October 2020
Mental Health Challenge: The Middle Place
Let's start from a place of honesty. We are tired. I think the world is tired right now. This year has been a challenging one for so many and it's not over, and there is still a lot of uncertainty when we look ahead. COVID-19 numbers have started going up again and we are entering the scary sounding "second wave". Many of us have reached a point of fatigue when it comes to the pandemic. I know I have. Even having to type out "COVID-19" makes me groan. It feels like we have hit a wall, and a lot of people are feeling like they are crashing.
In my attempts to keep my spirits up I have been doing some reading and came across an article that helped me to understand what I was going through. Tara Haelle is a science journalist who wrote a wonderful article, "Your 'Surge Capacity' Is Depleted -It's Why You Feel Awful", and I felt like it validated and explained the rut I find myself in. I will link the article below and highly recommend that you read it.
The to long did not read version of it is that we as humans have a collection of adaptive system to help us survive in acutely stressful situations. Which is helpful when we are living through something like a natural disaster, but pandemics are different, because they are not over in a day or two, it is indefinite. Our capacity to cope becomes depleted and it becomes a struggle to renew it when the stress is ongoing and chronic. We keep talking about how "unprecedented" this pandemic is and needing to 'adjust to the new normal", but that "new normal" keeps changing and so many of the systems we rely on are not working in any kind of "normal" way right now. We also aren't anywhere near recovery, we're still in the middle of the disaster, and we have to find a different way to adapt.
The article goes through different ways we can adjust our coping and the one that stuck out to me is building your "resilience bank account" and focusing on sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation, self-compassion, gratitude, connection, and saying "no". To quote from the article directly "If you do a little bit every day, it start to add up and you get momentum, and even if you miss day, then start again. We have to be gentle with ourselves and keep on, and begin again".
So with that in mind, I thought it would be a great idea to apply this to the mental health challenge for this month. In order to build on your "resilience bank account" choose one things to focus on, whether that is sleep, exercise, learning a new skill, whatever you would like. It may not be much but it will build up some of that depleted energy and you be able to give yourself a small win for the month!
https://elemental.medium.com/your-surge-capacity-is-depleted-it-s-why-you-feel-awful-de285d542f4c
Mental Health Tip
With things shutting down again it can be more difficult to exercise. Not getting enough exercise can have a negative impact on our sleep. The quality of the sleep that we get is affected by our sleep drive. You can think of the sleep drive as being like a balloon. Every time we do an activity we put air in the balloon. The bigger the balloon is when we go to sleep the more restorative our sleep is. So, if you were someone who went from walking most places and going to the gym daily to now working from home and only leaving your house once a week it is likely that your quality of sleep has decreased. If you this sounds like you one strategy that you can take to improve your sleep is to be more active. This may mean going for longer walks, doing yoga or another exercise at home. The important thing is to spend less time sitting of laying down.