Covid-Life continues. We’re in the midst of another wave of upheaval to our lives and routines. Kate is an expert on Stress Management, Coping and Well-Being. In this episode, she outlines the 3 questions she is living into to help her personally cope at the moment.
To learn more about Kate and the Workshops she delivers on Stress Management, head to www.thrive.how
To find Kate on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katesnowise/
#142: Coping with Covid Life (Kate Snowise) full written transcript
Hello, Here to Thrive listeners. Today I am talking about coping with Covid, right? We’re still here. Let’s be honest, we’re still here. And how many months has it’s been? March to — I don’t know what month I’m in. November? Eight months. We’re eight months in. Phew! It’s tough and that’s why I wanted to do a podcast dedicated to discussing how we can cope with this unique situation we’re finding ourselves in. So, I’m going to give you some practical ideas that I hope can help you over the coming months cope with the insane situation that we’re all living through as we close out 2020. Covid life people. Covid life. Stay tuned!
[Intro]
Welcome to Here To Thrive. I’m your host, Kate Snowise. This is a podcast for people who are ready to step up and live a happier life. It’s for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It’s a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don’t believe we’re here to merely survive. I truly believe we’re here to thrive. So, let’s get going.
If you don’t know much about me, I’m Kate the host of the show. I trained as a psychologist in New Zealand before I moved to the States seven years ago. And I did my research into stress and well-being. I’ve always been fascinated and burn out in how we cope, and so this is a specialty for me. It’s actually what I do a lot of consulting around. I do workshops for corporate clients on stress management and well-being and I work with clients one-on-one when it comes to burnout. So, if you do need a corporate workshop at your organization, by all means, look me up.
But I say all that to also acknowledge the fact that I’m human and I am living through this, too. So, yeah I have a boatload of theoretical knowledge, but today I’m going to kind of bypass the psychological theories and we’re not going to go into the stress process and well-being. I’m going to cut straight to the chase and answer the question: What am I doing that is currently helping me cope with this moment in time. I’m pulling back the curtain a little bit people and talking personally about what is getting me through this. No context.
I’m recording this episode the week of Thanksgiving. I live in Minnesota so we are currently in lockdown. As in we’re not allowed to mix with any other households at present and our kids are doing distance learning until at least January the 4th. My work hasn’t stopped. I’ve seen a handful of clients so far this week for personal coaching sessions. I’ve consulted on a stress management review for an organization I’m working with, and this just been all the normal life stuff. My second son turned seven the day this podcast is going to be released. I share that to say yeah, I’m preparing for a lockdown birthday celebration on Friday but also, I have a 7- and 8-year-old boy upstairs right now while I’m recording this. The juggle is real. My husband works in health care so he is not at home with us at the moment. And obviously there is also the extra anxiety of him being out in public and patient-facing. So, that’s what I am currently at and I think it’s worth just giving some context so we can acknowledge just how bad shit this is people. Like this is batshit. But that’s where we’re at right now and I’m going to accept it.
So, what is helping me? What is helping me not to lose my mother effing mind right now? Let me dive in.
So, the very first thing that I am focused on is being planned and organized. I know so [sexy?] but it comes from the model that I trained to in organizations. And there is a question that is really important to ask about ourselves, and that is: What can I do to manage and mitigate the pressure I’m experiencing? This is what I call an action-oriented coping strategy. Okay, so Covid. Ask yourself what can I do to manage and mitigate the pressures I’m currently experiencing?
Now, I get it. There’s a lot that we cannot control here, but to start with focus on what you can, for me that is planning and organizing. And it doesn’t necessarily come naturally for me. I’m not one of these all-together-ducks-in-a-row kind of types. I’m more of the personality type that tends to lean away from rigid organizing and pre-planning, but let me tell you a little forethought goes along the way to minimizing and managing our pressure. Woah Almighty is it worth it. So, what does that look like right now for me?
Every Monday, I sit down and I map out my week the best I can. You know it’s not perfect but I get my head around what my week is going to look like.
What I’ve got coming up?
Where is it’ll likely to fit?
Am I going to have to steal some time for my weekend?
Just even knowing that in advance helps me cope with it better. Now, I personally will throw chunks of time onto my schedule on my computer calendar so that I kind of know what my week’s going to look like. I also use a paper planner to jot down the must do’s, so that I have them out of my head. I have a record of them and they’re not lingering in the back of my mind kind of taking up headspace. Again, these are simple little habits that reduce the pressure I feel. Now, I get it there is a lot that we can’t manage or mitigate right now, but rather than just sort of throwing your hands up in the air and saying “If at all, I’m going to sit in the corner. I can’t do anything.” I just encourage you to take a moment to be like “What could I possibly do that might make this easier?”
