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The past year and a half have been like no other time in recent history. Among other things, you may have experienced the pain and challenge of lost loved ones, job loss, separation and loneliness, unpredictability, or health difficulties. You may be reeling from the challenges of living in a virtual world, and have experienced a complete upheaval of what you knew as normal. In addition, you may have experienced a wide range of subtle or not-so-subtle mental and emotional health challenges or feel like your psychological reserves have been drained.
While you may be feeling optimistic about the return of some sense of normalcy, you may also be feeling nonspecific and ever-present anxiety as you anticipate post-pandemic life. Things are opening; you should feel hopeful, right? So why do you feel anxious or depressed, and how can you be intentional about recovery?
Our world has suffered from varying degrees of collective trauma and learned helplessness. To move forward in a psychologically and emotionally healthy manner, we cannot just pretend as nothing happened and simply go back to business as usual. Following are steps you can take to reduce your underlying anxiety and embrace a post-pandemic world with hope and resilience.
1. Recognize the challenges.
Before you can move forward in an emotionally healthy way, it is important to acknowledge where you've been and the challenges you have faced.
Emotional experiences get wired in your mind/body complex and impact the way you perceive future events. Suppressing, denying, or merely moving past the experience doesn't change the wiring; it only moves it to a lower level of conscious awareness—where it may wreak even more havoc. Conversely, constantly reliving those experiences from the same debilitating emotional state they are associated with wires them deeper in your psyche.
More simply, recognizing the impact and events of the last year without allowing them to consume you emotionally can reduce the anxiety of moving forward.
Mindfulness, self-empathy, and self-compassion provide a non-reactive, non-judgmental way of being with your challenges. It's as if you are lovingly witnessing or observing your experience from a third-person perspective.
From a state of mindfulness, conjure up as much self-empathy and self-compassion as you can muster and review the challenges of the past year. Imagine witnessing your challenges as if you were a compassionate best friend or loved one.
2. "Re-educate" learned helplessness.
Unfortunately, our world has been suffering from a collective case of learned helplessness spawned by recent events. Learned helplessness occurs when a person is subjected repeatedly to seemingly uncontrollable circumstances; subsequently, they begin to lose their sense of agency or belief they have the internal resources to promote positive change.
How, then, do you cultivate sincere hope in the face of learned helplessness? First, understand that learned helplessness is a "thing." Additionally, if you learned helplessness through the circumstances of the recent past, with intention, you can un-learn it as things improve. Unless you re-educate yourself around your perceptions of helplessness, you will continue to see the future through that lens. Lastly, you need to be aware of how it has impacted you because it is often below conscious awareness yet dictating many of our perceptions around personal resources.
From mindful and self-compassionate awareness, recall how circumstances of the recent past have contributed to feelings of helplessness. Now brainstorm to find ways, even if they are small, of beginning to change those circumstances.
3. Realize your agency.
In the world of neuroscience, minor changes, consistently and continuously, lead to significant shifts in your mind/body complex. In other words, you can train your capacities for specific emotional resources by experiencing them in more minor yet intentional ways. Personal agency is a trainable emotional resource; it directly reduces anxiety and contributes to hope. Again, "agency" is the belief that you have the internal resources to promote positive change.
How do your train your sense of agency? First, reflect on the recent past. Then, let yourself focus on the things that have gone well, even if they are seemingly small.
Reflect on the things that went well, primarily focusing on your contribution to why they went well. You can even spend a few moments each day reflecting on what went well and your part as to why. This kind of reflection will train the neural nets in your brain to notice aspects of your agency you may have been overlooking.
4. Get clarity on what you do want.
Beyond focusing on your agency, reducing anxiety and cultivating hope require a "vision beyond." When most people feel lost or hopeless, their primary focus is on what is wrong; they have no practical sense of what they want out of the situation. You may be the same. Although you may have a vague idea, you likely have no concrete grasp or image of what it would truly "look like" if it were working.
Right now, you may be mired in the difficulties of the recent past. Yes, there may be a lot to recover from, but having a clear vision of the possibilities of life beyond the pandemic is an essential step in confidently and calmly walking into that life.
Reflect on the first activity. Now, instead of recognizing the difficulties, imagine what the situation would "look" like if it were working. Get as clear as you can about the vision and detail of how the improved situation would appear in your life.
An essential aspect of this exercise is that you do not have to figure out how to get there yet; you only bring awareness to what it would look like if it were working. The more in-depth you can be about the detail of what it would look like if it were indeed working, the more likely the answers will automatically emerge.
Walking calmly and confidently into a post-pandemic world is possible. Still, it takes compassionate recognition of the difficulties you have faced, intention to grow beyond your learned helplessness, realizing your agency, and a clear and detailed vision of the circumstances you would like to bring forth.
