yourself, check in with where's where's my head at. So I thought that the most beneficial. Thing I could offer you today was some really practical strategies to help you to bring yourself back into that window or to stay in that window and bear in mind, this is going to change day today.

17:03 So the important thing is for you to be. Really plugged in and really tuned in to where you're at. It may be on a day to day basis, it could be an hour by hour basis sometimes, but when you are using things like mindfulness to just check in with yourself, check in with where's where's. My head at, what am I feeling? How am I traveling emotionally today, then you're in a position with that self understanding, with that self awareness to actually then use strategies to support you and to keep you in that optimal kind of state where you're functioning at your best. And again, this is just not for you, This is for everybody around you. If you've got kids at home, like, there are probably some strategies here that you can use with them as well.

17:44 So let's just start with. If you are if you know that you're within your window, if you're traveling along, okay, this is where your emotions are fairly well under control. You're kind of cool, come collected, you have the capacity to self soothe, You're not feeling out of control, panicked, you're looking after your sleep's Okay, you know your appetites fairly normal. This is all normal kind of kind of stuff. So the things that are going to keep you in that window are well mindfulness of course, that ability to kind of stay in the present moment, to keep your attention in the here and now, Like I said, just checking in with yourself, mindful, breathing, mindfulness, meditation, this is all part of If this is part of your daily routine, that's fantastic. Grounding techniques are really useful.

18:34 So grounding is like it's a way of really physically dropping yourself back into the present. A really useful grounding technique, one that's quite common is naming five things I can see, four things I can touch, three things I can hear, two things I can smell, one thing I can taste. The five four, three, two one is a. Really useful little quick tool you can use to keep you back here in the present. Even the five things I can see is a useful and even five things I can touch, even if you don't go. Through the whole list. Anyway that you can engage your senses to bring you back here into the physical the present moment is going to be useful because we as we know it is your mind and where your mind wants to take you that is most likely to create this stress response. It's all of the fast forwarding to the worst case scenario, to the focusing on what's going wrong. It's going to heighten that arousal and potentially tip you up over the edge.

19:33 So anything that you can do to keep you back here in the present is going to be really useful. Slow, deep breathing, managing, checking in with your thoughts, like I just said, like making sure that you're coming back to what you can control, coming back to what's positive today, what I can be grateful for, what's going well. All of these. Cognitive techniques really this thinking process are going to neutralize or counter your brains in built negativity bias. We know that we all have that negative negativity bias in our mind. So anything that we can do to shift our thinking back to what's going well, what can we appreciate, even one that I really love, is what good might come from this?

20:21 It helps to give you. That broaden your perspective about even when things feel really crappy, like what good might come from this? Because typically if we're able to shift our awareness, there is usually always something good and worthwhile that comes from even the most difficult and challenging experiences of life. So the more that we can connect with those now and in the future, then the better off we're going to be. Making sure that you're staying in touch with friends and family, making sure that you're keeping some sort of routine without being too rigid about it, keeping up those daily healthy habits, getting to bed at a reasonable time, staying away from stuff that elevates anxiety. Caffeine and alcohol are the two words, even sugar potentially, but you know, keeping to a healthy diet, making time each day for something that makes you feel good, and something that gives you a sense of achievement. These are pretty basic strategies that we use in treating depression.

21:23 Actually is having people incorporate into their day one thing that you do purely for pleasure, even if it's just ten minutes, and one thing that you do to give you a sense of mastery or achievement, even if it is just tidying out one draw in your house, or even if it is just getting through one meeting or doing you know, one activity with your kids or whatever it is, but something that gives you pleasure, something that gives you a sense of mastery that stimulates the release of all of your happy hormones and will keep you in a good, healthy place outside of that window, and you've gone up into hyper arousal, your anxious, angry, panicked, flooded, really finding it hard to come down from that again, deep diafromatic breathing is a really great way to activate your parasympathetic nervous system and bring you back down. And I'm going to say that when you are hyper aroused, the importance needs to be on the extended out breath.

