6 Tips for Coping with Anxiety During Coronavirus

Coping with Anxiety - Coronavirus

I often write about coping and living with mental health issues. It’s my reality to live with fear and anxiety and to find coping mechanisms to help me deal with those things. That’s me on a normal day. As you can imagine, it’s a lot more stressful dealing with that and a global pandemic. It’s easy to succumb to fear, but living in a heightened state of panic isn’t going to do us any favors so, what are some things we can do for ourselves?

Have Grace With Yourself

This one is a good practice in general for your life, but especially right now. Maybe you promised yourself you’d workout for an hour a day this year, maybe you promised yourself you’d watch less Netflix, or maybe you wanted to eat less sugar - maybe those things have been thrown off the rails during this wild and uncertain time.

Put this into perspective and remember this is temporary and if you need to loosen the reins on some parameters you put in place, that is completely ok and you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it! Have grace with yourself, remember that you’re doing the best you can.

Move Your Body

Movement is so important to my mental health. Moving, sweating, stretching and more, it helps me drop out of my anxious head and into my present body. I know our gyms are closed, but there are so many wonderful people offering options online!

Workouts From Home:

Yoga From Home:

  • A local studio Sol19 is offering donation based classes online to help keep the studio afloat - they also have a YouTube that they’re starting to populate so give them a subscribe

  • Core Power is also offering some classes online for free

  • I also love Yoga with Adrienne

Meditate

Practicing meditation has grown increasingly important to me. It’s helped my brain learn to put things down. One of the ways my anxiety manifests is it picks at a specific thought incessantly and it just increases my anxiety overall. Practicing meditation helps me put those things down in a way that my brain doesn’t come back to it obsessively.

Meditations From Home:

Embrace Your Hobbies

Reconnect to the things you love! Read books, knit, draw, color, paint, learn to bake something new? What are things that make you come alive? Do more of those things. Doing things with your hands that aren’t necessarily “productive” can provide an emotional release!

Stay Social While Social Distancing

We’re so lucky with all the technology we have! Just because you can’t go out and see the people you love, doesn’t mean you can’t spend time with them! Hop on a video call with a bunch of your friends! Cook dinner with your mom on FaceTime. Virtually celebrate someone’s birthday! We need our community more than ever. Shakti Soul Collective has lots of digital events planned. Go give them a follow on Instagram to stay up to date.

Be Kind. Do Good.

There are so many people who have it worse than we do. Do a little good for your community. I am in a slack channel I found by following C19HelpSquad where we can send people who need it money, volunteer in your community to get groceries for people who can’t, or help in a myriad of other ways. We can buy gift cards to our favorite local restaurant or order in from them! We can donate to nonprofits helping people right now. We can virtually donate our skills. We can support local, small businesses by buying from them instead of major corporations.

I know how hard it is to live in fear, but we can do a lot to help ourselves move from a place of love instead. We can do our best to keep ourselves in our bodies and in the present moment and keep ourselves from living in our anxiety. I know this time is hard and I am sending you so much love. As always comment below or DM me on Instagram if you need to talk!

xoxo

alex

Mental Healthalexandra mollonanxiety, mental healthComment