For any of you who have kids and are in the midst of this distance learning thing, oh my gosh, organization helps you too. My kids need a routine, and truth most of us a much happier with the routine. When we know what to expect, there’s less room for drama and push back. I have a 7 and an 8-year-old people. Drama? Push back? Ugh! So, I would encourage you to have a clean and consistent school day routine, if that is something that you’ll also dealing with. I know this sounds really simple but seriously, putting five minutes into setting your kiddos up for their school day or at least double-checking that they’ve got themselves set up well, it just minimizes the risk of panicked interruptions that like ugh, stress me right out. I know it’s simple advice but it’s useful advice people. A little bit of forethought, a little bit of planning, it just minimizes the risk of those tension points popping up and surprising you. So that’s the first thing that’s helping me — stepping back for a moment and asking myself what can I do to manage or mitigate the pressure I’m currently facing. Planning and organizing is everything for me right now.
The second touchpoint I have with myself is I look at how I am restoring my energy or how I am coping with the things that aren’t as controllable. So, if we can control it, we should. But there is so much of what’s happening right now that we could just having to call on our reserves to get through it. And that requires energy. So, self-care people, all or the self-care. But I’m not necessarily leaning into new self-care habits right now. And it may seem a little bit counter intuitive but self-care, as I’m currently viewing it, is more about the things I’m not doing. So, when it comes to managing pressure we cannot control aka Covid, many of us will naturally turn to maladaptive coping mechanisms. So, these are basically things that give us a short-term sense of relief, but ultimately don’t nourish us will fill us up in the longer term. It’s really unconscious but we will try and find a way to cope. And if we don’t put forethought into that, if we’re not aware, it’s often these maladaptive mechanisms that give us the fastest route to feeling okay. They give us immediate relief and they’re often easy paths to feeling good. Whereas adaptive coping mechanisms they might require a little bit more effort upfront, but they have a long-term [, gain build in?] So, what are the maladaptive coping mechanisms that I am trying to avoid right now so that they don’t further erode my well-being? Wine, people. I’m trying to avoid the wine. This is my go-to immediate relief numbing mechanism. Now, before you get too worried about me, this is not in the realm of addiction or a problem in my life. But I know that there are many people who will turn to a glass of wine or an alcoholic drink to get a sense of relief after a tough day. I’ve spoken to clients about it and I know that this is something that so many people are turning towards to get through these tough emotions that we’re facing with Covid. The thing is, as a society, we legitimately encourage alcohol as a coping mechanism. You know, those glasses that highlight mom [inaudible] and stuff, like this is in built as a socially acceptable coping mechanism in our culture. So, what I recommend around this? It’s about being honest with yourself. For me, drinking during the week undermines my well-being. It means that I’m less likely to take care of simple things like the dishes and staying on top of how organized and clean my house is. A few glasses of wine at night means I’m likely to wake up a little crabbier, go to bed a little later, and find the next day harder. I personally also notice anxiety creeping in if I drink too often. So, like I said this is about being honest with yourself and checking in with whether or not alcohol is potentially draining you further in the longer term and making it harder to cope. For me, the way I am dealing with this is I avoid drinking during the week and I’ll have a couple of drinks over the weekend. That works for me. It might be something different for you.
So, the other thing I did recently, which mind-blowing people, was I deleted Facebook from my phone. So many of us turned towards the mindless scroll to numb out from pressure. The problem is with social media is that there might be detrimental side effects that you hadn’t anticipated. Like it’s not a [inaudible] numbing out mechanism. Like perhaps you might get frustrated or angry by conversation you see under a news story or you turn away from your family who is sitting right in front of you and disengaged rather than leaning into that sense of social connection that we all need to feel filled up. Aside from that, the scrolling can eat away actual time and before you know it, you’ve wasted a whole bunch of time doing nothing useful that perhaps you could have used in a much healthier way to take care of the stuff that is mounting up. So the mindless scroll is kind of like a head in the sand strategy that ultimately just leaves more sand piling up for you to deal with. I was surprised at how much deleting Facebook really did help with my mental wellbeing. It reduced my anxiety and that was — there were surprising to me. I was kind of unaware of what kind of effect it may have been having on me. So, now I get it. Some of you are probably thinking “Oh come on Kate. You’re now suggesting that to cope with Covid we stay away from booze and social media? Like haha. Like nice one, lady. That’s like — that’s hilarious.” Like I get it. What I do encourage you to do the though is if these are things that you’ll like “Hell no, Kate”, I would encourage you to still come back to that question of am I doing anything right now that might be ultimately undermining my long-term wellbeing, not building it up? So am I doing anything right now in order to cope that might ultimately be undermining my wellbeing in the long term. Now, obviously the aim is to turn towards mechanisms that are adaptive coping mechanisms, the ones that build up our energy reserves. The ones that are healthy for us. We all know the right things – self-care, exercise, social connection. But people, we’re also in the midst of a crazy pandemic, so if adding in the healthy coping mechanism seems really like “Woah!” right now, I at least encourage you to put your energy into simply trying to avoid the ones that are maladaptive. You’ll still get a gain there. So, that’s the second thing that I am doing. I am checking in to make sure I am not leaning into maladaptive coping mechanisms right now.