22:24 It's the long exhale that helps to bring you back into that parasympathetic activate, sorry, that parasympathetic nervous system. So something like breathing in for four breathing out for seven and doing that a few times will help to calm down all of that stress. Physiology, you might take a deep breath in and then exhale until your lungs are completely empty, and then just allow your lungs to naturally refill, so rather than sucking in the breath, actually just allowing your lungs to naturally feel but then really pushing all of the air out of your lungs. So these are ways that you can extend the outbreadth, and that's proven to be effective in activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is what you need to calm down. So how about we just do this together. Right now, I'm going to take you through one of these breathing exercises so you can do it with me. I'm going to count in for four and out for seven. The important thing is that I would like you to count along with me, either out loud or in your own head. So let's go together breathing in two three four out, two three four five six seven In two three four out, two three four, five six seven. If you can continue to do that whenever you find yourself feeling stressed, overwhelmed, anxious,

23:56 it will really help you to come back in to the present moment to come everything down. And the other thing it does is when you are counting out loud or in your head, it brings your head back into the present moment as well. So your mind can't be racing off and panicking about things that are going wrong. It can't be getting angry about your kids having too much screen time, or whatever it might be, if it's actually focused on counting, So that is one of the that's one of the reasons why counting to ten is one of the things they tell people to do when they're in anger management, when people get really ragy. The counting to ten actually it brings online a linear, logical part of your brain instead of that heightened emotional response, and it gives you something else to focus on. It gives you something to focus on that is not your angry or anxious thoughts. So I really recommend that you take time to do that, and even if you're in a good state, do it a few times a day, just as a part of your normal routine. It's really useful to just continually check in and bring your mind and body back to a state of calm. It's keeping you inside that window of tolerance. Other things that are really useful, things like jumping on a mini tramp or jumping on a trampoline, anything that is rhythmic. So this has been demonstrated in studies to do with trauma and treatment for trauma and the neurobiology of trauma, in other words, how trauma affects your brain. Anything that is kind of rhythmic is very soothing. So things like bouncing throwing a

25:31 ball backwards and forwards, or throwing a ball against a wall. Bessel Vandercock is one of the world's leading trauma therapists, and he says, never leave home without a beach ball if you're a person who is prone to panic and anxiety and all of those things, so being able to throw a beach ball backwards and forth. It doesn't have to be a beach ball. Of course. Hip hop. This is why hip hop. Is often very popular and very effective with people who have experienced trauma, traumatic upbringings, or other experiences. It's the rhythmic nature of it. Things like drumming African drumming. Again, you might not have drums, but you can just drum along on your coffee table. Drinking through a straw is another one, and of course I'm going to say make sure that you've got one of those metal straws so that we're not damaging the environment. But drinking through a straw helps to regulate your breathing as well.

26:23 Weighted blankets. I don't have any evidence of that, but I know a lot of people really are like weighted blankets. I think that you can order them online, but even if you don't have a weighted blanket, just like putting something heavy on you. It's like with kids having tantrums. I don't know if you've ever heard this. Like wrapping them in a really, really really tight bear hug. It's that sensory pressure that is very soothing. So if you've got somebody in your house that can wrap you in a bear hug, that could be very helpful as well. But otherwise, really wrapping yourself up tightly into a cocoon, it helps us to feel safe. It helps us to feel safe and comforted. Anything that you can do to move that energy through your body, mindfulness activities such as yoga or those body based sort of mindfulness activities are good, but it might just be walking, doing some boxing, just doing some exercise, throwing on a gosh. There's no shortage of free online workouts at the moment, and free online yoga classes. You only have to log into your social media and there is plenty on offer. So anything that just gets that energy and that adrenaline moving through your body and discharged will help to calm you back down and just to reiterate with that movement. Anything that's rhythmic in nature is going to naturally be soothing, so things that use both your arms and legs bilaterally, so walking, running, swimming, things like that that they have a kind of an

27:54 integrative effect on your brain. When your brain is feeling kind of dysregulated and everything is feeling disintegrated, then it can help to bring your mind and your body back into a sort of a sense of alignment and integration. So if you are on the opposite end of the spectrum and you are experiencing that real lethargy, depression, despondence, exhaustion, and you can't get yourself off the couch, then there are also things that you can do that will activate some of that physiological arousal to get you back up into a normal state of functioning, which is super important because if you feel flat and depressed and you low energy and low motivation and low mood, and you give into that and you continue to just lay flat on the couch and do nothing and withdraw from people and disengage from your normal responsibilities and routines, then we know that that creates a really negative downward spiral, and you will just spiral down and down further and deeper into that depressive state unless you really make an effort, a conscious effort to do something, and if you don't feel like it, that's the key to move your energy and to lift your mood up out of that. So some of the things that you can do to kind of activate your senses again, things like breathing in essential oil and you might even put some essential oils into rub it into the palm of your hand and then cover your nose and mouth. And I'm not supposed to be touching our face at the moment, but make an exception.

