How To Deal With Renewed COVID Anxiety

The highly contagious delta variant is driving a new surge of COVID-19 cases throughout the country. Masks mandates are back, and instead of experiencing nerves over relearning how to socialize with people in person, many are dealing with feelings of anxiety, frustration and grief, knowing that this pandemic is far from over.

“I think people were starting to think that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel in the spring,” Dr. Lucy McBride, a primary care physician in Washington, D.C, says. “People were getting vaccinated. Case rates and hospitalization rates from COVID-19 were dropping. And we knew at that moment in the spring, through accumulated evidence, that kids are protected at least in part by being surrounded by immune-vaccinated or naturally immune adults.”

“Does anyone have an antidote for emotional whiplash? My vaccinated patients are asking,” Dr. McBride tweeted last month. Her own advice is that anxiety is a justified emotional response: “It’s how we run from danger,” she says. But it’s also important to remember “to calibrate it to our particular reality,” otherwise we risk running our bodies and minds into the ground.

Dr. McBride spoke with All Things Considered’s Ari Shapiro about creating coping strategies for anxiety, the effects of decision fatigue — a deteriorating quality of decision-making when faced with serious questions like whether to cancel trips home or taking kids out of in-person school — and how the path forward rests on a careful line between hope and realistic expectations.

Excerpted from “How to Deal With Renewed COVID Anxiety” on NPR. Read the full article for highlights from the interview. Listen to the five-minute podcast below:

Source: NPR | How to Deal With Renewed COVID Anxiety, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027198541/how-to-deal-with-renewed-covid-anxiety | © 2021 npr

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