It’s normal to feel anxious about catching COVID-19, especially if you or someone you love is at increased risk of severe illness. Here are some ideas for how to manage that anxiety.
Anxiety is a normal human emotion that can even be helpful if it alerts us to threats and helps us take steps to protect ourselves. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests anxiety and depression rates around the world have increased by 25% since the pandemic began.
We're living in uncertain times. There are so many things to worry about including our own health and that of others here and overseas. That's on top of fears about finances, school or work and general worries about the future.
If you were already anxious before COVID, you're likely to be feeling more anxious now.
Anxiety isn’t just in our heads, it's in our bodies too. Common symptoms of anxiety include:
difficulty sleeping
poor appetite
difficulty focussing
trouble controlling worrying
sweating or trembling
difficulty relaxing, restlessness, tension and nervousness
hyperventilating, shallow breathing
increased heart rate
gastrointestinal (gut) issues
muscle tension or aches and pains
a sense of impending doom, danger or panic.
Although these physical symptoms feel awful and are distressing, they won’t harm you in the short-term. If you're able to let these feelings flow through you and past you, rather than resisting and fighting them, they will ease.
Anxiety is a normal and expected reaction to the pandemic, but ongoing anxiety can become harmful. Feeling stressed and fearful every day takes a toll on health and wellbeing very quickly. People who already experience a lot of anxiety may find their anxiety getting worse and find themselves less able to cope.
Here are some signs that your anxiety is becoming harmful and that you would benefit from support:
You can't think about anything other than things related to the pandemic.
Most of your pandemic thoughts end up with worst case scenarios.
Your anxiety interferes with your daily life eg, you have trouble going to work or focussing on work, or you struggle with things you used to manage like going out in public or having conversations with friends.
You want to isolate yourself.
You feel hopeless or angry in general.
You feel jittery and amped up all the time.
You are not eating or sleeping well.
You experience physical symptoms like frequent headaches or an upset stomach.
If you're worried about the way anxiety is affecting you, look at the support options below.
How to manage your anxiety
Feeling anxious and uncertain about the future breeds hopelessness and a sense that things, including COVID-19, are out of your control. But there are many things you can do to ease your anxiety.
Image credit: Pixabay
Don’t avoid your anxiety
Some people deny they are feeling anxious and distract themselves with food, alcohol or TV. But avoiding your anxious thoughts never works. Accepting and facing anxiety reduces it over time. Here's a brief list of things you can do to get there:
Take care of the basics
Anxiety affects us physically as well as mentally so it helps to take care of the basics.
Eat well: Being anxious uses a lot of energy so it's important to eat healthy food – even if you have a reduced appetite.
Exercise: Exercise is possibly the most effective tool to reduce the stress hormones circulating in your body. Any sort of exercise (including gentle walking) will help and the more regular the better.
Keep your mind active: When your mind is engaged it is more difficult for anxiety to take hold.
Be in nature: Being outdoors is soothing for the nervous system.
Make time for hobbies: Doing things you enjoy is a useful method of distracting yourself from anxious thoughts and can lift your mood.
Get enough sleep: Sleep is vital to wellbeing. Here are some sleep tips.
Further detail is provided here if you want to read more.
Set a routine
When things feel out of control a routine helps provide structure and makes things calmer. If you sleep and eat at random times, things start to feel chaotic, and anxiety can get worse.
Get up and dressed at roughly the same time each day.
Set a time for exercise and your other commitments.
Stick to your routine as much as you can.
You're more resilient than you think!
Anxiety makes us overestimate how bad things are likely to be. We also tend to underestimate how well we'll cope, but most people cope better than they think they will. So keep telling yourself how well you've coped in the past and know that you are more resilient than you think.
Stay connected with whānau and friends
It's easy to get isolated when working or studying from home and thoughts become more and more powerful when we are alone. Anxiety can spiral out of control. Take steps to reduce your isolation which can help ease your anxiety.
