Easing Anxieties Caused By Pandemics

Are you worried every time someone coughs or fearful crowds will make you sick? You're not alone. Diseases are endemic. We are always advised to use universal precautions such as washing hands, using hand sanitizer, cleaning well, and wearing masks around those who may be ill. However, what do you do when there are no Lysol, Purrell, or mask products for miles around? For many this causes increased stress and anxiety that can significantly impact both their personal mental health and their family relationships. This scarcity of common items signals that world anxieties may have reached peak levels. Around the world, people are canceling conferences and events in panic over the COVID-19 pandemic. As we can observe with the current events, people are bombarded 24/7 with news of vast infections and deaths. Our brains react to this perception of a crisis and our levels of fear-based anxiety increase. This can be the start of a vicious fear driven cycle, which causes people to react more, get more anxious, and become even more fearful and unable to function effectively and logically. While there are benefits of the anxiety caused by pandemics, such as:

1. Helping increase human bonding through a shared concern for survival
2. Bringing out our need to reflect on human compassion
3. Reminding us of the need to proactively protect ourselves
4. Holding us accountable for our own safety and that of others
5. Forcing us to talk about difficult topics, that we may have been avoiding
6. Demonstrating and testing our ability to overcome challenges
7. Pushing us to develop and advance medical science and solutions

Pandemics, however, also have negative effects, such as:

1. Causing panic among children, who are reacting to their parent's panic, as seen in studies, such as the work done by Schweitzer
2. Causing implementation of discriminatory practices in the name of public protection
3. Causing people to feel helpless and out of control
4. Limiting travel, physical activities, group events, which can cause cabin fever and otherwise damage both physical and mental health
5. Increasing hypochondria, which can cause worry and stress for those with acute anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders.

​What can you do to maintain your sanity and lower anxiety? We recommend:

1. Fostering new hobbies, such as reading, which can engage your mind and take you to new worlds and on new adventures through intriguing plots
2. Tackling things on your to do list, such as the flower planting, that you were putting off until summer
3. Participating in online and group chats in order to maintain a level of social interaction
4. Providing children with a consistent schedule
5. Making time for children to discuss and process their concerns
6. Engaging in exercises that you can do in your home with family
7. Using universal precautions to help protect and prevent transmissions of diseases
8. Seek mental health counseling, if you feel you or your family needs it

As noted by Xiang et al, the mental health consequences of measures taken during the 2003 SARS have shown that mental health interventions are needed by many during pandemics. The good news is that, as of 2019, most insurance cover virtual pyscotheraphy sessions. We encourage you to visit our office. When you engage virtually, we would have you read and sign the Virtual Consent, which will allow you to not only engage in virtual sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also when you are running late, are ill, have childcare challenges, or otherwise cannot easily come to our office.

Virtual sessions are as easy to do as 1-2-3!!!
Our simple process: 

1. We send you a link that you click on at the time of your scheduled session.
2. The session begins with a popup that lets you input your credit card information to cover your co-pay.
3. Your session begins.​

​Please don't wait, as noted in research done by Maguire et al, timely counseling can be very beneficial for those anxious due to pandemics.

---

References:

• Bishop, Sonia J. "Neurocognitive mechanisms of anxiety: an integrative account." Trends in cognitive sciences 11.7 (2007): 307-316.
• Chong, Siow-Ann, et al. "Clinical research in times of pandemics." Public Health Ethics 3.1 (2010): 35-38.
• Dingwall, Robert, Lily M. Hoffman, and Karen Staniland. "Introduction: why a sociology of pandemics?." Sociology of Health & Illness 35.2 (2013): 167-173.
• Duan, Christy, Howard Linder, and Damir Huremović. "Societal, Public, and Emotional] Epidemiological Aspects of a Pandemic." Psychiatry of Pandemics. Springer, Cham, 2019. 45-53.
• Everts, Jonathan. "Anxiety and risk: pandemics in the twenty-first century." The Spatial Dimension of Risk. Routledge, 2012. 97-111.
• Gilman, Sander L. "Moral panic and pandemics." The Lancet 375.9729 (2010): 1866-1867.
• Ingram, Alan. "Pandemic anxiety and global health security." Fear: critical geopolitics and everyday life. Routledge, 2016. 93-104.
• Maguire, Paul A., Rebecca E. Reay, and Jeffrey CL Looi. "A sense of dread: affect and risk perception in people with schizophrenia during an influenza pandemic." Australasian Psychiatry 27.5 (2019): 450-455.
• Schweitzer, Dahlia. "The New Face of Fear: How Pandemics and Terrorism Reinvent Terror (and Heroes) in the Twenty-First Century." New Perspectives on the War Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019. 203-221.
• Taylor, Steven. The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.
• Xiang, Yu-Tao, et al. "Timely mental health care for the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak is urgently needed." The Lancet Psychiatry (2020).

---

Contact Us

---

Author

Tamara Ince is the founder of Ince Counseling, a boutique style group practice that provides a safe milieu where individuals can reflect on their past, identify their triggers and learn to better manage their lives with awareness.  Tamara has always been curious about the brain and behavior, and how life’s circumstances shape how we feel about ourselves and how we receive information from our environment.  Follow Tamara @InceCounseling