The Coronavirus panic has been an invitation to declare with the best of intentions that fear is the enemy of a well-functioning immune system. Living in fear certainly has been shown to have serious health consequences, yet I doubt if that knowledge has ever helped a fearful person to reduce their fear level, and in fact it is way more likely to have upped the volume of their fear exponentially. You used to just be scared. Now you’re scared, ashamed for being scared, and even more scared because you believe your threat level is higher still because you’re scared.
So how do we escape from the grip of fear?
To begin, you can lighten it. Take slow, deep breaths. It will calm your nervous system and slow your heartbeat. Acknowledge your fear and name it. Research shows that naming an emotion in itself reduces its hold on you. “I’m scared because this pandemic and the way it’s being handled feels chaotic, threatening and worst of all unpredictable.” It’s fear-worthy. Admit it.
Reducing the intensity of emotions is great, but it’s really only the beginning. It calms down the inner emotional first-responder team so we can use our thinking and feeling capacities more effectively. Once you calm the emotion, you can look more realistically at the options you have to keep yourself and other people around you well. Find websites about strategies for dealing with fear. There are lots of them. Then try out their suggestions.
Some of us developed the ability as children to combat fear by denying it, some by trying to fix everything that might go wrong, some by pulling the covers over our heads till it goes away. There are many blueprints for how to be a human being dealing with life. It can be a gift of love to allow someone different from you to be themselves as they’re trying to survive, too.
Telling someone they’re wrong to be afraid is not an act of kindness. If you are one of the head-in-the-sand types of fear-responders, perhaps your fearful friend can help you learn to be more present to your own feelings. If you’re in bed with the covers over your head, I hope you get some comfort till you’re ready to come out and meet the day. If you’re a problem solver, we need you! And we need you to acknowledge that not everyone has your capacity to DO what needs doing without some feeling and thinking time first. You might also contemplate the things you can’t fix, and your feelings about that.