Find ways to help others
Anxiety can make you more self-focused but reaching out to support others instead breaks this cycle and feels good. Make it a habit to check on friends, neighbours and whānau who are more vulnerable and ask if they need anything. You will be helping them and yourself at the same time.
Look after the people around you
Your tamariki may also be anxious, especially if they see that you are worrying. These tips are specifically to help kids cope with anxiety.
Seek out positive people
We tend to catch emotions from the people around us – both positive and negative. Seeking out people who are grounded and level-headed can help improve mood.
Be kind to yourself
You don’t have to listen to all the mean and negative messages in your head. Just because they seem true doesn't mean that they are. Anxiety is never logical and very rarely accurate. Practise talking to yourself kindly, as you would talk to a good friend. Keep this up even when you are anxious.
Mindfulness and prayer
Mindfulness and prayer are very useful techniques to lessen anxiety. Here's what you need to know about mindfulness get started.
Breathing
Another good way to reduce anxiety is to learn to manage your breathing. Being anxious makes us breathe more shallowly. This makes your brain think you're not getting quite enough oxygen. Interrupting this cycle will make a huge difference. These videos describe the process. Practicing is important to get results.
If you feel yourself spiralling into negativity or panic, here's a simple but effective technique. It involves your breath and your body and focussing your attention on the here and now while slowing your breathing until you feel calmer.
List to yourself:
5 things you can see
4 things you can hear
3 things you can touch
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste.
Try practicing this when you are not feeling anxious so you are prepared when you need it.
Limit media coverage
Constant media coverage can increase the sense of danger surrounding the COVID-19 situation. It's important to be informed but too much media can take a toll on your mental health. If the news is one of your anxiety triggers, limit COVID-19 news coverage. Also, make sure you only get news from reliable sources.
Only try to control what you can control
Anxiety can make us feel powerless. It's important to figure out what you can control and what you can't. Taking action is empowering but trying to manage things outside of your control is throwing energy away and will heighten your anxiety. Things in your control could include making sure everyone in your whare/home has a mask and you have a supply of food, necessary medicines and cleaning products.
“What ifs” are dangerous
"What if" questions can lead to worst case scenario thinking. If you often find yourself asking them, go back to the grounding techniques (using breathing and what you can feel in your body) and carefully re-visit your questions when you're feeling calmer.
Try a mobile app
There's a variety of excellent apps to assist with managing anxiety. Take a look at these anxiety apps for COVID-19.
Here is more information about how to manage your anxiety.
Robyn Shearer and Dr Sarb Johal talk about how to support your mental wellbeing while dealing with COVID-19.
(Ministry of Health, NZ, 2020)
Take care of the basics
Anxiety is in our bodies, not just our minds, so it helps to take care of the basics.
Eat as well as possible: Anxiety may reduce your appetite but being anxious uses a lot of energy which makes it important to eat nutritious food even if you can only tolerate small amounts.
Exercise regularly: Exercise is possibly the most effective tool to reduce the stress hormones from anxiety that are circulating in your body. Any sort of exercise (including gentle walking) will help and the more regular the better.
Keep your mind active: When your mind is engaged it is more difficult for anxiety to take hold.
Spend time outside: There is evidence that being outdoors is soothing for the nervous system.
Make time for hobbies: Doing things you enjoy is a useful method of distracting yourself from anxious thoughts and can lift your mood.
Get enough sleep: If you are anxious, you may be struggling to get quality sleep. Sleep is vital to wellbeing. Here are somesleep tips.
Stay connected with whānau and friends
It is easy to get isolated when working or studying from home and thoughts become more and more powerful when we are alone. Anxiety can spiral out of control. There are many things you can do toreduce your isolationand they can help ease your anxiety.
