I was worried about his dismissal. But then a colleague sounded just as worn. He spent the pandemic helping his third and fourth graders with remote school while he tried to keep his small business running. She confided in me: “I haven’t followed the war in Ukraine at all, I just don’t have the bandwidth.”
To an unusual degree, people are tired.
During the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic began, the question my patients asked me was: “when do you think things will return to normal?” Now no one talks to me about a return to normality. There is an unspoken recognition that the chaos we are experiencing could be with us for a long time.
Patients who had been worried about national and world events and visibly frightened during the pandemicNow they look exhausted. the assassination of george floyd it was horrible, and mass shootings are becoming more common. Now it feels like we’re all in an unforgiving game of whack-a-mole, but in this case rodents are existential threats.
I am noticing that many of my patients are experiencing a deficit of optimism and are overwhelmed. about important issues beyond your control.
I call it “hope fatigue.”
People are tired of waiting for the pandemic to end, for the Ukraine war to end, for mass shootings to be brought under control, and for our government to address these pressing crises. Two in 10 Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing “almost always” or “most of the time” in a 2022 Pew Research Center Survey.
Symptoms of this fatigue are feeling anxious, shutting down, or giving up.
“People are having a lot of difficulties: covid has done us a number. And now they are unsure about the state of the world,” said Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has been studying the psychology of risk and decision-making for more than 60 years.
Therapists are struggling to help. We try to instill a sense of hope in our patients: that they can feel better, that they have agency, that their catastrophic thoughts may be exaggerating reality. But when a patient laments climate change and wonders if she should have children, it’s a challenge.
It’s tempting sometimes to feel sorry for them, but that’s not productive. I try to validate their concern and then explore what this means to them personally.
Our nervous system was not designed for this.
Many of the problems threaten our fundamental sense of security. Will my community be decimated by fires, will my children be safe in school, could there be a nuclear war?
“I see a lot of people ‘going through the motions of life,’ but because they don’t know what to do with life, how to stay safe, how to have control over anything or make a difference to anything, how to have fun, they fall into a kind of detachment,” said psychologist Judy Levitz, founding director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in New York City.
Human beings need to feel that they have some degree of control. When you take away a person’s sense of security, depression and anxiety can set in. Our nervous system simply wasn’t designed to deal with so many crises at once.
no wonder that 33 percent of Americans reported symptoms of depression and anxiety this summer, up from just 11 percent reporting those symptoms in 2019.according to the Household Pulse Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Eight steps to refocus your anxiety
Dwelling on seemingly intractable problems can lead to anxiety paralysis, but there is hope.
“Just because you can’t fix a problem doesn’t mean you should ignore it,” said Slovic, whose website, the arithmetic of compassion, highlights obstacles to humanitarian decision-making. “We are not helpless.”
Here are some of the tips I give my patients.
Take a break from the news. displacement of doom it can be addictive and amplify the tragic nature of events. In one study, researchers found that those who were immersed in the news of the Boston Marathon bombing for several hours a day a week after the event they experienced greater acute stress than people who were at the scene. “We speculate that the graphic nature of the coverage and repetition of those images triggered intense distress,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, the study’s lead author and distinguished professor of psychological science, public health and medicine at the University of California. in Irvine.
I advise patients who feel depressed by headlines to read the news just once a day, turn off alerts on their phone, and if possible, check social media sparingly.
Take care of yourself. I tell my patients: “You have to be in good shape to face the current turbulence.” That means increasing your resilience by taking care of your nervous system (sleep well, eat well, exercise smart) and engage in life-affirming activities.
Focus on the present. Get into the habit of anchoring yourself in the here and now. Worrying about the future doesn’t help.
Try a breathing exercise. Taking a few deep breaths, for example, inhaling for a count of five and exhaling for a count of five, will help calm your sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response) and reduce your anxiety.
When I offer deep breathing exercises, some of my patients may be skeptical, as if I am offering some kind of new age gibberish. But I remind you that the exercises are based on science. They typically report that, at a minimum, breathing gives them something to do when they feel their heart rate increase.
Think of your victories. Remind yourself of what is working well in your own life, whether it is your job, your friendships, or the uplifting variety of houseplants you nurtured during the pandemic.
Be your own therapist. Ask yourself, what specifically am I feeling hopeless about and why? Being able to put what’s getting you down into words can help you feel less swamped by emotions and more able to process information rationally.
To take action. Worrying doesn’t help mental health, but acting does. Look around your community. Perhaps your local playground would benefit from a basketball court, or your church or synagogue could sponsor a refugee family. When people get involved in local issues, they have a renewed sense of optimism.
Join forces with a friend. Choose a cause. There are hundreds of nonprofit organizations dedicated to tackling some of the planet’s toughest challenges. Donate money to an inspiring organization or volunteer.
Slovic offers this advice: “Think about what you can do rather than what you can’t.”
Are you a mental health professional who would like to contribute to this column? Email [email protected].
