Life lessons in lockdown: ‘We can gain from doing things in new ways — even if they are not our first choice in life’
Author and psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick’s mental health toolkit for getting through Lockdown 2.0 and beyond. Today: As we move out of level five, we can look to the future
There’s no sense of excitement or joy in the air as we complete the six weeks of lockdown because we continue to await vaccine and treatment for this viral threat. So although the higher-level restrictions might perhaps be lifted, we still must live a restricted life in order to keep one another safe, and that’s psychologically very difficult to accept.
Psychologist Martin Seligman suggests that how we explain hard times to ourselves impacts our ability to navigate difficult situations in life. His concept of the
3Ps: personalisation, pervasiveness and permanence, outlines how we find it harder to get through tough times if we blame ourselves for the situation, if we see the difficulty pervading every aspect of our life and character, and if we believe the situation to be permanent.
PART SIX: This is not permanent
MENTAL FATIGUE
So as we emerge from lockdown 2.0 and we look towards the next set of changes to how we live our life, the third of the 3Ps is a useful tool. Permanence. We need to remember that life as it is now is not permanent. This is our ‘normal for now’ rather than our ‘new normal’. Mental fatigue had understandably set in before we went into this lockdown and after six weeks of greater restriction, there may be an added sense of weariness for all things Covid and for adapting once again in line with re-entry guidelines.
But the virus doesn’t care if we’re tired, it doesn’t care if we think we’re great for how we’ve adapted our lives immeasurably since March, we get no credit for that. Coronavirus will take every opportunity to spread and we must hold firm now despite our psychological fatigue with the groundhog-day feeling of it all.
Removing a sense of permanence and reminding ourselves that one day life will not be like this, that one day, going in and out of lockdowns will be behind us, is a vital tool in helping us to carry on as we enter the next phase of living alongside Covid-19.
TRAGEDIES
There are of course some things during this time that are, very sadly, permanent. The death of a loved one brings changes that will last forever, people’s lives permanently altered by the absence of the person they love. The closure of a business brings the end of livelihoods, the end of an era or perhaps the end of a community. So I’m not talking about these tragedies, but for the rest of us, it’s useful to see this time as a comma in our lives, not a full stop.
PREFERENCE & TOLERATE
Another useful psychological strategy to help us cope with coming out of lockdown, is thinking in terms of the words preference and tolerate. By using these words, we’re acknowledging that how we’ll need to live still isn’t how we want to live. We also acknowledge that we might not like it, but we can do it.
So you might say to yourself: “I would prefer to meet all my friends now that lockdown is over, but I can tolerate just seeing one in order to play my part in curbing the spread of the virus.”
Or you could say: “I would prefer to see my family in person, but I can tolerate remote contact for the moment if it keeps them safe”.
Think of preference and tolerate and you’ll help yourself handle the relentless restricted life that’s here to stay for a while longer.
You will stretch out your capacity to cope by nursing yourself through, understanding that whilst it’s unquestionably difficult to stay apart from everyone you want to see, it is possible despite that difficulty.
ALL OR NOTHING
Continuing on the theme of helping ourselves by watching how we think about things, a useful approach is to consider the perspective that something is better than nothing.
Often we fall into the ‘all or nothing’ thinking trap in life, and in pandemic terms this might mean only wanting to do things as we used to do them and not really considering that we might get something from alternative ways of doing things.
Of course we want our old life and our familiar routines back, but that option is not available to us right now.
So being more balanced in our approach and realising that something is better than nothing can help us to adapt and get through this time, getting some pleasure from safe ways of living even if they are not our preferred ways of living.
‘We need to remember that life as it is now, is not permanent. This is our ‘normal for now’ rather than our ‘new normal’. Mental fatigue had understandably set in before we went into this lockdown and after six weeks of greater restriction, there may be an added sense of weariness for all things Covid’