29:25 Sanitize your hands first, and then breathe in some essential oil, put your palms up near your face, or even just sniffing essential oils in a bottle. I often do that myself. I have a little bottle of a couple of little bottles of essential oil that sit on my desk, and throughout the day, periodically I will just pick one up and just breathe it in. It's quite soothing and refreshing. Again. Movement anything that sort of stimulates and activates the senses, and anything that's kind of sensory, So things like finger painting or baking or creating kneading bread though stuff like that, stuff that sort of activates your sensory experience, things like dancing music, anything that lifts your energy, lifts your mood.

30:13 The trampoline the mini tramp are also great. The therapy ball, like, some of these strategies are actually useful at either end of the spectrum, just to help to bring you back online and bring you back into that kind of optimal functioning state. I also didn't mention before with that rhythmic movement swinging. On a swing. I know a lot of playgrounds were closed, but if you can find one that's open, swing on a swing, it sort of mimics like being rocked as a baby. If you can imagine that natural tendency we have to kind of be rocked and swayed, and how soothing that is. Anything that mimics that, so rocking on a rocking chair, I can't think of it. Maybe a hammock, anything like that that you can think of that gives you that so even just swaying, even just swaying to mud, it has a very soothing effect. So I hope that some of those tips are helpful to you. I hope that you can find something in there. And again, it really is about you playing around and working out what works.

31:12 Best for you. Not every technique will necessarily help you, but it's about you getting to know yourself, you getting to know where your limits are, and then knowing what's going to be really effective in helping you to manage that. And again, hopefully as. A result of this, you will build yourself a toolkit that you can take with you going forward, even when we come out of the other side of this current situation. And I wanted to just also mention that often, in the long run, these really significant difficulties, traumatic events are often the catalyst for people to become more appreciative, to develop strength and confidence, and a sense of their own resourcefulness and their own reszilent, and often even just a new sense of meaning and purpose. And I know that I've been seeing a lot of people. As much as we want things to go back to normal, there's a lot of people asking, well, what kind of normal do we really want to go back to? Do we really want to go back to living life how we did before?

32:18 Not just at an individual level, but at the community level and even a global level, Like what changes might we want to come from this? And so I think there is a real opportunity if we can tap into it to just connect with our sense of gratitude, our appreciation, our sense of community. And that's been one thing that's been really evident through this whole thing, about the fact that we are all connected locally, globally. Again, we're all in the same storm, and so despite the social distancing, we are feeling more empathy towards each other. We're feeling more. Altruistic, and we I think we're all developed a sense of what really matters most. So if we come out of the other side of this with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, with a deeper connection to our own values, a greater sense of appreciation and gratitude for what we do have, then maybe that is the good that will come from this. So this has been the third and final episode in my solo series Supporting You through Coronavirus. Just a couple of things before I go today, I want to remind you that as much as I am here to help you as best as I can, this podcast and others like it unknown substitute for professional mental health care. If you are really struggling, please remember that you have access to Medicare rebates on psychology or psychiatry appointments GP appointments from home via the telehealth option,

33:54 so you can phone your GP, you can have a video appointment or consult you can get a referral to a mental health professional, and you can access appointments from home as long as you have phone, sky Bazoom or some access to technology that connects you to a professional. All of the usual Medicare rebates apply for those appointments. And if you do want more personal attention from me, I have just opened my online membership called Beyond. It's beyond Happy, Beyond Limits, Beyond Struggle. You can find out more about that at castdone dot com, Forward slash Beyond. I'm having a great time supporting my founding members. That's weekly content, live calls, lots of fun, lots of information and lots of support and communication, all from our own homes.

34:45 You can join for just thirty nine dollars a month and find out more at cast done dot com, Forward slash Beyond, or email me hello at castdone dot com. I'm looking forward to bringing you some more guests going into the future, getting back to the usual format of crappy to happy that you have come to know and love. Until then, stay safe, look after each other and I'll see you on the other side. Crappy to Happy is presented by Cast Dunn, produced by David Vilenski, Putio production by Darcy Thompson. Listener