Coping

It is pretty clear that we are not going to return to our pre-Covid-19 life. Several families have lost loved ones and have experienced sharp drops in income in these past few months. As we take measure of where we are and steel ourselves for the long arduous road ahead, we need to be mentally strong. Forced confinement, fear of contracting the virus, a continuous stream of bad news and not knowing when and how these dismal times will end can all play havoc with our emotions, thoughts and actions.

I have come to learn that these three are very intimately connected.

In a recent podcast interview, Dr. Nina Vasan, a Stanford psychiatrist, talked about how cognitive behavioural therapy can help a person going through illnesses such as depression or anxiety. Using sadness as an example, she described how you might feel low and depressed. You might think, ‘no one likes me’ and ‘why is this happening to me?’. And in response to these feelings and thoughts, you might stay inside and isolate yourself. And when you do this, you end up feeling sadder. Dr. Vasan goes on to say that it is very hard to change one’s feelings. If one is feeling anxious, telling them to stop feeling anxious doesn’t really work. Nor is asking someone to change their behaviours by themselves – asking someone to go out more won’t work either. Turns out that the easiest of those three things to change are your thoughts. Behavioural therapists use a term, “cognitive distortion”, to describe patterns of thoughts we have that can be false or inaccurate that also have the potential to cause psychological damage. Here are a few types of cognitive distortion:

• Black & White thinking – this distortion makes us think something is either great or terrible, with nothing in-between. When polarized thinkers receive criticism or achieve goals partially, they tend to view themselves as total failures.
• Overgeneralization – this distortion takes one instance and generalizes it to an overall pattern. For example, a student may receive a C on a test and conclude that he is a failure.
• Mental Filter – this distortion focuses on a single piece of negative information and excludes all the positive ones. An example of this is when we dwell on a negative part of the client’s feedback, ignore all the good bits and conclude that the client is going to ditch us.
• Disqualifying the positive – this is when we acknowledge positive views but reject them instead of embracing them. An example is when some employees can’t accept that they are competent and attribute any positive reviews to political correctness or some other agenda.
• Fortune Telling – this has us jumping to conclusions and making predictions based on little to no evidence. When we don’t hear back from the client on a proposal we have sent in, we may conclude that we are not in the running anymore.

While these distortions are common and potentially damaging, we don’t have to live with them. We can start by taking an inventory of our thoughts and challenging ourselves on their veracity and relevance. Our mind, easily our most powerful tool, can just as easily become our greatest stumbling block. By exercising control on the thoughts we have, we can start to cope with very tough times.