Challenge your thinking!

Why not take this unique time to make real change? Examine your fears and worries – you may find that there is less to them than you though after all.

Practice Compassion
Humans can be pretty tribal and judgmental. It may be true that we get even more tribal and judgmental when we’re feeling threatened and anxious.

Even at the best of times, social media seems to contribute to increased anxiety, judgement and hostility, so we should all watch out for that. Try counter any “pull” to be more hostile or judgmental by practicing compassion – including compassion for yourself. The research on the practice of compassion shows that being there for other people and doing good things for other people, even small gestures, is very good for our own mental health. So caremongering is a win/win.

Practice Gratitude and Savouring
Make time to be thankful.

At the best of times, people have a negative bias. We tend to focus on the negative rather than the positive, and the negative information carries more “weight” than positive information.

That is why couples therapists say that couples need to have at least six positive interactions to balance every negative interaction in order to be happy in their relationship.

COVID-19 has us all focused on the negative. So, it’s more important than ever to drag yourself over to considering the positive things in your life. You have to practice, because it isn’t easy for most people. But, it’s worth doing because the research says that the regular practice of gratitude has significant benefits on mental health.

Being grateful for the ‘Big Stuff’ and the ‘Big Wins’ is great! It is important to do that. But, the research says that being mindfully grateful on a regular basis for the small great things in your daily life – a nice warm cup of tea, a fresh baked cookie, new socks, music that moves you or the smile of a loved one – is all it takes.

It’s not: “Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.” It’s: “Make sure to take some time each day to smell the roses and savour that experience.”

Accept Your Emotions
If you’re feeling fearful, anxious and maybe a little depressed because of COVID-19, join the crowd. COVID-19 is affecting everyone’s’ emotions in the same way.

Experiencing these emotions doesn’t make you weak or broken or “crazy.” It makes you normal. These emotions are a natural responses to what’s going on in our lives right now.

Our emotions are useful. They can inform us and guide us. For example, anxiety helps motivate us to prepare and be safe.

Emotions can be very distressing, but they’re not dangerous. Practice accepting your emotions for the mostly normal reactions that they are, and commit to managing them and working with them as best as you can.

Being afraid of our own emotions, avoiding, and trying to fight them off doesn’t work very well. Emotions are not something we can escape. Better to accept and learn to live with them.

Identify Your Fears
It can be a good idea to identify exactly what it is you’re afraid of. While we want to accept our emotions, we want to identify our fears so that we can examine and challenge them. If we have to accept them, we’ll do that. But, first let’s challenge them.

When people are anxious they feel like something “really bad” is going to happen, or maybe a feeling of doom. When people are afraid like that, sometimes they can describe what they are afraid of and sometimes they can’t. If you’re afraid but you don’t even know what you are afraid of you have a double problem.

So, take some time to think about what you are afraid of on a regular basis. If you’re predicting a catastrophe or disaster, then try to put your finger on what exactly you’re predicting. Are you predicting that you are going to get sick? That you or someone you love will get sick and die? That you will lose your job and be unemployed forever? Lose your home and relationship? Identifying your fears allows you to examine them and challenge them.

For example, If you’re worried about a worst worst-case scenario, how likely is that? What is the best thing that could happen? What will most likely happen? If you can identify the worst worst-case scenario that’s feeding your fear, you can start to challenge it. If the worst case scenario is true, then you can challenge your belief that you somehow won’t be able to cope with it.

Challenge Your Thinking
Don’t believe everything you think! especially if you are experiencing a strong emotion like anger or anxiety. At the core of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is the idea that feelings, thoughts and behaviours all influence each other and that negative thinking, including catastrophizing feeds fear and anxiety in a positive feedback loop. Recognize that when you are anxious your thinking is likely to be distorted. Thoughts aren’t facts. Learn to identify your anxious thoughts and treat them like you would anything else presented to you as a “fact.” What is the evidence to support this thought or belief? What is the evidence that does not support this thought or belief? If that that thought or belief isn’t true, what is the thought or belief that seems more true? If you practice that, you are practicing cognitive therapy, just like that.

Remind Yourself of Your Strengths
People are remarkable adaptive and resilient. While you may have never faced anything like COVID-19 before, you have probably overcome other challenges and adversity at some point in your life.

While we’re not all “survivors,” most us have had to cope with hardship before. When times are hard, we can get very down on ourselves. We can forget about what is great about us as a person, what we are good at and the strengths we have that have helped us adapt and overcome adversity in the past.

Take some time to take an inventory of your strengths and remind yourself of the times you’ve overcome adversity in the past. Don’t be shy about it. Talk to yourself about this as you would to someone that you valued and cared for.

Make Decisions Based on Your Values
The best “core work” of all – although it is a bit of a longer-term project – is to identify your values and commit to making value-based decisions. That is a strength that serves people really well. Think about the things that are really – really – the most important to you. If you can identity those, it will help you let go of the worry over things that aren’t really important to you at all.

Manage Your Substance Use
When under stress, people use alcohol, cannabis and other substances to avoid their emotions and manage their mood. Now, more than ever, it’s important to be careful about the illusion of stress relief that substance use is, and to monitor and control your substance use so that it doesn’t get out of hand.

For the first few weeks of COVID-19, you may have been on a “vacation” schedule, trying to cope as best as you could with unfolding events. However, as the COVID-19 situation continues, you want to re-establish or establish a healthier relationship with alcohol, cannabis and other substances.

Consider going back to what you were doing normally before COVID-19, for example – maybe no drinking during the week and/or no drinking before 5:00 pm.