6 Tips For Coping With COVID Anxiety This Fall And Winter

As the days get shorter and nights longer, the delta variant of the coronavirus is still very much with us, sad to say. It’s already clear the next couple of seasons won’t be the “life as usual” we all hoped for.

“People have a lot of frustration. People have been doing this a long time, and they thought by now things would be in a different position,” says Vickie Mays, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

So what are some ways we can manage our anxiety as the days get a little darker and we pull the masks back on?

The good news is that this winter we know what masking up and other restrictions look like and we know how they can make us feel. Here are a few tools our experts recommend to help us deal with it all:

Reframe how you think of anxiety

Reframing can be a valuable tool. It takes feelings or emotions you have and turns them into something useful.

Suzuki, who is the author of a book coming out this month called Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion, says instead of approaching anxiety as a negative emotion that must be suppressed, we should think of it as a superpower that motivates us to act.

Learn to breathe yourself calm

If you find yourself feeling anxious or angry, activate your parasympathetic nervous system. “The secret is deep breathing,” Suzuki says, and you can do it wherever you are. Inhale deeply while you count to 4, and then exhale while you count to 4. Repeat until calm.

Move your body

You can fight anxiety with physical movement.

Exercise, even just 10 minutes a day, makes a difference.

Research shows exercise can ease panic attacks and mood and sleep disorders too, and a study in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry found that joining a team sport might be even better than hitting the gym alone.

Connect with others

Being with other people is a critical part of maintaining our mental health and something many of us either stopped doing or moved online during the initial period of tight COVID-19 restrictions last year.

But this winter will not be like the last one, Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease professor at the University of Michigan says, “because we have safe, highly effective vaccines.”

So go on vacation, visit your parents, see the friend you haven’t seen in a while, she advises, but take precautions and keep an eye on what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends and how high the transmission rate is where you’re going. Consider keeping a mask on indoors when you make those visits, especially if you’re going to be around small children who can’t be vaccinated or around people who have compromised immune systems.

Find a ritual that’s meaningful to you, and maybe even share it

Long before the pandemic, Suzuki searched for ways to incorporate ritual in meditation to soothe her own anxiety. She found it when she participated in a tea ceremony in Bali, Indonesia, in 2015. In the ceremony, a monk silently brewed and poured several rounds of tea into handmade ceramic tea bowls for guests.

Since then, she repeats the silent tea meditation herself nearly every morning and, during the pandemic, has shared it on Zoom as a way to connect with friends.

Accept that our new normal may be abnormal

As much as we wish it away, the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is here to stay for a while, and we have to find ways to manage our risks and take care of our mental health for the long haul.

Excerpted from “6 Tips For Coping With COVID Anxiety This Fall And Winter” from NPR. Read the full article online.

Source: NPR | 6 Tips For Coping With COVID Anxiety This Fall And Winter, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/09/04/1033672045/6-tips-for-coping-with-covid-anxiety-this-fall-and-winter | © 2021 npr

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