Mind Managment During a Crisis
COVID-19. Quarantine. Job Losses. Home Schooling. Wildfires. Hurricanes. Recession. Protests. Violence.
Every day, it seems we have more to worry about. Our lives seem upside down, and fear rules. How can we survive the mounting impact on our mental health?
Don’t fret. We can learn to manage our minds and get some relief against worry and fear.
Think about how some people remain calm during a crisis. What is their secret?
History: The Great Teacher
We want to believe things are different right now, but what’s old is new again for everything. COVID-19 may be new, but flu isn’t.
Looking at the past, we see the circumstances we have today are not unique. These events have occurred in different forms and combinations over the years. Change persists, and humanity survives.
Big terrible things always happen. It’s part of being alive.
Ask any wild animal. The threat of being eaten looms daily. Does it sit around waiting to die? Nope. It goes on living, taking precautions along the way.
The condition of being alive requires us to live with constant change, with good and bad, with uncertainty.
Understanding the Mind
Our human brains exist to survive. They evolved to avoid danger, find pleasure, and be efficient.
What happens in our brains during a crisis?
They automatically scream, DANGER, DANGER! Stay in the cave, don’t go out!
When faced with any situation, the mind immediately signals fear, telling us to stay in the cave, eat ice cream, and watch Netflix.
What the mind doesn’t tell us is TAKE ACTION, because taking action is risky. When we argue with reality through worry or fear, we stop taking action.
People who remain calm during a crisis know about another part of the mind. They use this part to override the DANGER brain. We’ll call this other part the ACTION brain.
When we learn to activate our ACTION brain, we can deal with any situation.
Our Human Lives
Our minds tell us we must stay safe at all costs if we want to survive. This worked perfectly for thousands of years.
But we know life should be more than survival.
Life consists of good and evil, comedy and tragedy, laughter and tears. To live the full human experience, we must accept the breadth and depth of reality.
We can’t choose the good and leave the bad. We can ignore it, but bad and unexpected things still happen. Certainty is an illusion. We can’t know the future.
The good news? Humans can adapt to whatever comes. If we don’t want to spend our lives in worry and fear, we must learn to live with uncertainty.
We must live with ALL of it, knowing that:
· Murder, destruction, illness, and death happen. Always.
· Birth, creation, health, and human kindness happen. Always.
Those who have children know they can die at any moment. So, can we. But we go on, regardless, knowing life is both dangerous and magical.
Accepting life’s contradictions gives us the gift of growth. Without pain, we can’t know joy. Working through life’s difficulties helps us learn and improve.
The Cliff Notes Version of Crisis Mind Management
Circumstances come and go. Change is the only constant in the world. But, it’s scary to think we should control things when we know we can’t.
So, now what?
What matters is how we deal with the reality we have in front of us at any given time.
If we want to live the full human experience in a complicated world, we have two choices.
1. Hide in the cave, crying, complaining, and being fearful and worried.
2. Decide what we can do to improve our lives and those of others.
When we choose fear and worry, we choose to be powerless. Learning to live with uncertainty makes us resilient.
Truth is, we already know how to live with uncertainty, the uncertainty of death. We don’t think about it all the time, because if we did, we would be immobilized.
What if we stopped thinking about all these negative things all the time and stopped imagining what could go wrong?
Try thinking about what could go right instead. When we activate our ACTION brains, we find there’s no room for stress or worry.
When we have cloudy and worried minds, we lose our power to make decisions. Keeping our brains free of worry opens us up to creativity in the search for solutions.
Just as our brains imagine what can go wrong, they can imagine the opposite. All possibilities exist. Because we can’t know the future, anything can happen.
We can create positive or negative self-fulfilling results. Let’s use our ACTION brain to search out positive solutions. Let’s free our minds to explore possibilities for contribution, growth, connection.
Don’t Worry. Be Powerful.
Each of us has the power to decide: do we choose the cave, or do we choose action?
Make no mistake, everything is a choice, including doing nothing. We build our lives from moment to moment.
By accepting uncertainty, our minds become free to create, find solutions, and work toward something meaningful.
If we stay grounded in the present, acknowledging the truth of what we are living, and live in action, we can handle anything!
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