In a crisis it is easy to feel helpless, frustrated and confused. Though it is understandable to fall prey to such emotions in these unprecedented times, there are ways to ensure that our negative feelings don’t come to dominate how we think and live our lives. I share a few ideas below to help bring us a greater sense of calm and control.
Calm
A mainstream awareness of mindfulness has grown over the last few years. Even so for many it remains in the ‘good idea’ bucket, rather than an integrated part of everyday behaviour. There are lots of excellent books and videos on the topic, so instead of repeating the content here, I’ll suggest a way to implement at least one mindful practice easily into our everyday lives. New intentions and behaviours are more sticky if they are linked to an existing habit. I always have a cup of tea in the morning. So, as a way of starting my day calmly and peacefully, I now enjoy a quiet tea meditation. I just pay 100% attention to my morning cuppa! As Thich Nhat Hanh, explains:
‘Only in the present moment, can your hands feel the pleasant warmth of the cup. Only in the present, can you savour the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the delicacy. If you are ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future, you will completely miss the experience of enjoying the cup of tea.’
It is surprisingly easy to do, and if I notice my thoughts drift away (as they invariably do) I just bring my attention back to the texture of the cup, or the warmth of the steam on my face, or the flavour on my tongue. A few moments like this are amazingly generative and give me a solid foundation at the start of the day, before I open my social media feeds, email and news apps.
Control
With nearly all media focused on Coronavirus, contagion and casualties, it can seem as though - that is all there is - and when so much is changing around us, we can begin to feel at the mercy of the events and the world ‘out there’.
So how do we deal with the terrible daily news and its impact on our lives? In his book Happy, Derren Brown outlines a philosophy that has endured for over 2000 years – the idea that we can release the burden of responsibility for the things that we cannot control. The process for deciding which things we can and cannot influence is known as the Stoic fork. The idea is very simple: our own thoughts and actions are under our control. Everything else is not.
So, what can we control? We can control how well we follow guidance from the WHO and our respective governments. We can control how we spend the time we have, how we act with the people we’re isolated with and how we communicate with the one’s that we aren’t. It was lovely to hear my daughter laughing last night as she had a virtual party with her friends from university – all of whom find themselves in various degrees of quarantine, all over the world. We all have the power to make a choice. As former slave Epictetus explained:
’The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which… are the choices that are my own.’
You can read more about a stoic response to the crisis here.
Catching myself
It is no accident that various presents from my children over the years have included some reference to me being a bit grumpy! Frustration, and its nastier sibling anger, can often surface as (somewhat inevitably) our expectations about the meal, the flight, the hotel room, the movie, the traffic and just about everything else, fail to be met.
It is only relatively recently though that I came across Alfred Adler’s views about behaviour and outcomes. He challenged the idea that we get angry because of a cause, but instead suggested we get angry because we want an outcome. This somewhat turns my (rare!) grumpiness on its head, I’m choosing to be grumpy because I want something! Let me put that another way, it is down to me, not the cause.
Gary McKay expressed it this way:
While we are often aware of the consequences of our anger, we are not always aware of its purpose. Our purposes or goals are often hidden from us because they are part of our belief system which we formed when we were very young. (1)
This new awareness means that when I catch myself getting frustrated or angry… at anything, I realise it is a choice that I’m making because I want something. Of course, I don’t always get that moment of insight straight away, but slowly I have learned to see what purpose my mood, whether an emotional outburst or a smouldering heaviness, is really about and I’m often not very proud of the answer!
Realising that at some level, I’m making the choice, means I get an opportunity to revert back to the ‘fork’ and ask myself: ‘Is this something within my control?’ If it is, then great, I can choose an appropriate action, if not, also great, I can just let it go.
References
(1) McKay, G. D. (1997). The basics of anger. Bowling Green, KY: CMTI Press.