Helping you find a little peace of mind during this lockdown
AFTER LISTENING to the news over the Christmas break, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me that we have now gone into another national lockdown. For many around the country the prospect of being locked down brings fear, dread and a huge amount of worry for a wide range of reasons.
You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t react, but sometimes that reaction can continue and evolve into stress, so I’d like to take this opportunity to share some insights that may be helpful to you at this time, and maybe bring a little peace of mind at this time.
Our minds are incredible machines, and our gift of thought is very powerful.
I’m sure you’ve had the situation where you have worried and worried, created all sorts of scenarios in your head about what might happen and it has felt really, really real? Only to find that when the actual time came it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be?
It happens because our minds use our past experience to try to predict what might happen in the future – however just because it does this, doesn’t mean that what it thinks will happen, it’s an illusion, a trick of the mind, created simply by our thought.
It maybe that right now, you’re using your past experience of lockdown to predict what may happen over the next few weeks, and that looks scary and full of worry for you, often it can be helpful to notice what our minds are doing, remind ourselves that we simply do not know what the future holds, no matter what our thinking may be suggesting.
It’s fascinating because as soon as we see the nature of the thinking – that it is simply an illusion – it loses its grip on us, and we are able to pay less attention to it.
Our minds often do this because we yearn for reassurance that we will be okay, that we will get through. One thing that we always forget as humans is that we always come through, we are such resilient creatures. I reminded a client of this, only this week. She was hugely lost in worry thought. I gently pointed her to how she had navigated and got through two lockdowns, how she had worked out what to do, how she had responded and figured out problems as she went – how that was her innate resilience in action. We so often don’t see it – often because our worry thought is so persuasive.
As humans we have an innate capacity for fresh ideas, problem solving, working things out, this ability is with us all of the time and it is in each and every one of us – this is our innate resilience!
An easy way to connect with this, if you are lost in worry and fear right now, is to bring yourself back into the present moment. Fear and worry almost always happen when our mind wanders to a future moment, so bringing ourselves back to the now enables us to clearly see that in this precise moment we are absolutely okay.
The knock- on effect of this is that all the worry and fear thoughts fall away, our minds become clearer, we feel more peaceful and more able to hear the more helpful thoughts that will help us get through whatever we are facing.
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