Find ways to help others
Anxiety makes us become more inward looking and self-focussed. Unfortunately, the more self-focussed we get, the worse the anxiety gets. Changing this dynamic and reaching out to support others breaks this cycle and feels good. Make a regular habit of checking on others who are more vulnerable and ask if they need anything. You will be doing a good deed for others and helping yourself at the same time.
Look after the people around you
Your tamariki may also be anxious, especially if they see that you are worrying. These tips are specifically tohelp kids cope with anxiety.
Seek out positive people
Just like COVID-19, emotions are contagious. We tend to catch them from those around us. For example, if you are living with someone who is depressed, over time you may find your mood is low. Anxiety is also catching, so it's important to think about who is around you and where you go for support. If your friends and colleagues are anxious and negative, your anxiety will spike. If you seek out people who are grounded and level-headed, you will feel better. You don’t have to cut off your friends and colleagues but be very careful who you surround yourself with when you are feeling anxious.
Be kind to yourself
Anxiety can be brutal, but you have a choice. You don’t have to dial into all the mean and negative anxiety messages in your head. Just because these messages seem true, doesn’t mean they are true. In fact, anxiety is never logical and very rarely accurate. Practice talking to yourself kindly, the way you would talk to a good friend. Keep this up even when you are anxious. It may feel strange at first, but it will make a difference.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a very useful technique in the fight against anxiety. Here's all you need to know toget started.
Breathing
One of the best ways to reduce anxiety is to learn to manage your breathing. Being anxious always makes us breathe more shallowly which makes the brain think we aren’t getting quite enough oxygen. This makes us more anxious, but interrupting this cycle will make a huge difference.These videosdescribe the process. Practicing these techniques is one of the best ways to reduce anxiety but you need to keep working at it to get results.
Don’t avoid your anxiety
The more you fight your anxiety, the harder it can hold on. Some people deny they are feeling anxious and distract themselves with food, alcohol, Netflix or all three. Avoiding anxiety, or your anxious thoughts, never works.
It may sound strange, but accepting your anxious feelings and allowing them to be there without judgement or giving them too much attention helps to reduce them. Facing anxiety reduces it over time.
In contrast, avoiding things that make us anxious reduces anxiety in the short term but strengthens it over time. If you find yourself avoiding things due to anxiety, get support to face your thoughts.
You are more resilient than you think!
We are all excellent at predicting the worst. Anxiety causes all of us to believe 3 things:
We overestimate how badly we’ll be affected by negative events.
We overestimate how likely bad things are to happen.
We underestimate how well we’ll cope with difficult situations.
However, people tend to cope with life events far better than they believed possible – even if they are fearing the worst. Know that you are more resilient than you think. It will help ease your anxiety. Tell yourself how well you are coping many times each day until you believe it.
Limit media coverage
Given that when we are anxious, we overestimate the likelihood of bad things happening, it is important to check our anxious thinking. Constant media coverage can increase this sense of danger leading to more anxiety and more certainty that the danger is real. This catastrophic thinking or worst-case scenario thinking is an awful spiral. It is important to be informed but too much media can take a toll on your mental health. If the news is one of your triggers, limit COVID-19 news coverage and make sure you only get news from reliable sources.
Only try to control what you can control
Anxiety can make us feel powerless. Firstly, it's important to figure out what you can control and what is outside of your control. Giving too much attention to things that are outside of your control is just throwing energy away and will make the anxiety worse.
However, doing something about the things that you can control will be empowering. This can include simple things like making sure everyone in your whare/home has a mask and you have a supply of food, necessary medicines and cleaning products.
It is important to realize that uncertainty is part of life. Acting on things you can control and accepting the things you can't, will significantly ease your anxiety.
To reduce an anxiety spiral
If you feel yourself spiralling into negativity or panic, there are a few simple techniques to ground yourself in the present moment to stop the negative spiral and allow your rational brain to come back online.
Here is a simple but effective technique. It involves your breath and your body and focussing your attention on the here and now while slowing your breathing until you feel calmer. List to yourself:
5 things you can see
4 things you can hear
3 things you can touch
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste.
