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Is Covid making you an emotional mess? Tips to help manage, get happy and carry on

We’ve seen mass buyouts of toilet paper as Covid fear took over rational behaviour. Several lockdowns and masses of confusing data later, Covid is triggering negative emotions, wherever and whoever we are. Fear, sadness and anger lie behind pandemic job losses, deaths, social isolation and restricted travel. We are not used to paying attention to our feelings, let alone living with the exhaustion of negative feelings.

It just doesn’t feel right anymore, home school, home office – nowhere to go for light relief. It will not feel right for a while. It’s more important than ever to understand our human feelings, where we are being triggered and take some steps towards emotional wellbeing. If you are really struggling, do seek out a local counseling helpline. Here are some tips for you in your daily life:

Pay attention to what you are feeling – for many, this may sound a little ridiculous, everything has been just fine up til now. Human emotions can get messy and confusing causing us to overreact to others. Letting out your frustration on your colleagues or your family can be damaging. At Balance 2020.info, you can find information and tips about our universal feelings, their interplay in body, mind and soul with practical tips on how not to overreact.

You can find out what you feel with Meditation. It actually helps us curb overwhelming feelings which cause stress. We are human, our mind wanders, and even more now. According to a study by Killingsworth & Gilbert, our mind wanders almost half the time and that doesn’t make us happy. Meditation doesn’t always mean hours of time sitting cross legged. Just a few minutes a day, concentrating on a walk or yoga, gathering your thoughts over a cup of tea or a loving kindness meditation where you send kind or forgiving thoughts to another person. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists and Yale professors have proved that this works to stop our mind wandering, triggering anxious feelings and body pain. It also increases our grey matter.

Anxiety, Stress are symptoms of Fear
Stress, simply put, is a feeling of being overwhelmed which puts pressure on your mind and body. Often the instinctive ‘fight or flight’ mode is triggered in our bodies. We become anxious, eventually ill. Some practical life hacks to help you get more positive:

Job loss – use the time for learning many companies are offering online courses for free. The WOOP technique is a great science based tool for helping people find and fulfill their wishes, set goals and find motivation to change.

Get a Chia Pet -just for lockdown, not life so much has been written on how everyone is getting a pet. If you think an animal is for life not just the pandemic lockdown, what about a Chia pet – a combination of urban gardening and pet.

Stuck at home – change your environment -take some time to declutter, throw out that old stuff or give it to somewhere more needy. Science says giving makes us more happy than we think it will. The extra space can be used for a gym mat or a dance floor.

Do that home project you always wanted to – now is the time to get that old photo project out. The memories of happy times will give you a mood boost. You can involve the kids or the CDC has some great resources for all ages them through lockdown.

Beat the holiday withdrawal blues At Balance2020.info, the team takes a break with a google journey. Get in touch with a friend and travel to your destination together by looking at websites, photos, satellite pictures of where you would like to go if you could.

Move yourself happy – it can feel like the last thing you want to do when you are exhausted but it really helps boost the ‘happy hormones’ endorphins. Call a friend and go for a socially distanced walk. Do a ten minute happy dance at home.

Reach out and savour even little human contacts – have you talked to your neighbour? Someone at the takeaway? in the supermarket? Though our intuition goes against this, studies show us that human contact actually does make us feel better and other people tend to appreciate it as well. Or even just give an old friend a call, reconnecting sparks a bit of positivity.

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