The third thing I am doing is around my mindset and checking my perspective. So. I do chick in and ask how am I looking at this situation. How am I approaching my days? There are three things that I do that help me get in the right headspace and reset right now. So let’s be honest, if you’re anything like me, some days are just straight-up hard. Man, was I in a funk last week one day. Phew! I get it. Like sometimes it just feels like the train has gone off the tracks. What I lean into when it feels like this is that every single day is a fresh start. Every single day I get a blank slate, and I don’t have to carry the funk from yesterday into the rest of my week. I can leave it in the day. When I put — when I put my head on the pillow, it’s like phew! I get to start again tomorrow. I know this sounds like a simple shift in perspective and really it is that, but it’s really empowering to lean into this belief that you don’t have to drag a funk or a mood into the next day. Every day is a reset and I get to start again. That’s what I call a fresh start perspective.
The other thing I do which I feel like it’s getting just even more cliche but it works people: gratitude. You can invoke a sense of gratitude. It’s one of the human emotions that we can create. It seems kind of perfect now that I’m thinking about it that this is being released the day after Thanksgiving, but what gratitude can do is change your view to what you do have and away from what is missing or what you don’t have right now. So, it is a perspective shift. I do a daily gratitude list and it helps me so much. It helps me make sure I’m not overlooking all there is to still be grateful for even in the midst of the things that are upsetting or disappointing. It’s there if you look for it, people.
Finally, one of the three-piece in Martin Seligman’s resilience motto, if you’ve read the book Option B, I think Sheryl Sandberg mentions this model in there, is recognizing that the situation isn’t permanent. We won’t always feel like this. It’s a perspective shift again. Now, I get it, this has been going on way longer than most of us expected. I was not expecting eight months and we keep getting new hurdles thrown our way. Yeah, I get that too, like now my kids about distance learning. But in the grand scheme of things, this too shall pass. This is happening right now, we won’t feel as we do now forever. I lean into this thought that I find really grounding. You might find another way to remember that this isn’t permanent, but for me, that simple old school belief of this too shall pass keeps me grounded. It refreshes me and helps me remember that this is a moment not forever. So, perspective. The mindset. Just checking my perspective is the third thing I do.
Big virtual hugs everyone. As Glennon Doyle so aptly puts it, we can do hard things. People, we’re in the midst of doing hard things and we’re surviving, okay? Got this? It’s just a little friendly reminder that we’re already doing it and we are okay.
Wrapping up the three questions I want you to focus on and by all means [inaudible] down and do some thoughts and journaling on this afterward. Those are one, what can you do to manage or mitigate the pressure you’re experiencing right now? What can you control, then go do that.
The second, are there any maladaptive coping mechanisms that may be undermining your longer-term wellbeing that you need to step back from? This is the honesty check. Are you doing anything that is ultimately bringing you even further down right now?
And the third element, what can you do to support a positive perspective? The things I’m doing is I’m leaning in to planning and organizing. I’m conscious about alcohol and my social media consumption, and I’m remembering that every day is a fresh start. And this too shall pass.
Oh, people I hope this helps. If you want to find me, if you want to learn more about anything that I do, you can head over to my website thrive.how H-O-W. Also, if Here to Thrive has helped you in some way, it means so much to me if you could help it be seen by others. Please leave a rating and review in iTunes or where you listen. That matters, it helps podcast providers work out which content is worth showing to others. I can’t listen to every podcast, they need some feedback from you. So, appreciate you muchly. It would mean — it does mean so much when you take the time to do that and to show your support for the show in that way.
People, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you had a wonderful week wherever you may be and I hope this just gives you something to hold onto and feel a little bit more grounded and [seated?] in the midst of what has been a very unique time.
Long enough with love. Keep thriving beautiful people. Keep thriving.