Coping
With Daily Life
during COVID-19
How do we have the resilence to
endure and thrive
when it's been going on
for so long?
As a psychologist, I have been providing psychotherapy to people living and working during COVID-19 who seek ways to handle the anxiety and depression of the pandemic.
Learn My 4s Paradigm to help you improve your agency
Pandemic trauma, loss of control & emotional fatigue
require strategies to reduce stress & increase effectiveness
4s
Structure
Self-Care
Speech
Slow Down
Structure
* Find organization in life, home & work
*Use schedules with flexibility & choice to yield agency
* Build in ramp-up and calm-down time before & after work
Self-Care
*Discover Calming & Energizng Self-Care
*Determine how sensory items make you feel
* Every 30 minutes give yourself 2 minutes of care
Speech
* Positive Gentle Self-Talk
*Praise yourself and others for effort & accomplishment
*Proposition of receiving information
Slow Down
*Accept reality
*Recognize priorites
*Restructure behaviors
Can I help you become the person you want to be now?
Clarify Your Values.
Act with Your Values.
You can learn from your experience:
Be Well.
Be Safe.
Be Healthy.
4s
Structure
The pre-COVID structure may no longer be available to you.
You need to build a structure through a schedule… The purpose of the schedule is to have structure with flexibility and choice. The art of choosing plus the structure gives you a sense of agency.
Use a calendar to organize your day from wake up times to hygiene to meals, work and other activities.
Mommy blog websites have excellent templates for this. Build one for yourself and for your family as a whole and perhaps for each of your children. In this schedule, add times for activities that you may enjoy. There are websites with lists of 365 pleasant activities. Download them and circle activities that you would like to do with yourself or with others in your house or via the web or through outside safe social distancing. Do the same for your children. Turn those lists into menus. Have multiple activity slots in your day and use the time to choose from the activities that you like from menus.
Schedule self-times and group times.
If you are working, remember that many of you had a commute time which you used to get prepared and decompress. Set an activity to ramp up for work before you begin. Set a time frame for quitting time each day. Select an activity that you can do after your work time to transition yourself back to home life.
Self-Care
Self-Care can be Calming or Energizing. You need both. Find sensory items in your house that offer you the qualities of calmness and energy: Smells, music, visual objects, etc. Determine if they make you feel calm or energized. Make a list of them and their qualities, i.e. lavender is calming; citrus is energizing. Every 30 minutes check in with yourself and see if you need to be calm or energized. Take about 2 minutes per every 30 minutes to use these items to maintain your agency, so there is not a decline.
Make Things to Build Mastery (Non-work-related). Examples: Cooking, drawing, painting, or marble runs. Find the benefits of being in a process and being able to complete something; the satisfaction improves agency.
Find a moment to be in Nature, either in real time or virtual. Take a picture of nature so you can refer to it for self-care or an activity. Visit a national park or a collection of ocean sounds virtually and take in the majesty.
Quest for Novelty (Do something new everyday, e.g. a dance party or picnic in house). Build magic and wonder in your house.
Take a tour of your house and find the things you like and recall how you got them and tell someone else about it.
Each day search for love, joy, beauty in your world and find it around your house.
Speech
Positive Self-Talk
This is your time to be kind to yourself, as you adapt to a changing world.
Speak to yourself gently.
Praise
Many people received their validation from their job which might not be available either at all in a different capacity.
If you see anyone in your home or beyond doing something positive, praise them in a specific targeted way → describe to them what you saw and how it was helpful, effective, beautiful, etc. You will both feel better.
Proposition
Determine the benefits and costs of getting information from the media or beyond.
Does each additional report help keep you safe or does it scare you. Consider putting the news on a time cue, midmorning, afternoon, early evening.
When you seek the news, ask yourself, “Am I ready to receive this information? If not, “What do I need to be able to do so?”
Combine the Resourcefulness and Kindness of the Tom Hanks characters from Cast Away and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Mr. Rogers).
Slowdown
Like it or not, the pandemic has caused most people to slow down and transition their daily functioning from that which they expected.
We might not be able to change that fact for now.
If we accept the reality, we may be able to shift how we feel and how we interact with ourselves and others in our homes and beyond.
We are seeking to improve our senses of self-determination (how we find autonomy, competence, and relatedness) in changing times.
If you find yourself being overly controlling to someone, that seems understandable. The effects of COVID may be finding their way into your relationship. Now, Slow Down!
Practice self-care, engage in right speech, and/or choose a meaningful activity to do.
Slowing down may offer us the change to recognize our priorities and restructure our behaviors to meet the needs of ourselves, our families, and our communities.
We may need to be highly resourceful and utilize what we have in our homes to feel better. In a Food Network Analogy, we are no longer living in a Guy’s Grocery Games World. We are living in a Chopped Kitchen World where we have to turn whatever is in our mystery basket into something helpful, effective, and maybe even delicious!