Bringing your mindback to your body and breath is remarkably effective but it works best if you practice it before you need it.
“What ifs” are dangerous
‘What if’ questions always lead to worst case scenario thinking. If you often find yourself asking them, it's a sure sign you are heading into an anxiety spiral. The best thing to do is to go back to the grounding techniques (using breathing and what you can feel in your body) and carefully re-visit your questions when you are feeling calmer.
Set a routine
This advice is repeated in every wellbeing column for a reason. When things feel out of control a routine helps provide structure and makes things calmer. If you sleep and eat your kai at random times, things start to feel chaotic, and anxiety can get worse.
Get up and dressed at roughly the same time each day.
Set a time for exercise and your other commitments.
Stick to your routine as much as you can.
Postpone your worry
Worrying all day is exhausting and will leave you tired and stressed. Try choosing a specific time each day to worry(eg, 30 minutes at the end of each day) to get some control over it. Any worries that surface outside of the “worry time” get postponed. This means you get 23.5 worry free hours. It suits lots of people and it's worth a try.
Keeping busy with crafts, music and games helps with anxiety
Partners Erana Thompson and Alyssa Graham were both afraid of catching COVID and sometimes anxiety and lockdowns got the better of them.
The Papakura couple had a small baby when COVID first hit and Erana says that made her feel especially anxious.
“We didn’t want baby to get sick,” Erana remembers.
Image credit: Erana Thompson, Te Amo and Alyssa Graham
At one point Erana thought she was having a heart attack and she went to hospital fearing for her life.
“But it was a panic attack – I wasn’t having a heart attack!”
She wondered a lot if her anxiety was normal or not: “It was pretty scary and it took me a while to be able to control the attacks or find things to help me to control those.”
She knew plenty of people experienced anxiety but perhaps not everyone understands that it is common and normal when life gets tough, as it did for her family.
Plenty to do to get through
She wants to reassure others there are plenty of things you can do to get through the tough times. The things that really made the most difference for her was keeping busy with her crafts, playing music, singing karaoke with Alyssa and Te Amo, playing card games and being with her whānau.
She says her mum helped her a lot to get through: “Like breathing techniques, little things like tapping to bring down my heart rate. I used things like weaving korowai and playing cards, karaoke, anything like that to distract my mind.”
When Alissa caught COVID in August 2022 it was a shock and they didn’t know what to think or how to react.
“We pretty much just panicked,” Erana recalls. “She was in the kitchen bawling her eyes out, and I was in the lounge bawling my eyes out.”
Alyssa said she panicked that their baby was going to get sick, or Erana or the kids she worked with.
“I didn’t want to be responsible for that. But when I got my head around it we let people know and [my employer] got in touch with Papakura marae and they contacted support services who rang us all week.”
Alyssa was also worried for herself because she has 3 long-term conditions, including asthma, and she knew that was a risk factor for people with COVID.
Community support amazing
Turned out she wasn’t too sick at all, and says the flu was worse. The support from the community at that time was amazing, she adds. For example, her doctor’s clinic employs a COVID nurse who would ring her every day to check she was okay and the clinic sent care packages, as did many other people.
“She rang me every day and [took care] of all my medications” Alyssa says.
“And we had so much food we shared some with whānau. It was awesome” Erana adds.
The experience, they agree, has given them a lot of strength.
“It’s definitely helped not being in lockdown anymore because you feel a sense of normality. I can go out and not be so scared” Erana says.
Alyssa says her mother-in-law has been a great support all through COVID and they couldn’t have done it without whānau and others helping out.
Video: Keeping busy with crafts, music, games to help with anxiety
(Health Navigator NZ and Te Whatu Ora | Health New Zealand, Waitematā, 2022)
Image credit: Pixabay
Image credit: Erana Thompson, Te Amo and Alyssa Graham