COVID-19 AND DESPAIR

1 February 2022

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I must apologise for not posting a tip yesterday. Like every one of my clients and friends I have spoken to recently, I seem to have good days and bad days at getting through this weird world of coronavirus. Yesterday was a bad day and I seemed to spend all day sleeping and reading about coronavirus mechanisms of action.


This feeling of despair and powerlessness is what has inspired today’s post.


There is a spectrum of emotions with love and joy and freedom at one end and despair, fear and powerlessness at the other. So it’s no great surprise that so many I’ve spoken to are feeling tearful as we’re having fear, despair and powerlessness drummed into us with every coronavirus update we read or see or hear. Our social media pages are filled with people suffering and the symptoms they are dealing with. The news is all about the extreme cases, be they very young, or super healthy, that’s the power of the online news world.


The thing is that stress and all of these emotions actually damage your immune system making you more susceptible to infection. So it is critical, not just for your mental health, but for your physical health too, to nurture your sources of pleasure and counter your sources of despair and powerlessness.


Face to face: Today I read that studies have shown that Facetime and Skype stimulate the same brain chemicals of joy as face to face contact does, as compared to telephone which doesn’t. So try to make some time to facetime your friends and family both for your good and for theirs.


Find joy: As I write, our daughter a poultry lover who is over-excited about her duck eggs brewing in the incubator, is watching on youtube a family who have hatched an emu chick and this divine little beast is running around their house a bit like ducklings do each year in ours. I know all this joy for her is deeply therapeutic. This is very particular to her, but find your joy.


Create hope: Have something to set your heart on and put steps in place to create it. I am on a mission to make my business more online and I am on a mission to make my body more streamlined so I am loving putting steps in place to get there. Nothing has changed yet but I have hope and excitement at what I’m going to create by the time we crawl out of this confinement. What could you create to give you hope?

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