OPEN FORUM An upside of anxiety and the curse of panic
Most of us alive today are novices to experiencing global pandemics, so we could benefit from some insight through a scientific lens of human behavior under threat. There’s a lot of controversy about just how much we should be anxious and panicking.
Science has an answer.
Anxiety is helpful, panic is damning:
Anxiety drives us to mobilize together, stay clearheaded, and do what is needed for the common good. Panic is highly contagious, throws us into irrational and catastrophic thinking, and drives us to toward lousy human behaviors that can exacerbate our crisis — greed, excessive hoarding, stampeding. Panic is highly contagious and infects those around us. The difference between anxiety and panic is critical to understand, so we can strike the right balance.
Moderate coronavirus anxiety is good. We are doing smart essential things — washing hands, canceling things, staying home; no Disneyland for spring break. Prevention behaviors in turn reduce anxiety further. The stress response is what has kept humans safe and alive throughout history. Some people are still cavalier and cool — which can have new consequences, such as ignoring directions meant to keep others safe. This is it, it’s our one timelimited opportunity to “flatten the curve” of infections, to prevent overwhelming the hospitals, and our anxiety fuels our efforts.
But just how anxious should we be?
There is a sweet spot. We need to take social distancing seriously, not as if, but truly as our lives and especially vulnerable people’s lives depend on it.
The media are flooded each day with predictive models of worstcase scenarios, and stories from Italian hospitals which are, frankly, terrifying — describing the lack of resources to stop people dying from interstitial pneumonia. These easily lead our anxious minds to overestimate the actual threat, and underestimate our ability to cope with it. Further, the more time we spend on media, the more likely we are to feel overwhelmed, and to develop posttraumatic symptoms in the long run, as we’ve learned from Dr. Roxane Silver and colleagues’ studies of disasters like the Boston Marathon bombing and 9/11. Stick with the facts from a few reliable sources such as the Centers for Disease Control. Try to limit media exposure to twice a day max and focus on productive activities this period.
Coronavirus panic is creating big problems, personal and societal. Don’t let it spiral out of control.
How are you doing today? Since it’s cold and flu season, many of us have symptoms. Panic can heighten our perception of physical symptoms, and this feels tortuous if we are suspecting it’s COVID19. Further, prolonged high stress can actually suppress our ability to fight viruses.
But it’s worse than that — under panic, we hijack our prefrontal cortex, home of rationality, so we are thinking from our emotional brain. We are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions. Predictable human behaviors under panic, now in full florid display across countries, include herding behavior, panic buying and hoarding, and xenophobia.
The human threat response can easily go awry.
Fear drives herding behavior: Rather than making a rational decision based on data, fear drives us to follow the herd. It explains why on March 9 the Dow hit a 12year low, and the next day, it rebounded. On March 11, based on President Trump’s unreassuring comments, it dropped again. Herding behavior has led us quickly toward recession. We are social mammals prey to “panicimpulsivity” and it’s painful economic consequences.
In hard times, our automatic tendency, if left unchecked, is to respond to others with competition, greed, and overacquire any limited resources. This creates problems for the common good (in psychology this is called “tragedy of the commons”). Panic buying may reduce anxiety temporarily—“I’m safe, I have 20 bottles of Purell and 10 boxes of masks”—and it gives us something we have control over, but real safety is found in certain safety and distancing behaviors, and supporting each other.
There are viral scenes of herding behavior on social media, such as the stampedes scrambling for toilet paper. There are few true shortages, just hoarding. We might see trouble filling grocery stores due to slow distribution (lack of workers), not real food shortages. Toilet paper production is continuing as usual. If we buy moderate amounts at the store over time, we can “flatten the curve” of overdemand and shortages in our stores. Now bank lines in San Francisco are long.
We need to temper the panic and encourage each other to be reasonable in our appetite to stock up.
It’s more marathon, less sprint: Living with a highly stressful situation for months is not a human physiology problem, we are built for that, but allowing it to get under our skin with exaggerated and prolonged emotional responses is. Chronic stress left unchecked can dampen our immune response (a focus of our research). We of course want a pill, a quick way to “just say no” to intense anxiety and panic. Stress science has a lot to say about situations we cannot control, and certainly a global pandemic is the exemplar.
We can first acknowledge we cannot change the situation, we must completely surrender with acceptance of our new reality. But we can do our part — we control our personal ecosystem. The more we accept our current life of strict distancing, the more we can flatten the curve quickly.
China’s strict measures led them to be on the other side of this. We can, too. Fear of the unknown is inevitably intense. But mindless fear is far worse than mindful awareness of fear.
Let’s face this one day, one moment, at a time. Being mindful starts by becoming aware of what you personally are experiencing, by labeling the thoughts and emotions you are having, switching from emotional mode to a kind and reflective observer mode: “So this is what it feels like to live in a pandemic.” Paradoxically, that helps the emotion pass through us quicker.
Be extra kind to yourself, acknowledging that anxiety right now is normal and almost inevitable, and humans across the globe are sharing this same experience with you. This virus brings us right to our shared humanity — our primal stress response to protect our lives, our love to protect others. Let yourself feel gratitude for what you do have right now, and grateful to those still working to keep stores stocked and fighting to save lives in our hospitals.
We are stuck in this together: One of the most powerful ingredients for stress reduction is calm caring emotional support. Opportunities to help abound. Helping behaviors are known to be happiness behaviors as well. Social distancing doesn’t mean we can’t provide social support through phone and video. We can check on elderly neighbors, friends and relatives who cannot leave home easily (especially if they are sick), with caring calls or texts, and offers to bring food and medications. Communities are rapidly building their own support networks, using networks such as Nextdoor or Facebook. This is a time we discover who we are as a nation, an opportunity to strengthen our worndown social cohesion and live our core values.
This is going to be a tough period, there will be some herds and stampedes, suffering and deaths, but together we can rise above our reptilian panic responses, and fight our best battle against this vicious virus.