How to stop coronavirus shaking your mental health
As the royal couple issue a plea about the stresses of self-isolation, Lauren Libbert reveals how she learnt to protect her mind
The night my mother died, I suffered my first panic attack. It was 3am and I couldn’t sleep, my mind blown by trying to imagine life without her. The panic pressed down on to my chest until I could no longer breathe and was gasping for air.
For a few minutes, I thought I must be dying and my whole body was shaking. Finally realising it was a panic attack, I focused on breathing and managed to calm myself down.
As a generally stoical sort of person, this experience threw me. It showed me how out of control my body could become simply because of the frantic workings of my mind.
Thankfully, it was a one-off. I grieved and for five years the panic of that terrible night didn’t resurface.
Until last week, when we all went into lockdown. With the coffee shops shut, I’d been struggling with what I presumed was a caffeine-withdrawal headache all day. But a post on Facebook, from a woman who had tested positive and was complaining about her terrible headache, had planted a seed of worry. By the time my two boys, aged 12 and 13, had gone to sleep, it had grown into a beanstalk of panic.
I lay in bed that night with catastrophic thoughts roaming wild. I was a single mum. If I got ill, who would look after my sons? My partner, who’s not their father, lives in his own house. Who would look after me? At 49, I’m not so young – what if I died? Fear gripped my chest again and I struggled to breathe. After the panic attack subsided, I couldn’t stop thinking about the effect this virus is having on our mental health, not just for those previously prone to anxiety but for newly anxious people like me. A survey carried out by Yougov, on behalf of the Mental Health Foundation, found that more than one in five adults in the UK had felt panicked by the coronavirus, three in 10 had felt afraid and more than six in 10 had felt anxious. And that was before the lockdown.
It’s undoubtedly why the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge spoke out at the weekend, giving their backing to a new mental health campaign by Public Health England, which has issued guidance on how we can stay calm and connected.
“The last few weeks have been anxious and unsettling for everyone,” they said. “We have to take time to support each other and find ways to look after our mental health.”
One of the newly anxious is Jennie Wallace, 38, who suffered her first panic attack two weeks ago.
“It was my first day was selfisolating with my daughter,” recalls Wallace, who runs an aesthetics clinic in Belfast.
“I’m a small business owner and have wages to pay. The weight of what was about to happen just hit me.
“I was scrolling through Facebook and it all just overwhelmed me. I started to feel a pressure in my chest and then my heart started racing. I quickly googled ‘panic attack’ and read advice on breathing, and only focusing on one thing.
“I did that until things calmed down. Generally, I am a person that handles stress well. But this is something I can’t control. No one can.”
It’s this uncertainty that has thrown Kyle Frank, too.
“I’ve never had these anxious feelings before. Usually I’m very chilled, but I feel like they have been triggered by watching the news,” says Frank, 24, founder of skincare brand Frank’s Remedies, from London.
“There’s just so much uncertainty and it’s hard to escape because updates are everywhere. Friends and family are always talking about it, too. You can’t avoid it.”
Therapist Abbey Robb at (abbeyrobbtherapies.co.uk) agrees that no one is currently immune from feeling anxious.
“This is an unusually stressful time and everyone is worrying about their friends, family, livelihoods and health,” she says. “There’s this huge thing coming towards us like a tidal wave, and not everyone has the techniques to cope.”
Robb finds it helpful to reframe panic attacks as “surges in emotions”.
“The key is to manage them,” she says. “For a start, turn off the news and social media. There has to be a balance between information and enjoyment, so make sure you’re doing things like watching films and exercising to release the tension in your body.”
Oddly, there are some who suffered with anxiety before the pandemic, but are now incomprehensibly calm.
“I have struggled since the birth of my son, but it’s weirdly the first time in five years I’ve not had panic attacks,” says Emily Tredget, 32, co-founder of happity.co.uk baby classes. “I think it’s because I’m having to live in the moment and have so much going on with work, home schooling and also being midrenovation. I’m just trying to do my best each day and this, oddly, has made me the best I’ve been in years.”
Robb isn’t surprised: “People with anxiety are ahead of the curve and prepared, because they’ve been dealing with this for years,” she says. “The rest of us just have to catch up.”
‘I was scrolling through Facebook and it all just overwhelmed me’