Mental Habits to Stay Strong as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) During the Coronavirus Pandemic
CNN is on.
I’ve only turned it on for a minute while I chop veggies for dinner.
There’s a woman on the screen from Italy talking about what it’s really like to be living in lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Her hair is a mess, and there are dark circles under her eyes. She looks stressed before I even hear her words, “every moment, we get bad news”.
And I can feel my internal calm begin to fade.
I broke my own rule by turning on national news at night, and it’s stealing my inner peace.
As a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), there’s a part of me that thinks that hearing what’s going on in other countries will help me prepare.
So I start putting myself in her shoes, imagining what that must be like to “get bad news” at every turn. Empathy is an HSP’s strength, after all. I can feel her emotions.
But then my mind starts wandering into dark corners. What will it be like if my mom gets it? Will I go take care of her since she lives by herself? My mind jumps over to wondering if hospital visitors are even allowed right now. What if I can’t visit her? I can’t even FaceTime her because she doesn’t have an iPhone.
And then I wonder about my in-laws. They’re two hours away. Will Adam travel to northern Virginia if one of them gets the virus?
What if the worst happens, can you hold funerals during a pandemic when groups can’t gather?
STOP!
Dear HSP, what started out as a moment of feeling empathy for this innocent woman in Italy, has turned into a mental free fall.
My challenge right now, and yours, is to stay present in the moment with what is currently occurring in our own lives. That’s what will give us the inner strength we need to respond effectively.
Here are 4 strategies to help.
Turn off real-life stories of the pandemic. Yes. There are some that may be comforting. But you’ve got a 50/50 chance that they won’t be. If you decide to watch, get ready to shut it off if it takes a turn for the worse. Your nervous system will absorb all the stress. As HSPs, we’re especially prone to secondary traumatization by hearing the stories of overwhelmed health care systems and collapsing economies. If you’re looking to feel more in control over what’s happening now, you can control whether you watch stories like this. Switch the channel when they come on.
Be mindful of how your empathy can be a gateway to anxiety. Hearing the woman in Italy talk led me to make up a story about the type of crisis I could be facing soon. I imagined how scared, anxious and upset she was. And tried to brace for her reality to become my own. In that moment, it was imperative to re-ground myself and connect to my own experience in the here and now. I’m now more mindful of the fact that my empathy can lead me to create a dire picture of the future and a cascade of anxiety.
Believe we will survive this challenge. Your brain will gather evidence that loss and lack are on the way. So deliberately hold hope for the best possible turnout. We may gain something from this that you can never imagine with pre-pandemic eyes, even if your life looks drastically different in the end. Right now, we have a chance to see what life would be like if work didn’t dictate how we do everything. If nothing else, this time will show us how complicated our lives have become and how much we needed to press pause. And we will learn to say “I love you” at every chance we get.
Imagine that the Universe’s safety net will catch you. “No matter what happens, you will always be okay.” That was the intuition that came to me as I waited in the surgical family lounge while my father had his brain biopsy. It was a moment of calm blowing through me. And I knew exactly what the words meant. Even if he didn’t survive this health crisis, he and I would always be okay. It meant the human spirit survives beyond the time we live in human form and I, too, would survive beyond the loss of one of life’s greatest treasures, a parent. It forced me to expand my definition of being okay beyond that of what we just witness with our limited human minds. There’s a bigger plan for us. For our spirits and souls.
The truth about how to stay strong during a pandemic
“No matter what happens, you will always be okay. ”
Change is coming, my beautiful friend.
Be mindful of how your empathy can lead you to visualize other people’s dire circumstance as your fate.
Believe in and look for signs of the unending resilience of the human spirit.
We will rise and overcome. No matter what happens, we will always be okay.
Even if our lives look very different at the end of this. There will always be light in the midst of uncertainty.