Our Quiet, Collective Heave-Ho
Staying in to avoid Covid-19 feeds the beast of anxiety. Staying in to help flatten the curve feels purposeful. The meaning we make and where we look influence our experience of the scary upheaval of this time.
A few weeks ago, I started to feel the anxiety building. I started to collect extra groceries, canned goods, ingredients. Appearing non-chalant, I’d fill a bag with non-perishables that would be stashed in corners around the house. The anxiety told me upheaval was coming and since we’d never been through one before my imagination obligingly colored in the vagueness with partial narrative and vivid feeling. Specifically an intense blend of chaos and captivity. Both of which stoke primal fears in this body-mind of mine.
I spent every little unallocated moment on my phone checking Washington Post or NYT or BBC News headlines. In the moment between clients at work, the minute my kids went off to play, while I waited for a light to turn, sitting in the pick-up line at the math tutor. If I were alone, I kept a steady stream of NPR, changing stations to retain a constant drip of information, analysis and forecasting. To watch, in my imagination, as the chaos unfolded in China and Italy and try to impose that image on our life here has been hard to compose. It feels so Other — that level of mayhem. But it made the world feel ever more uncertain which feeds the anxiety and makes it grow.
The scariest stories are those of the not-old set who have fallen with this virus and i’m trying to tell myself it can’t happen to me because of A, B and C but i’m not thoroughly convinced so the anxiety swells and constricts further. Then cases in Ohio, where I live, show up and, finally, the governor shutting schools and my news drip intensified to include the local paper, constantly in search of the Number of Cases close by as we’ve quietly closed the doors of our home and resolved to watch the fearing world from our windows.
This dedication to ingesting information has married with my baseline-fearful imagination to create a sense of seige in my own being. Anxiety doesn’t need much prompting if you have a bit of it, just a whisper of uncertainty can summon the enthusiastic hypervigilance needed to (hopefully) Keep Us Safe. So by Friday night last week, my whole body was erupting with symptoms. Dizzy, nauseas, weak, lethargic, is-that-a-deep-enough-breath?, what-with-this-sore-throat?, and, of course, checking Google for Symptoms of Covid-19. But the part of my mind that Sits in the Back and Watches suggested I consider whether it might also feel like an Anxiety Attack and, yes, that list was a much better match.
While I went through the motions of a couple of regular weeks leading up to this, I was ignoring the gathering and building anxiety just under the surface. The anxiety had been whispering to me that life would change and since the change was unknown it was definitely somehow fatal. I wasn’t making space for the anxiety to be present in conversation with others or even in my own self awareness. So it told quiet, tragic stories to my being with abandon.
I know better than this, I’m a therapist, but I’m also a regular person in the midst of a global crisis so I went to what I know; the ideas I share relentlessly with clients. The simple ones that reorient a moment and reset the nervous system. First, I turned toward the feelings I was experiencing, rather than ignore them. For some reason simply acknowledging these feelings — feeling them in the body, noticing where they are, how big, what qualities they express like vibration, texture, sound — creates a bit of space in which I can breathe just a little better. There’s a bit of balm in that space. Acknowledging the feelings brings me solidly into this moment where my family and I are safe for now and I can experience that fact. When I can acknowledge that the feelings are there, be present in this moment, I can then go the step further in caring about this anxiety, this suffering.
Self-compassion in this moment is an essential skill we all must practice. Self-compassion, the willingness to feel what’s there — simply acknowledging the anxiety and sadness and fear and sincerely caring about it. If we care about our own anxiety we will find space to care about a lot more. And our ability to care now is an actual matter of life and death.
When the anxiety has overwhelmed or stolen sleep I’ve turned to my breath. Slow, quiet, natural breaths turn off the fight or flight response our body engages in the midst of anxiety. It engages a part of the nervous system that reinforces the idea that we are OK in this moment. And by OK, I mean breathing and safe. To do this, use a stopwatch or timer and try for at least 5 seconds of an inhale and at least 5 seconds of an exhale, preferably longer for both. Three to 5 minutes of this has bought me sleep and reoriented my thinking. If my breath proves to my brain that I'm OK, my brain will believe it and so will my body.
Lastly, I noticed that when I pay attention to media that discusses ways that people are adjusting, not just constantly looking out for the threat, it feels more spacious. How are people spending time in social distancing? How are people finding ways to keep money moving in the economy? How are people supporting one another? When I pay attention in this way this all feels like something our country will survive. Not unscathed, not at all unscathed, but survive nonetheless. Staying in and staying calm, staying informed and sane and continuing to make space to care about those who cannot stay in or calm or sane or informed makes this all purposeful. I’m not just staying in and staying calm and informed to avoid infection, I’m doing it to join with my fellow countrymen in doing what we CAN do to keep all of us safer.
All of us who can stay in and stay calm and informed and who can care about any of this are participating in a giant, quiet, collective HEAVE HO which will take our focus and determination and a whole lot of heart. HEAVE HO as we do everything we can to stay out of gatherings and slow the rate of infection. HEAVE HO as we avoid any use of services that need to stay free to respond to those in greatest need. HEAVE HO as we find ways to keep spending money locally. HEAVE as we breathe in a long breath to acknowledge the pain and sadness and HO a long exhale to remind ourselves why we stay in and stay away. We care about this country and all its people. There’s a bigger meaning in our isolation. We can make this a moment of contraction from anxiety or we can make it a quiet, collective purposeful and committed act of compassion for ourselves, for the country and for the world. HEAVE. HO!
